Reflections: Week 3 and 4

Picture taken by Ashley Penrod

Hey all!
I can hardly believe that we just finished our 4th week of class! Where is this semester going?! I hope everyone is finally getting the hang of this and smoothly working out any last bubbles there may be.

Week 3
Week 3 was where I finally started to feel like I learned something about the environment. We had our first readings due, and our first reviews on the readings. The first reading talked a lot about biodiversity, the climate, weather, population and health, food, and water. The second readings was about film and environment. It gave a lot of great and different viewpoints on how we can't always believe what we see on film, and that we need to watch out for how the films portray our environment and pick which parts we choose to believe. I loved getting to talk about these readings in class, because sometimes they are hard to understand and hearing about them from everyones perspective and new ideas they have to say about them, make them much more bearable and understandable! Throughout week 3 we continued to blog! We made some comments on other people's blogs and continued writing some Share and Voices! Which have all been great so far! Week 3 is finally the week that I started getting the hang of blogging and how to make my page, mine. I'm finally not stressing out about being late for something or not blogging on time, and think I'm getting the hang of this!

Week 4
During week 3 we started watching "The Inconvenient Truth" by Al Gore. We continued to watch it throughout week 4. We had discussions about the movie after each day of watching it. I'd never seen the movie before, but have heard most of the book, as mu roommate read it this summer and absolutley LOVED coming in my room and annoying me with facts from the book. As I just said, it used to annoy me, because I didn't understand or really, didn't even care. Seeing this movie however, makes me care, semi-understand, and it probably wouldn't have even annoyed me anymore! I think I'm going to read the book, just to be able to go over the facts that Gore said again. The fact that really got me on Thurday was that by just changing a few things in a few areas of our lives, we could really turn this around! When he broke it down, and showed the little colored triangles of where we could be, and it turned out that we could be healtheier than in 1970 I could hardly believe it! To know that we could be doing this and aren't amazes me I guess. My roommate always says that she doesn't "believe in global warming." I can hardly see how that's true now... During week 4 we also did our first Eye Opener blog. We calculated our Ecological Footprint and found out how many planets it would take for everyone to live like I did! My results discusted me, but I guess they could have been a lot worse at a rousing 4.2 earths. We continued blogging our results or our footprints and commenting on other poeples blogs. I think everyone in the classes blogs are starting to look amazing, and you can really see the presonal touch brought on by all of them! Great job guys! Let's keep it up :)