Last week my mindfulness practice helped me with a lot of things, it allowed me to have peace of mind because I recently got some bad news regarding a friend of mine that has got me scatterbrained and upset. This exercise has helped calm me down and has brought me peace, which is something I haven’t had a lot of in the past few days. I am learning to push thoughts out of my head when I am doing the mindfulness practice, which is something I normally struggle with a lot. I use an app to help me with my practice and I think that even after this class I will continue to do it because it works and helps me remain calm. Unfortunately I was sick and was not able to come on Thursday we learned about poverty and environmental degradation. My author agreed that poverty did, in fact, cause environmental degradation because when you are poor you have very little connections to resources that do not hurt the environment is really not something you are focused on when you are just trying to make ends meet. People who are impoverished tend to move around a lot and while they are living in one place they use up all the natural resources that are in that area and then move onto the next area and continue the cycle. I contributed in class by talking about how my authors article would agree or disagree with the different ways some countries are trying to be more environmentally friendly, for example, Brazil is gifting some of their citizens land for 90 years for them to do whatever on. The author to my article talked about how we need to help future poor people and current poor people and this way if these families have land to live on for 90 years many generations will benefit off of this land and have their own resources so they won’t use those that are harmful for the environment. We also had to do an annotated bibliography and I did mine over fast fashion and microplastic pollution. In the article about fast fashion I learned about the hazardous work environment that some people are forced to work in with little pay and no safety regulations causing them to develop serious health conditions, like back problems and respiratory issues. Another thing fast fashion creates is textile waste, the waste makes up 5% of our landfills. The article about microplastic pollution talked about how this has become a problem in the last few years and that the microplastic is getting into our air, land, and water. This issue is one that is hard to stop because the plastic is hard to find, so finding a solution to this is very difficult. We did this research to come up with a topic for our infographic, my group selected the harsh working environments involved with fast fashion and we are going to cover the topics of where these main businesses are, what they pay, how many of the workers get sick, etc.