I have had a lot of reflection about my life and how every decision I make can either negatively or positively impact the world I live in. I want to be apart of the change that helps the world, not hurt it. I hope to tell others of how they too can help and what they can do to help spread the word about this movement to be the change our world needs. We will find that when we help, we can be happy. When we find that we are happy, we will also be healthy as Marc Cohen’s TED talk touches on this subject of happiness and health correlation. He talks about his health vortex, wellness on top and illness on the bottom. Enhanced health is near the to with wellness and ill health is near the bottom with illness and average health in the middle. Cohen talks about how people of enhanced health are better at handling stress and have a much more balanced life because of their diets, relationships and exercise routines, they find complementary ways to deal with things in their life. The more stressors, such as relationships, financial, job and health, you have brought you closer to the bottom of the vortex. While blissors, things that move us up, such as, relationships, health, exercise, financial, things that can also be stressors but that’s are not negatively impacting our lives become blissors.

The mindful and sustainability reading really helped me out because it touched on my research project subject, climate change. Also, how that even with all the new technology we have in our world today, there is already so much damage that will be hard to try to bounce back from. The problem is at a point that technology and government cannot resolve this problem easily. To fix our world there must be a major cultural shift to mindfulness of our environment. Mindfulness is about being aware of the present moment and the results of your actions. Which is what I have been working on myself and thinking about what happens to my trash when I throw it away. I hope to help others also learn and become more self-aware about their actions also. Activity 2 helped me narrow down what I wanted to research, which was climate change liked I mentioned before. But I want to tie it into agricultural, which is my major. Climate change has many factors but most of them relate to nature. Every angle of this problem can relate to agriculture, whether as a solution or part of the problem.

Western Value says that nature should be used for our advantage to improve our own lives. I do not really know if I totally agree with this. I think nature is a beautiful thing that should not be disturbed. But we have also learned so many things from nature that have furthered our knowledge of medicine and we have helped animals in need because we were able to learn about them. But the issue of learning so much about the environment is that humans must invade to learn. Even though we are just trying to learn, we negatively impact our surroundings. It is a difficult line that we are always walking on, between learning to better ourselves and not harming our environment and being invasive and harming the environment. But sometimes even when we think we are doing the right thing we can still be doing the wrong thing. Leyla Acaroglu talks about this in her TED talk, Paper Beast Plastic? Most people would assume that picking paper instead of plastic would be better, but she makes me rethink that decision. She explains that paper is heavier more difficult to break down than plastic. She also talks about how Americans are wasting so much food because of our larger refrigerator sizes. 40% of food is wasted and ends up in the landfill. The landfill is bad because it is such a toxic area, gives off methane instead of carbon dioxide. A term we learned in class is Biophilia, love of life. Instead of looking at nature and our world as something for our pleasure we should look at the world as something we are lucky to have, we must love the life it sustains and helps it sustain this life because right now our world is struggling.

Thank you,

XOXO

Wicked Dude