Belle1190
Registered: May 2008
City/Town/Province: Bodega Bay
Posts: 1
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What are my community responsibilities? I am committed to improving my environment, but I am also dedicated to facilitating my peer’s involvement in benefiting our area’s environment. I live in a beautiful, rural, and liberal place and I have grown to view the environment as my natural habitat, like that of a wolf or a tiger. My ecosystem is valuable in resources and endangered species, and I have grown to respect it as if it is it’s own person. In my community I have been involved in many things, but those that I see as the most important are those that deal with the conservation of my environment, and the preservation of our natural capita and the involvement of my peers.
Living in rural west county, I have been influenced by my community, and their influence has lead me to care a lot more about recycling and the environment then I ever did before. This year our school began a new club, “Be the Change”, and their mission began, as ‘be the change you want to see in the world’. I joined this club and the first mission I conspired was to set up recycling bins all over my school. At first it seemed as if we had widespread support, but day after day I was the only member who volunteered their spare-time to paint trash reciprocals so they were recognizable recycling centers. I labored for weeks, because at a school our size (200 kids) I thought it was silly not to recycle, I mean it is easy enough to throw paper in one bin and plastic in the other. Now I have completed about 20 recycling containers, and students at my school have caught on to how easy recycling is and we fill the bins up (correctly) almost every day!
Last year, the town I love and live in was at risk of being overtaken by the construction of a rock quarry. With 950 people, one would imagine that it would be easy to rally opposing support, considering I know about everyone in my town; well it wasn’t. I became involved with Friends of the Bodega Bay Watershed Committee, an organization whose chief goals were to stop the construction or rather destruction of the proposed quarry; because I felt there was no way to save the town I was born and grew up in. For months I helped paint signs, protest on the corner, and canvas town for support. I talked to people who had already completed their Master’s degree, and I was barely finished with my junior year of high school. This was a project and I was as dedicated as anyone, even more than most people and I created poster and pamphlets; this problem was eating away at me not only because it would make my town ugly, but mostly because it would destroy the natural habitats of endangered species, tamper with our natural watershed, and decrease the level of environmental well being our town has prospered off of since before I was born.
The environment matters to me, I see global warming happening and I am scared of what this earth might be like for future generations if we do not do something about this phenomena. The projects I have been involved with helped me achieve something for a greater good and not just myself. After I leave Tomales High, people will still recycle, and after I move away from Bodega Bay the quarry will not magically appear. This is what I am dedicated to, and what I feel is my duty to educate my peers about. Not only did I help involve students from my school in our recycling program, but also I was also able to get them to help me, and Friends of the Bodega Bay Watershed stop the construction of a quarry in our coastal area.
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