myrami
Registered: March 2009
City/Town/Province: Clinton Corners
Posts: 1
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One of my major pet peeves is watching people brush their teeth and take their time, wasting almost a gallon of water before they spit. I’ve actually turned the water off on some of my friends because it irked me so much to see such waste. I’ve also walked around the entire day holding an empty bottle when there were no recycling bins around. Don’t even get me started on littering. Environmental concerns are a huge issue in the world today. There are even some statistics that show a surprising percentage of the population does not think that global warming is a real problem. I suppose my concern started when I heard the horrifying stories from my cousin about how we are shortening the earth’s life span, the ozone layer is thinning because of our excessive fossil fuel emissions, some animal species are going extinct because of our lack of consideration for their habitats and other such stories that have caused me grief since I was about eight years old. Sometimes just thinking about these things makes me unable to sleep or concentrate. Everything I do throughout the day is impacted by how it will affect my carbon footprint and how it could negatively affect the natural world. This might actually be a good thing however seeing as how it has made me truly passionate about an issue.
In my school before last year, the environmental club was basically a joke; a picture in the yearbook of a random group of people who really did not even have a club. We had no recycling or plans for recycling, no large group grounds clean up, and no celebration for Earth day as many others do. Somehow my friend and I got it into our heads that we would start a recycling program in our school. We sent letters to the board of education and attended a meeting stating our purpose and trying to get their support. Using the cardboard boxes used to deliver paper, we made recycling bins for the classrooms, and we also found and repainted pre-made garbage can tops with holes in them for bottles from back however many years when the environmental club was actually real. Every day we and whomever we could recruit would stay after school for an extra one or two hours and collect the recyclables from all the classrooms. For a while we had to store the bags we collected in a little storage room and slowly bring them to our houses to be recycled until we found out that the waste management company for our school did in fact pick up recyclables and we actually had bins that had just never been utilized. This year we are finally getting our club legitimized with an advisor. Unfortunately, we have to raise money for this position ourselves since it couldn’t be included in our district’s austerity budget. To do this, we hosted a bake sale and collected donations until we were able to get enough for two semesters and have some left over for projects. Even not being a real club, we hosted a grounds cleanup and invited people for community service to help clean up around our school. Finally, just last week, the Board of Education accepted our donation of the funds we raised and established the club. We are extremely proud that we accomplished so much in one year and hope that our work will inspire others to partake in the environmental effort.
This experience has taught me that if I engage myself in something and devote some time to it, good things can be accomplished to benefit causes I care about. Through small steps and hard work, we created a system that has helped our school get a little greener. With actions such as this, we can become more efficient and help protect our natural environment so future generations can enjoy what our society has taken for granted. Hopefully soon, the government will do more to enforce efficiency and green activism in our country, which seems to be far behind with regards to environmental concerns internationally. My passion for this subject is something I plan to carry with me throughout my life, and, if it isn’t utilized in my career, I intend to at least have it in the background of my life, more than just telling my friends to watch their wasteful habits in the bathroom.
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