My Impact on Earth

All year the main focus of the course has been about helping humanity and planet earth. So our class watched a few short video clips about Tiny houses. In case you don't know what a tiny house is it is exactly what your thinking. They are environmentally safe extremely small homes. The point to them is that they use space effectively so people can save money and not have so much to clean. Also a lot of the people who own tiny houses and  select other people took up the challenge of trying to live with 100 things or less. So individually we all tried to compose a list of 100 things we could not live without. I think I stopped at 76. It was really hard trying to decide how much of one thing I needed. For instance, I had a hard time picking a number of shirts, because theres so many different kinds for different events and places. After we did the 100 items list we had to count the actual amount of clothes in our closets. I was genuinely shocked that I didn't have more clothes than I counted. Just counting clothes I had 182 articles of clothing including shirts, shorts, pants, skirts, dresses, jackets, and coats. I think my number was lower compared to people in my class because I got started late on buying clothes every fall. Until 8th grade I was in private school and had to wear a uniform so I didn't really care that much about clothes I had a few jeans and t-shirts for the weekend and that was all  I needed. Recently the amount of clothes I have has gone up due to the fact I think I need more options for school, whereas previously I did not.
For the "Mapping the Impact Project" my group chose to find what were the components of a pen. We found pens are made of plastic, metals and ink. All those materials are then broken down into more specific substances that have to be extracted from countries all over the world such as India, China, the Middle East, and even parts of Europe. Then it is ultimately manufactured in an Asian country, then it is packaged in sent to America for distribution. From doing the project and watching the video about the ecological impact of humans I realized just how much we deplete the earth's natural substances for the smallest things, like pens. When I look at a pen I don't think about where it came from, who had to go mine the metals for it, or who had to breathe in poisonous amounts of burning plastic to assemble it. I just use it and I think that it's important that as the future generation we figure out a way to not waste so much because we are quickly running out of raw minerals and space.

Lastly  our class also decided to take a quiz that would map our ecological footprint. (If you click here you can also take the quiz and find out your ecological foot print). I took the quiz and apparently if everyone lived the way I did then we would need 4.51 earth's to sustain us. I was a little surprised  because I thought I was pretty eco-friendly. I recycle and turn off the lights when I leave a room and my family washes most of the dishes by hand. I guess the fact that we drive everywhere and have a decent-sized house contributes to the large ecological footprint. I can't really change too much about where I live right now or the car because we live far away from everything but when I move out I can try to be more eco-friendly and maybe even buy a tiny house.