If humans continue to hurt our planet at the rate which we are currently doing so, Earth’s future will be disastrous. However, climate change is not only something which our grandchildren will have to worry about; it has already affected us within our own lifetimes. I decided to research fatal weather events in America from 1970 to 2019 (when this piece was written), specifically hurricanes and wildfires which killed 10 people or more. Using data from the EMDAT database, I found that there has been an exponential rise in these events in the past 49 years. While there are many factors that tie into the rise of fatal catastrophic weather events besides climate, such as increased migration to coastal regions, according to GlobalChange.gov, part of the increased power of hurricanes comes from higher surface sea temperatures. For this piece, I scaled all of these events out onto a timeline and found footage from each natural disaster. For every disaster, a percussionist rolls for a duration scaled out to the amount of people killed. Breaking is meant to serve as a reminder of how we are actively reliant on a stable climate; it is not the responsibility of future generations to take care of our planet, but ours right now. "Breaking" was written for five percussionists with tape and video playback. It was performed by Yanal Tchelepi, Caleb Smit, Alex Chen, John Cavalier, and me. It was created in partnership with the ClimateMusic Project, an organization which aims to bring awareness to climate change through music. To learn more, check out their website at https://climatemusic.org/