Reflecting on the article about mindfulness and sustainability, it taught me a lot about the world and how we have to be physically and mentally healthy human beings to try to fully live a sustainable lifestyle. Meditation isn’t going to solve the entire issue of not having enough sustainability in the world, but it is going to help us be more mindful of our surroundings. Once we are more mindful, we will realize the impact we are having on the environment and we will start to make changes to our day to day habits to make the environment better. There has been too much human-driven habitat change, over-exploitation, and pollution. It’s time we become more aware of our surroundings and how we impact them.

After doing different meditations in class it showed me many reasons why being mindful is important. When we meditated in class, it allowed me to listen to my mind and my body, letting it fully relax. Instead of listening to every racing thought I had, I simply acknowledged it, and then let it pass by. This helped me to relax and feel calm again. Having a few moments of relaxation can put your mind in the correct mindset, making you a much happier and stress-free person. Meditation helped me to go throughout my day feeling relaxed and stress-free instead of always worrying about what is coming next. Since I wasn’t feeling so overwhelmed, it helped me to become more positive and mindful about the things I say, the things I observe, and the things that I do. This helped me to notice not only the impact we have on the environment but also the impact we have on others and how simply meditating can change our mood for the day.

It is hard to be happy unless you are mentally and physically well, and it is hard to mindful if you are not happy. With wellness, there is a vortex divided into categories. Enhanced health and average health fall into contemporary medicine such as meditation and acupuncture. While ill health falls under the category of western medicine such as pills. When you are ill, you are more worried about your self, but when you are well, you think about others around you. To be well you have to find a balance of negative and positives in your life. Your common sense and natural wisdom need to be balanced to have peace, and then is when you will be able to be mindful and sustainable.

The movie, The 11th Hour  explains how the earth is acting like an infected organ because of our carelessness and lack of sustainability. We are currently living in disharmony with the planet and our attitudes are based on politics, economics, and selfishness instead of how to heal our planet. One of the major issues we are facing right now is air pollution due to gas from burning fossil fuels. We take fossil carbon and turn it into biomass. This is causing issues like acid rain and asthma. The burning of fossil fuels is also one f the man-made contributions to global warming. Other man-made impacts have created droughts, excessive rainfall, and extreme heat. Our planet had the potential to end up like Venus if we don’t change the way we are treating our planet. Earth has the Green House effect, which is a natural way of trapping the suns heat in the biosphere, heating up the planet. But because we are putting un-natural gases into the biosphere, it is heating our planet up. The degree change of the planet has been enough to melt arctic ice and speed up hurricanes. We need to find more efficient ways of clearing our air and producing less pollution before it’s too late.

There is quite an abundance of wicked problems when it comes to sustaining the environment. One large one is deforestation which is caused by people cutting down massive amounts of trees in one location. Because of this, the soil becomes unhealthy, and doesn’t have enough nutrients to grow crops. The trees aren’t able to grow back because of the lack of nutrients in the soil, and the locals have to go else wear to get wood for shelter and creating appliances. Deforestation also takes away a big amount of oxygen from the deforested areas. Along with deforestation, there is also extreme population growth which is becoming an issue. We are going faster than we are able to produce foods for people to keep them safe and healthy. With the more people, we have, the more waste we have. And since we haven’t been able to solve our pollution issue, it just makes matters worse. This leads to another major issue or nonrenewable resources. These resources often end up i dumps or in our oceans, killing the animal that try to feed off of it. These resources aren’t biodegradable so they only way to get rid of them is to burn them, which pollutes the air even more. We have fallen into a horrible cycle of environmental issues and before we are able to solve one of them, another gets 10 times worse than before.