This week we were asked to up our game in the practice mindfulness instead of just 5 minutes a day to 10 minutes a day. Honestly, I was pretty excited to be challenged to take extra time out of my day to practice mindfulness because it definitely calms my stress and anxiety. My mindfulness practice allows me to clear my head. This week was super stressful because I had a huge project due that took a toll on my anxiety. At moments I had to step away from my project and just take a break to calm my anxiety. Stepping away helped me to give my full attention back to my project. This week for our in class mindfulness practice we were asked to print off a mandala to color. This mindfulness practice was by far my favorite of all the in class mindfulness practice we have done. This was my favorite because I like coloring and it was very peaceful and helped with calming my stress. 

After our mindfulness practice, we jumped right into talking about the article we read before class which talked about how poverty affects the government. We were assigned a yes or no article just like before. And just like the last yes or no article we were assigned i read the no article. The no article was saying that no, poverty does not play a major role in the degradation of the environment. The author was saying that the ties between poverty and degradation are not as clear as the author described in the yes article. I understood and mostly agreed with the things the author was saying. The article states two different reasonings that poverty is not completely linked to degradation of the environment. The first is that environment degradation is actually from land-clearing, argo-chemical use, and water pollution. This also states that the privileged sometimes pushes the poor to already degraded land causing the land further damage. The second statement was that population growth doesn’t have a link to environment degradation either. That the people that are too poor to invest, causes further degradation. 

In our breakout room, my group and I discussed how we feel corporations should help those in poverty. My group felt that corporations should but we were kind of on the fence about it. We felt that corporations could help but also probably won’t. They have the money and funds to help but we felt that they could also have other intentions that couldn’t always have the people’s best interest. We felt that the corporations could give them easier access to jobs or create programs for housing and practice sustainability. We also talked about how we felt that corporations also sometimes make things worse by turning their back on the interests. Most of the time corporations can make the issues worse by not putting their money or work where it belongs. Overall, we felt it would be a good idea for corporations to invest in the lives of people in poverty, but they probably will never have the right intentions.