sokerbree
Registered: December 2008
City/Town/Province: Galt
Posts: 1
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Brianna
Ecologist Essay
Option III
Recover Our Past
The location of my project site was at my own high school, Elk Grove High in Elk Grove, California. My school is a very old school, established in 1894, and is barely standing up by its own foundation. We have a smaller set campus for our two-thousand students, but not much vegetation besides some in the front of the school and a few trees. There are many birds that come to our campus and some squirrels that reside in the trees. Our campus usually does not get compliments by the way it looks and since I have been attending there it gets worse and worse every year.
What has actually occurred on my campus since last October of 2007 was the beginning of a mini-revolution. The changes that took place have been done slowly but have impacted the upcoming students entering or promoting on our campus. My feelings towards recycling have changed from the start of the project, to the situation I am in currently. At first not many people encouraged me with my new ideas I had for plans for our school. Some said it would be too hard to change the lazy teenagers’ habits of trashing things. I knew if I just set my mind to it I could do it, I would just have to work really hard for what I wanted to happen. My feelings towards it now, are very grateful and happy with what I have now, and I feel very successful. I was very determined and persevered through the comments that were made to me by my own peers.
Last October, I questioned my advisor as to why we don’t have any place to recycle our bottles and cans at school. We currently only had bins to recycle paper that mainly the teachers used. He asked if anyone would like to work on looking up more info as to what other schools and businesses are doing about this world-wide problem. Many older schools in the United States don’t get as much funding as the brand new schools for programs, not that California even has the budget to pull money from anyways. Raising my hand, I agreed to this responsibility that was out of my positions trends, but I knew I would have my heart set to the project. I set up a group of 4 other members and we met on our own time, called “The Green Team”. We ended up using some money from our own leadership account to get our ideas started. We planned “Green Days”, Lunch Time activities, made our own recycling bins, and dug through our handmade bins to collect what we had to recycle. During Earth Week in April, we collaborated with our Peer Counseling group at school and made a conjunction for the students to make commitments to having peace as well as saving our environment. Last year was a great jump start to something brand new at our school.
This year on the other hand has been a little rocky from the start. I am now the “Herd Pride Commissioner” on my leadership team and my job is to run the school clean up days on Saturdays, and also to control the recycling program that occurs on our campus. There has not been one of these positions in leadership for quite some time, so I had no reference to go to that had any experience in the area. In addition, the same group that had helped me last year has been too busy to help me, so I have had to do much of the work all on my own. I have gotten more acknowledgment from the waste management officials outside of school and some recognition by the staff at my school for keeping it up, and this encouragement has helped me tremendously. A regional waste management representative contacted me and sent me ten of their own black bins and also lots of recycling stickers. I opened up my own “Herd Pride” account with the money I have collected from the recyclables and plan to use the money towards the end of this school year to benefit the next student to step in my place that will bring new ideas.
For long-term solutions at my school we could improve our program by encouraging students to recycle not just at school but take it back to their homes to get started in the community. To enforce the recycling in a quicker effect at my school, the administration could make a policy that the students must adhere to or they will get a no activity point. We also should create a recycling club on our campus for other students that are not in leadership can join and be a part of. This club could help us do fundraisers out of school, go collect recycling in the public, help clean the community and go beyond what just our school needs. We could meet with the city council and propose ideas to get younger children “thinking green” and help us start taking better care of our earth before their generation gets old. All kids as well as many adults still need to be informed about the consequences of the wastefulness they do, and that they need to conserve resources for the future.
As for the environmental problems in the world right now, there are so many different ones. Global warming, the honeybee extinction, and the habitat losses from the excavation of the natural resources within that region are a few of them. The only solution that comes to mind is recycle, reduce, re-use. I don’t just mean the simple cliché or catch phrase, but rather just take a second before you just throw something away and think if it can be used for something else. Whether someone else can get more use out of it, or maybe it can be recycled by a manufacturer for a brand new product.
The little project I did just like many other fabulous ones on this website, all make a huge difference together in the end. If everyone in the world did their share of taking care of the environment and even recycled, the problems with planet would be dramatically reduced. Certain raw materials we have we have almost killed off, but if we recycle them we would use energy in a beneficial way and also not kill the animals that once lived in that habitat. The large dumps we have would not be taking up space and take hundreds of years to decompose one plastic bottle, and we would not contaminate our animals and plants biomes my releasing toxic products onto the earth.
I explored this website and found it to be very interesting. People have so many different ideas of how to benefit the environment and all of them are brilliant. All these brave citizens of the community are taking a stand and voicing what needs to be said to the public through their actions. I’ve learned through my project that you can’t force anyone to do anything, but you can persuade them to change their habits. I just wish that more people would understand that we are all connected in the environment and plants, animals, and humans all need one another to survive in the food chain. Plants take care of us by giving us the oxygen we need, so why can’t we make sure they are taken care of and receive the proper atmosphere to also continue to exist? By all means I am not a tree-hugger, but I do believe that we were created on this earth to take care of what we were given, and to not diminish it for what lies in the future. I have learned so much from this project.
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you seem like a green pioneer in your school :P 
