My Reflection Of My Environment : My Value Of The Environment

The article Environments That Inspire complied by Susan Friedman was a fantastic piece. I learned that having a stick building area for children will encourage children to explore their imagination and create something for either dramatic play or make different kinds of structures. Another thing I have learned was how important it can be to have low tables and chair for toddlers. Allowing the children to sit in these chairs where their feet can rest on the floor give them a feeling of independence. Lastly, something that I learned and found quite interesting was having the All About Me Books. The child and parent can work together to create these and then bring them to class. The books celebrate each child’s uniqueness, encourage literacy,

“We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.” – George Carlin. Since 1950 humans have made 8.3+ billion metric tons of plastic, 6.3 metric tons have become waste; only 9% of that waste has been recycled. In the last 50 years, plastic has done more harm than good. If we continue we leave our legacies with this world and leave Earth to restore itself.

There is rising unease about throwing out plastic products as well as the accumulation of plastic products in our oceans and landfills. This poses problems for all species in the environment, such as animals becoming tangled in smaller products, organisms consuming the products, or transferring chemicals directly to humans in the surrounding environment. Plastic products being dumped into landfills is not sustainable for our present and future environment. A small amount of fossil fuels is being used to create plastic products. The fossil fuels are practically wasted because the products are cheaply made and are thrown out shortly after purchase. Depleting the amount of fossil fuels, rapidly filling up landfills, and manufacturing briefly used plastic products is not sustainable for our environment. Increasing the amount of recycling, cutting down on plastic production, and reducing on the amount of littering are all valuable solutions to cut down the amount of plastic in landfills. (Thompson, Moore, vom Saal,

Another problem that we may stumble upon would be relying on other people to be ecologically responsible instead of ourselves. We often believe that there are other people out there in the world who are making a difference and so we passively sit back and do nothing. However, we are all accountable for our own actions. Palmer (2015) is a man who worked around the world with people from every major religion from Daoism to Zoroastrianism. He has witnessed many religious environmental movements emerge and grow. He states that the basis of the environmental

While environmental questions are frequently channeled through practical and economic prisms, it is also appropriate to consider our econolgy as a function of morality. The ethical dilemmas which contribute to our policies and our behaviors regarding the use of fossil fuels and our attention to global climate change are frequently overshadowed by more immediate concerns of survival or mere comfort.

Americans, as a whole, do not care about the environment anymore. When we watch the news or simply talk about our day, there are always more pressing topics that come up. However, as a nation, the threat of a failing environment seems to be forgotten because the effects are not as obvious as other threats. Bill McKibben’s “Waste Not, Want Not” discusses how much time, money, resources, and people America has actually wasted and how little effort has been made to try to change. McKibben causes readers to think it is too late to save the environment from our wastefulness because we put our efforts into systems that do not help the environment, spend more money and resources than necessary, and refuse to acknowledge how much were wasting.

While attending the convocation festival today we were open to the opportunity to be enlightened by Jay Erzkine Leutze, author of Stand Up That Mountain. While he spoke I was not enlightened about items in the novel, however I was enlightened by his views on values. His views on what values make a person better. He spoke about his belief that if someone wanted to be a good person they needed to focus on the environment. If someone treats he environment well and pursues the rest of their life and values surrounding the environment that person is able to do much good. I do agree with Mr. Leutze in this regard. If someone is willing to take care of the environment and the materials within their surrounding area then they are willing to care for the organisms and people living within that environment. Those people are able to plan ahead and focus on future generations and are less likely to be selfish individuals.

According to ecowatch.com, all the plastic humans added up thrown away added up can circle the Earth four times. This is around 500 billion plastic bags, and most of them end up on landfill sites. The plastic bags in landfills usually lay there for over 300 years until they are completely photodegraded, or decomposed by the light, especially sunlight. During the process of being photodegraded, the plastic bags break down into small toxic particles that are either released into the air, or into the soil. These small toxic particles contaminate many different things such as soil and waterways. Since it is in the soil and waterways, animals often come and end up eating these dangerous toxic particles. Some supermarkets use biodegradable bags that are said to be “environment friendly,” but that is a total lie. According to an article about plastic bag pollution by Sharon Jacobsen, it says, “...the truth is that the process of breaking down these petrol based bags causes carbon to become methane which is a greenhouse gas.” Greenhouse gases are very dangerous to the environment since it causes temperature increase around the whole entire globe. Therefore, in conclusion, neither plastic bags or so-called “environment friendly” bags are good for the environment all around us, and we should not use them. Instead, we should use reusable

Throughout world history, people have come up with brilliant new ideas to make life easier, and as time goes on, research, making food, and getting news, has all become instantaneous. It now only takes the push of a button to cook a thanksgiving meal or the click of a remote to find out what’s happening across the world. These things are often taken for granted, and rarely does someone stop and say: “I wonder what turning on this extra lamp does to the environment?” This statement sounds insignificant when there are people starving in other countries and people are training for the army. Yet, being concerned about the environment is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, the environment should be one of the biggest concerns among people, as

Earth is filled with vast amounts of water, yet it’s like a cruel joke to people who cannot drink it due to its toxicity to us. Likewise, fresh water is our most precious resource that people depend on every day. Our society is based around the use of large amounts of water in our everyday lives. Charles Fisher, a three time winner of the Gerald Loeb award, a writer for the magazine Fast Company, and the author of The Walmart Effect and The Big Thirst, tells a different story. In the article Will the World Run out of Fresh Water, which explains that people take water for granted and never see its true value like people in the past, published at the Detroit Greenhaven Press in 2012. Because we use vast amounts of water and never see the process in which water is given to people, Fisherman proposes this idea that water is taken for granted until we run out, which is more than true.

"Save the Planet," "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle," "Go Green." Quotes like these have become a commonality in today's age. We all are familiar with the large efforts to help preserve the environment. In "Ideals of Human Excellence and Preserving Natural Environments," Thomas E. Hill Jr. sums up his essay by stating, "The point is not to insinuate that all anti-environmentalists are defective, but to see that those who value such traits as humility, gratitude, and sensitivity to others have reason to promote the love of nature" (688; par. 4) This excerpt provides the thesis behind Hill's argument. The author found that

Environmental Impact of Personal Lifestyle: Behavior # 2 For many years I have contributed to biodegradables that end up in landfill sites. I have been continuously purchasing water bottles my whole life. Plastic is used almost everywhere, I have been using plastic bags when I go grocery shopping and I have never tried to get reusable bags.

Along with my love for the environment came a pain in watching it suffer around the world as human development encroached onto once untouched regions. I felt powerless and desperate to somehow use my individual influence, no matter how small, to slow the damage to the planet and lessen the impact a growing population was having as we dive deeper for resources.

However, you are right because all of us should be concerned about this trend and join the Plastic Pollution Coalition. It is important to do it, considering that tons of plastic containers are polluting our sea, rivers, and beaches around the globe (Gould, page 175). This problem seriously affects the survival of wildlife planets and animals. Just recently I heard in the national Geographic channel that, almost 11 million tons of plastic debris and more than 15 billion of trash is being dumped in the oceans every year. Sad statistics that are breaking the natural equilibrium of our sea ecosystems and sooner or later we will be paying the consequences of our irresponsibility, ignorance, and lack of self-awareness. We must stop right now. With

In today’s society the value of water is greatly underappreciated, this is probably due to the lack of education across the globe. We abuse water as if it is an infinite resource, while at the same time not individually being responsible for solutions to the waste of water. In this essay I will provide a summary of the chapter that was assigned to me. I will also discuss the chapter by focusing on its core argument, explaining how supporting arguments are constructed around the core argument, and describing what kinds of evidence are used to support these lines of argumentation. The chapter that I was assigned was chapter five, which was the topic of water.