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.

What we've done on the CC Team

Hi all readers of my blog (I know that sounds dumb but I never know how to start this thing), I haven't updated since the Collaborative Consumption video by Rachel Botsman, so for those who aren't up to speed on our current G&T II project, we have split into two teams to try an accomplish our goals for the Mother Earth/Go green unit. I personally chose to join the collaborative consumption team because I was inspired by Botsman's TED talk and the documentary Tapped. I always knew humans wasted material goods, and why shouldn't we?; when theres ads on TV encouraging you to buy this that and the other thing to make you happy or enhance your lifestyle. Everything from makeups and lotions to enhance your beauty to flat screen TV's and big stereos for entertainment . But when I watched Tapped and learned about all the plastic and trash that builds up; I realized where all our thousands of material possessions end up. All the packaging from our junk,simply put, ends up in the ocean which damages the ecosystem and which will eventually damage us if we don't realize whats happening and put  a stop to it. Listening to Botsman I realized that it's not so much the stuff that people actually want but rather the experience. People don't necessarily want to own hard cover old school text books to educate themselves but rather the knowledge from within. So I thought if we could just get the world to see that we don't need material stuff, then maybe we could make a real difference for the good of our global community.


Another thing I realized during my collaborative consumption research is that I have oodles of junk just sitting in  my room because I have a fear of throwing things out, and I believe lots of other people have the same fear. I never throw birthday cards away so I have every one  I've ever gotten since for as long as I can remember in a bag in my desk, because someone cared enough to write it so I feel it would be cruel to just throw it away as if I didn't care. I keep every paper from English in case it comes in handy for college. I keep every single sheet of band music I've played since 6th grade in a binder, just to track my progress and to play them later if I ever get bored. I keep shoe boxes, broken watches, every earring that i can't find the match to, and even the cassette tapes I listened to before I had CD's and my eventual iPod, the list goes on and on and on. In essence I guess you could say I'm a border -line hoarder or a pack-rat. I just feel that all those items have a memory and a story and I would be stupid just to throw away a precious memory. But from this project I've begun to realize its just stuff. I don't need it. It just takes up space and when I'm gone it will take up even more space in a landfill somewhere. So step by step I've begun to throw things out. Every weekend from the start of this project I've gone through different boxes, folders, binders, and begun to just recycle paper or throw out garbage.

But enough about my personal changes due to our collaborative consumption research. As a team, Marcus, Damini, and I visited about 24 teachers and a few secretaries and asked them if there was anything in their rooms they didn't use and that just took up space. About 80% of them replied yes and that the material was either outdated or no longer part of an adapted curriculum. Most of them wanted to know why we were asking so we explained to them the idea of Swap 4 Schools which is an extension of swap.com which enables schools to trade things they don't use or need for things they want. For instance if American Pageant HS has a set of 80 Geometry books, and we have a set of 75 Literature books we can trade. However a problem we constantly ran into was that most of the things we don't use are outdated so if we were to give them away we would have to give it to a less fortunate school and probably not get anything in return. But the main point we wanted to make was that out of a fraction of the teachers and staff interviewed 80% said there was just books or file cabinets or old school projectors that just take up space in the classroom or office.


 Now I am currently drafting a letter based on the statistics gathered from a variety of our teachers. Eventually we plan to send the letter to the principle asking if he is interested in participating in Swap 4 Schools.
In closing I would like to say the idea of collaborative consumptions has drastically changed my views on my life and the world, and I definitely feel it is something I will continue to think about.

Collaborative Consumption and Swap.com

In class we watched another TED Talk called The Case for Collaborative Consumption in which the speaker Rachel Botsman spoke on the topic of collaborative consumption and how we can evolve into a better society based on sharing. In the 20th century everyone needed ownership and self possession was a big deal, however in the 21st century Botsman's goal is to move us towards collaborative consumption in which we can eliminate pollution and unwanted byproducts of the things we want. For example if I have a bicycle that I never use, I could lend it out to people for profit. That would not only saves the recipient money(cheaper than buying a bicycle, helmet, pump etc.), but I would gain profit and eliminate the waste that two bikes not used often would create. The steel or plastic used to make and package the bike could be preserved or it could be used to make something more people would use more frequently. "Usage trumps possessions, access is better than ownership."

After we watched the TED talk we picked different organizations that support Botsman's position on collaborative consumption. I got swap.com, which is almost like Ebay except its a trade. For example if I own a Biology book, instead of burning it i could trade it with someone who needs a biology book in exchange for something actually useful to me, like a CD from my favorite band. The founders of the organization including Jeff Bennett and some of his colleagues "saw profit in Mom's continuous lunch-dates-turned-book-swaps-turned-book-clubs. If that network of friends knows 10 other networks, that know 10 other networks. Every one person knows someone else with something to swap. We added video games to the mix when one of our founders watched his nephew pay $55 for a new game that was tossed to the side after one week. When the cousin came home from college complaining about the price of text books, we added those, too." Swap.com works very easily all you have to do is list the books, CDs, movies, and video games that you are willing to trade on swap.com, and also list the things you would like to receive in exchange.Then in order to make sure that the trade is fair  Swap.com will show you all of the items that you CAN receive for your items. (Information about the item is included on the site so you know what you’re getting and also information about the person you are trading with is displayed. Both traders must agree that the trade is fair and then you are provided the shipping address where you need to ship your item. 

Statistics about Swap.com

Member swaps: 1.9 million 

› Member savings: $12.0 million 

› Reduced carbon footprint: 10.9 million lbs.

USHMM Trip

So as all my blog followers know our gifted and talented class has been studying hope, humanity and the human spirit. A while ago our teachers suggested that we look at tragedies in which the human spirit triumphed in order to learn the strength of the human spirit. In my opinion one of the worst human tragedies of all time was the Holocaust,(which if you don;t know was the mass killing of over 12 million people in Europe, primarily Germany advocated by Adolf Hitler and certain members of the Nazi party) so our class took a trip to the United Stated National Holocaust Memorial  Museum in Washington DC last Friday.
I had been dreading because the Holocaust always makes me  feel horrible. I feel ashamed that I belong to the human race that produced someone so willing to annihilate billions of people and even more ashamed of a human race that sat by and watched the tragedy happen and didn't intervene until it was more or less too late. I was also dreading the trip because I hate seeing the emaciated bodies and sunken in eyes, and living skeletons with skin on them. I feel sick looking at the pictures of dying orphans with no food or shelter, and the hopeless looks in the concentration camp victim's eyes, and even sicker when I realize theres absolutely nothing I can do to change history.
So what I expected to see before going into the museum was just pictures and videos of basically everything I already knew. I thought because I've studied it so much that I knew everything there was to know about the Holocaust..and I was wrong on so many levels(no pun intended each level of the museum taught me something knew). Not only did  the museum inform but it also was made in such a way that makes you as an individual feel connected with the museum.
When we first arrived and got through security, we all had to pick up a little identification card that held a vague story of an individual who lived during the Holocaust, and ultimately on the last page their fate. We then stepped onto an elevator that was designed to look as a gas chamber and we went up to the fourth floor. The fourth floor showed Hitlers rise to power and the burning of books by Jewish authors and about the Nuremberg laws, the floor showed how Hitler got almost the entire German nation to believe that Jews, gypsies. mentally handicapped and other "inferiors"needed to be exterminated in order to create the perfect Aryan race.
As we descended down the museum we saw so many things. I saw an entire room filled from the ground to the ceilings of Jewish culture prior to the Holocaust. I walked through a railroad car smaller than my room if not the size of my room that was filled with 100 people that took them to their deaths. When I walked through the car I stood inside for about 15 seconds before I started to get creeped out. In my overactive imagination I could picture the cart crammed with people begging to be free, begging for water, begging for fresh air, begging to be treated like humans, I imagined myself sitting amongst them and when I looked back I felt something in my heart, a really dull ache of sorrow for the abused. Another exhibit that made me feel something was seeing a sculpture of the gas chamber procedure. First time I looked at it I looked at it backwards and I remember thinking woa! someone put a lot of work into this. Then I realized you start reading on the left and it hit me. I always heard how the soldiers told them all to undress so they could shower, but I never stopped to think if any of them bought that excuse. The expressions on their faces before they went in and actually in the ovens just  shocked me. The facial expressions got me the most because some were unsuspecting, the faces of the innocent. Most of the people gassed were women and children who could not work, and I can't even begin to describe how it made me feel but I will forever remember the haunting ghastly clay faces of the gas victims. One more exhibit that influenced me greatly was the section where you could just go in and sit and listen to some of the survivors stories. One story was of a man who would taunt the soldiers behind their backs in a different language, and another was of a man who told jokes to boost people's moral. He said that the most important thing to do was to survive and believe liberation would come because if you had no hope of liberation then you had no reason to live....when you have no will to live it makes dying easier.
Overall what did I take away from this extremely depressing trip?
1. Do not where a belt with a metal belt buckle when going to the Holocaust Museum...because you will be patted down and your bag will be searched.
2. As the last Holocaust survivors get older, we need people to pass on the story, and bear witness. We can never forget... ever what happened. We are the voice of the future and we must teach this lesson to our children and teach our children to continue passing the story down.
3. Personally I made it my mission to join amnesty international, and to make people aware of the effects of genocide; because I think a major problem with our society is that we are self absorbed. We are concerned with ourselves and don't pay attention to the outside world. We turn on the news and say "Wow that's bad, oh the government will fix it," but the truth of the matter is that one person can make a difference. Just being aware is only the beginning, from there we must take action. So I challenge you my blog readers consisting of my mother, my teacher, and a friend of mine, to educate yourself on the genocides taking place all over the world and then I challenge you to do something about it.

The End of Humanity( Don't get freaked out.... I just mean humanity as the unit title)

Soooooo... we finished the project finally, and I think pretty soon we'll be moving on to our next unit for quarter three. If I forgot to explain the project in previous blogs I'll reexplain it now. Basically for our gifted and talented class we have been exploring the human spirit and hope and characteristics that separate us from other species. After we discussed that for a while our teachers wanted us to be able to all come up with individual topics that interested us  and branched off of  hope and human spirit as a universal theme. When I first learned about this all I wanted to know was what exactly humanity was and I assumed my classmates would all choose the same general idea of what exactly is humanity.I was severely mistaken and I underestimated just how many different takes we all had on humanity hope and the human spirit. I learned so much from this unit not just from my own research but from watching my classmates presentations.
 One group that presented asked the question what does it meant to be human and do you have hope for the human race? They then went all over our school and asked these questions to both teachers and students alike and got many responses. What really interested me about their project was the second question about if we have hope for the human race or not? I was honestly expecting everyone to say NO because of how the world looks right. I don't really have hope in the human race and I figure why bother humans are set in their ways and unless something monumental and worldwide happens we aren't going to change. We are constantly at war with other nations and we are destroying ourselves the way people involved in mob hysteria do. We fight and spill oil in the ocean and treat the planet like a gigantic garbage can and constantly divide ourselves and ostracize and form hate groups, so quite frankly I think its going to be an endless cycle until we all kill ourselves or the apocalypse or a  nuclear war. Despite my oh so positive outlook on life, many teachers said they did in fact have hope for the human race ( I have no idea how since Justin Beiber has more followers on Twitter than the President of the United States!!!!!). They say they lose hope when tragedies such as the Congresswoman in Arizona being shot(click here for more details)  but they gain it back eventually like when we all come together for things, such as the disaster in Haiti.
On a more personal note, I eventually decided that what I wanted to learn from this unit was, why are there so many lonely people in the world if we are social beings and meant to be and empathic race? Honestly just take a minute to think about it... When you think of lonely people you don't really think of it as a big deal, but there are so many lonely people in the world. This is unnatural because since the beginning of human existence, whether you believe in the Big Bang theory or Adam and Eve or the Norse religion of the cosmic cow, we have been meant to function as a social race.Throughout time we have banded together to form tribes, nations, and ultimately whole countries. So then why you ask are there so many lonely people in the world. The answer is right in front of you. No literally your looking at it...computers. Well at least that's my theory. Leading neuroscientist John Cacioppo says that loneliness is contagious and we can catch it from one another, it isn't something that can be helped. If our friends begin to feel lonely so do we because of neurons in our brain and other psychological and scientific stuff. However I wanted to know why people get lonely in the first place and Roger Ebert thinks its technology. Now that we have computers and facebook and twitter, why bother going outside or talking to people face to face when you can type it. Technology  can fulfill our need for companionship, but it can also destroy relationships. We( I'm speaking America in general) have gotten so bad with our  gadgets that a family all together in the same room will have individual little screens to keep them occupied, and that is what drives wedges into our relationships. That I believe is what starts the domino effect of loneliness in this world. And now self( because I know I'm the only one who reads my essay long blogs) I bid you adieu.

Ubuntu and Jeremy Rifkin's Empathic Cvilization

What is ubuntu, the African philosophy, one may ask? Different people have defined it as different things. However, Archbishop Desmond Tutu has defined it as almost like a peace that one can have within themselves. He says "a person with Ubuntu is open and available to others... [and] does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished."He then goes on to say "We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole world. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity." I think that he is entirely true, we have become a race that is entirely consumed by gaining our own tangible wealth. We have become so caught up in our own lives that we(including myself) often forget that we are apart of something bigger than ourselves. From reading a collective bunch of definitions on the ubuntu philosophy I have decided that to me it basically means that every link in the circle of life is important, no matter the size, color or shape because together we make up humanity and divided, well things might go downhill.

Now, currently Jeremy Rifkin has the idea of an empathic civilization, which is quite similar to this ubuntu philosophy. He has written a book called The Empathic civilization,and he has also created a short 10 minute video that includes him drawing and lecturing us on his idea and the origins of this empathic civilization, which you can watch here. Basically Rifkin is saying that humans are not wired for agressiona nd selfishness, but for empathy, love companionship and the feeling of belonging. We all have empathy for one another because we have one thing in common no matter race, gender, or age. We all know that we are born and we live for a limited period and then we die, this is how we are empathetic towards one another,because Empathy is grounded in the acknowledgment of death and th e celebration of life, and rooting for each other to flourish and be. Jeremy Rifkin believes that if we can extend our empathy to the entire human race,and our fellow creatures, and to our common community the earth. He believes that if we can imagine thta then we can save our species and the planet. This is so similar to the ubuntu principle in the fact that we just aren't meant to be alone no matter how much we want to beleive that we are. In fact Rifkin provides scientific evidence in about the way the neurons in our breains light up to what others around us are doing. We have to see that the only way to save our planet is to embrace  the ubuntu/ Rifki theory of unity an dcreaty a society based upong solidarity.

What i wanted to get out of the unit was to figure out what exactly is the human spirit and how does one obtain a strong human spirit when life has got you in the dumps. This ties into the unbuntu and empathic civilization philosophies because perhaps our fellow humans are what jeeps our spirits up when it seems like there is no hope. Maybe its because we know someone else has this same problem and together we can make it, possibly?

Below you can watch Jeremy Rifkin on "The Empathic Civilization"

Internet: Blessing or A Curse To Lonely People?

All the Lonely People and A Meeting of Solitudes by Roger Ebert, and another article by Ezra Klein, immediately made me think of myself. Three years ago I was new to my school district and I was angry at my parents, the world and God for taking me away from a place where I was comfortable to a place where I was the foreigner. After a while my anger faded and I deluded myself into believing that I wouldn't make any friends in my new area for dumb reasons like: I'm not funny enough to have friends, and no one would ever like me because I'm just so different from all the other kids. So with that in mind I was set to not try to make any friends at all since i was so sure no one would ever want to be friends with me. I resolved I only had 5 years to spend in purgatory until I graduated and could go to college wherever I decided. Until then I figured I would just spend my total of 7 hours at school no more no less and come home to my computer and chat with my old friends on facebook and bebo or whatever social networking site was cool that month. After a while I had my annual check up at the pediatrician and the doctor asked me how many hours a day I spent on the computer/television total. I answered with more than 5 hours altogether and she was stunned and told my  mom I needed to go outside more often or I might develop depression. So my mother cut back computer time therefore cutting back my social time, and I was forced to wander the neighborhood alone, as my brother already made friends with all the neighborhood boys. As Ebert stated in his article "Just because you're afraid to go outside doesn't mean you're happy being inside," this is entirely true. I was most definitely not happy being inside no matter how much I lied and told myself that inside was better; because it's not. It is so much easier to be brave over the internet; to be bold and fearless and witty online is easy.Whatever you write can easily be edited before you send a message. Whereas in person you can't take wordds back, you say whatever you want in the spur of the moment. In person people know you for you; for the brash, or sarcastic witty you;but on the Internet people only know the polished and edited you, which is why I think the Internet can be blessing, and yet a curse.