The Grand Finale

As I finish up my blog for this semester, I can already tell a difference in the way I think about my impact on the environment.

What do I think the biggest environmental issue is today? After all I learned, I think that our usage of STUFF is the biggest usage. The video we watched in class, "The story of stuff" hit home for me the most I think. The fact that after 6 months, we only have 1% of everything we've bought in that amount of time. That's appalling. Food packaging and disposable items (Even things like Ipods and Computers that become outdated so quickly) are just piling up with no where to go because we're producing these things at such a high rate.

I hate that what we do with our trash is such a double edged sword. We can either continue to bury everything, even though it's having a hard time breaking down, or we can send it to the ocean, where it's polluting the ocean life and a whole new ecosystem. It'll make you feel kinda hopeless. 

 

What can we do about this as a society? We all need to make smaller steps to reduce how much stuff we use and produce. It's going  to be hard, but there's lots of people out in the world that do it everyday, people who use recyclable bags, take advantage of public transportation, even things like buying foods and using your own containers from home to store them in is totally doable. The problem is that no one realizes how much stuff is around. When I look around my house I see lots of stuff I don't NEED. With the holidays coming up, we're all just going to accumulate more. I'm going to do my very best to keep more than 1% of my stuff in my house. Not as a hoarder, but to reuse things or to upcycle things.

What am I going to do? I'm going to start shopping differently. I already started by reducing the amount of online shopping I've done in hopes of reducing packing materials, gas for delivery trucks, and hopefully giving my community some of my money close to home. I've also started paying much more attention to what can be recycled or what I can use again and again. I've had the recyclable grocery bags, and have since added reusable produce bags to help with plastic usage.

The most interesting thing I learned in this class has been how dang sneaky our food production is. The fact that when people called for ingredients and information on where our food comes from and no one wanted to give up the facts, that was actually really interesting. Why are companies so unnecessarely secretive about our food?! It's our right to know! I also really enjoyed learning about the companies that are becoming more sustaiable. I think it's great that big companies are using their ability to make a change in the environment.

 

Something I got from this class that I actually wasn't expecting was a growing concern for our environment and planet. I've always known that there were issues that were happening, but I never knew how to fix things, or that so many options were around to help reduce impact. This class actually is changing the way I look at everything.