Rebecca14
Registered: August 2012
City/Town/Province: Edson
Posts: 1
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Hi! My name is Rebecca and I live in a small town in Alberta called Edson. This wonderful town is situated right between the plains and the Rocky Mountains. Oil and Gas, along with coal mines and a wood mill is what drives our small town of 8000 people to maintain our prosperity. Unfortunately, due to this town’s petite population size, there wasn’t much done to help the environment in this town. In this essay, I am going to share my journey in how myself, and four of my best friends, worked to educate and change this great community.
It all started during grade 11, when Jordyn, Keenan, Arth, Justin and I were approached by our chemistry and biology teacher about joining our high school’s first ever Envirothon team. Now the Canon Envirothon is an international environmental competition that has been active in the United States and in Canada for 25 years. You write written tests, field tests and present a 15 minute oral presentation that all revolves around wildlife, aquatic, forestry, soils and a current topic. First, you compete to represent your province or state, where the winners all get together to compete in the finals in a different city every year. This was only our first year of competing at the provincial level, therefore we didn’t exactly know what to expect. Although we didn’t study much, we still places third in the province, only 0.7% away from the first placing team. Due to prior arrangements, my team was fortunate enough to attend the finals in Sackville, New Brunswick in 2011. It was a great learning experience and I absolutely loved it.
This year, in May 2012, my team made a triumphant come back and won the Alberta Envirothon. The difference this year was that we had put in more than 100 hours of studying and field work. Needless to say, we were superbly prepared this time. One thing we also did was attend a water summit in Kananaskis, Alberta. Here, we learned about water management and the effects that are happening to our environment due to human activities. As a part of the summit, we had to do a special project that would help educate and move members of our town to change our surrounding environment for the better. We thought long and hard for what we should do, and we kept coming back to the creek that runs by our school. This creek used to be thriving with trout and other living aquatic creatures. Eventually, the school was forced to move the smoking area to the edge of the creek. The body of water became filled with tires, carpets, smoking buds, food wrappers, and the list goes on. It was absolutely disgusting. So, the five of us went to a grade nine science class and the marine biology class and explained our situation. They agreed to help us clean up the creek, and by noon the next day there was such an improvement in the area, it was amazing. The reason why we chose these groups of students was because of their ages. They were just starting high school, and for the five of us, it was our last year. By educating and getting these younger kids involved, we hoped that they would be able to follow in our footsteps in continuing to look after that creek.
In August, my team and I flew to Pennsylvania to compete for team Alberta against 54 other provinces and states. In the end, we finished 24th, with the 9th best presentation and finished in the top ten for the soils and forestry tests. Now, the five of us are all attending university in the fall, two for engineering, and one for bio-medical and two in sciences. Personally, I am attending for sciences, where I hope to eventually be able to work in the environmental sciences field. Not only was I able to obtain a wonderful experience with this competition, but I was also able to realize my passion for the environment and helped me realize that this is what I want to do in my future.
Thank you so much for taking your time in reading my story in how I became in love with this topic. If you share this same passion and you want to learn more, I highly suggest Envirothon. I was a great experience, and I will continue to recommend it to everyone.
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