This class has taught me a lot about the environment that I didn’t know and enriched my knowledge on some of the things I knew little about. First, it taught me about what a wicked problem is and some of the characteristics of it. I learned different ways we can help make the planet more sustainable and how I can contribute to helping. I also learned about how to make a respectful argument against someone else’s opinion. Global warming and climate change were some things I knew about before this class and were topics I could contribute to on in class, but this class taught me even more about these two topics. Sweatshops were something I didn’t know about before this class and I especially didn’t know how harmful it was for the environment. I didn’t know that poverty is a big contribution to pollution, I know understand that because some people live in poverty they don’t have the money or knowledge to try and be more sustainable. I had no idea about textile waste and how much it affected the environment. Mindfulness was my favorite topic to learn about and practice, it is something that I am going to continue to do outside of this class. Mindfulness has helped me with my anxiety and made me feel more calm and at peace. It taught me to live in the present instead of daydreaming about the future, which is something I use to do a lot. I am a big “me time” person, so this exercise fits right in to my everyday life. I am very thankful for this class because it has taught me a lot about how important it is to take care of our Earth. The problems I learned from this course was textile waste, sweatshops, biodiversity loss, deforestation, and pollution. There are many ways we can solve these problems, and some of these problems are already being worked on to find a solution. With sweatshops many people around the world are becoming more aware about it and it is causing consumers to blacklist some companies that use sweatshops. In one of my articles that I annotated it talked about how the word is getting around about sweatshops and that consumers will cut all ties with a company if they use sweatshops, this is causing a scare with the businesses that use them, so they are deciding to cut their ties with the manufacturers. Pollution is another problem that is happening all around the world, one of the articles we read talked about how we should start taxing business and companies that continue to pollute the environment. Cap and trade was one of the examples, this means that businesses are given a certain amount of licenses to pollute and if they need more licences then they have to buy more off of another company, the author stated that many of these companies will not want to spend the extra money so they will learn to cut down on the pollution they produce. In the movie, The 11th Hour, they talked about how we can rebuild and build new buildings that are sustainable, by using things like solar panels to help with renewable energy. The scientist also proposed that we tax those who are creating the pollution, just like one of the authors said to do. At the end of the movie one of the spokespeople talked about how the earth will eventually be okay again, but by that time we will all be extinct. I feel that after this class I have a lot more knowledge to be able to go out and inform my friends, family, and strangers about what is going on in the world and how they can change their ways and help out too. I am going to try and use less plastic and recycle more than I do now, I also want to buy things I can reuse, for example, straws and plastic bags. Also, I want to plant more plants and possibly make a garden so I can grow my own produce and not have drive to Walmart to get them and contribute to the pollution. We learned from the movie that you contribute to harming the environment from what you buy and not double checking how or where it was made and this is something I want to start doing more so I am not giving money to companies who don’t care about the Earth. I want to influence as many people as I possibly can and talk to them about what we are doing to the earth and how we can make a change and how we should make changes to our life stuff fast before it is too late. One of my coworkers at work is working on switching the plastic straws to metal or plastic, before this class I did not realize how much plastic my work uses, but after this class I am much more aware and I want to make a change and try and get cooperate to be more environmentally friendly and end the use of plastic. This class has definitely made me more aware of everything around me and has made me appreciate the Earth much more than I did before. I feel as though classes like this should be something everyone is required to take in college to make them more knowledgeable about the harm that is being done to our environment and hopefully encourage them to be more sustainable. It is frustrating to know that some people don’t care about the environment and don;t want to change their ways, but I realize that the people that do care outway the number of people that don’t. I see more and more influential people getting involved with trying to save the environment and that gives me hope, a way that we can make big changes fast is electing people who want to make a change and voting out the people that don’t.