Reflection Post: Week 1 & 2

I enjoyed the first week of Environmental Health.  The ropes activity was a creative way to get us to be critical thinkers.  It’s a good reminder to always look at things from many different angles and to know that problems may very well have multiple solutions.  I feel like that might be a good summary for how this class is going to play out for me.  This was also an important class period because we learned the basics of blogging.  This was definitely a harder concept to grasp than the activity (at least for me)!  However, I’ve found that the more you play around with blogging, the more you learn.  It’s a learn as you go sort of experience!

During week 2 we did a number of things.  We started class with a small slideshow reviewing famous sayings mostly involving gardens and flowers.  We related those sayings to environmental health on a larger scale.  After that we watched a video clip from 60 Minutes about global warming.  Specifically, it was about the government censoring what scientists tell the public about the effects of global warming.  I was really disgusted to find out that the man in charge of editing these reports before they are published was a petroleum lobbyist previous to working in the White House.  Honestly, how can the public make educated decisions when the information isn’t all there?  Also, maybe if they did put out the real information about global warming and how serious it is for our environment people might be more apt to do something about it.  Lastly, we discussed our Read ‘n’ Seed books and our introduction post.  I was excited to choose a book.  When I did take a look at the list I even read the synopses for the books that were already chosen just because they sounded so interesting.  I would definitely add a few of those books to my reading list.  I chose a book called “The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight”.  In the description it said that this book was the inspiration for a short video called “Global Warning” in which Leonardo Dicaprio is the narrator.  I checked it out and it was pretty cool.  It pretty much just lays out the problem of global warming plane and simple so that anyone can understand.  You should all check it out!

Happy Friday!