Hi, all, sorry for the silence, I’ve been in a blue funk, waiting to hear back from the colleges I applied to. I’m well on my way to snapping out of it, though!
In the meantime, online Anthropology student Sophia Fong is saving the day by writing about a recent Brown Bag lecture featuring Eco Encore founder Jesse Putnam, executive director Jessie Alan, and board president Sloan Ritchie!
There are many apt observations, here, Sophia, great writing! Thank you!
This last Wednesday, I had the chance to attend the brown beg lecture: Selling Sustainable Living. Never having gone to a brown beg lecture, I was surprised to see that although there where chairs enough for a couple of hundred students, only a couple of dozen came. Considering that I was there for extra credit, it was a little less than encouraging that such a small number of students had showed up.
In the end though, I really enjoyed the presentation and I definitely took something away from it. There where several speakers so forgive me if I don’t remember everyone’s names but the first speaker started out by speaking about what sustainability was and what sustainable living included. Being generally aware of my surroundings, I knew that sustainable living meant not using more resources than could be replenished. Another speaker than talked about sustainable building and how waste materials from burning coal can actually be used in building. This was a little bit more enlightening for me but what really hit was what the speaker called the take aways.
There where two things that he wanted us to remember. One, you should always ask yourself, “What is on the other side of that plug?” When you take a hot shower for example, your using energy that in a lot of cases is being fueled by burning cole. When you decide to take a few extra minutes, your polluting the earth just a little more. His next take away was that everyone is responsible for the condition that the environment is in, so everyone one has the ability to improve it. I really liked this because it reminded me that even though I feel like I can’t really do much, I am doing things to lesson the environment every day. I use paper, energy, and all sorts of other natural products so it’s actually very easy for me to start improving the environment instead.
The speakers went on to talk about other things like non-profit groups like Eco encore and and starting up such groups but what had been said earlier that hour stuck with me. When I went to get lunch later that day, I though about how the onion rings I ordered where seriously over packaged and how I didn’t plan on ordering them “to go” again. The next morning, I cut my shower short after thinking about how that hot whater was being heated. Later on I even went and took this on line quiz that had been suggested at the lecture about what my ecological footprint was. This is the site I visited: http://ecofoot.org/ I was astounded to find out that, according to the quiz, if everyone lived like me, we would need 4.2 Earths!
In the future I implore others to attend lectures like this one. It was very informative and most importantly it has already caused me to make small changes.
