Lets hug some trees

You should all check this out! These are just some little ways to be a little nice to our environment. Its actually pretty easy and cheaper to be eco-friendly. One my favorite suggestions from this article is buying used clothes at places like good-will and salv-o and giving your used things to those same places. You can give your used stuff to those same places instead of throwing them away and having them end up in a land fill. Shopping at good will is one of my favorite rainy day activities! I've gotten some of my favorite articles of clothing from those places, and how great would it feel to buy a shirt that you love for 2$!!!!!??

Al Gore's campaign focused heavily on global warming and doing so serious policy reform to try to heal our environment. Obviously that matches up with my ideas pretty well. I think we could spend a lot more time on issues like improving our environmental policies instead of things like foreign relation policies. I think things like the Iraq war were (in my opinion) incredibly unnecessary. I just feel like we could have made alot of better choices in what to focus on if Al Gore had been made president. 

Alot of people think that global warming is a hoax. They are wrong. I don't even know how to argue this, they are just very wrong. I spent an entire section in one of my Natural Resource economic classes going over how global warming is very real, and it is very much caused by us, not some natural rise in temperature that happens every few hundred years. Some of my favorite parts of the things the hoax advocates show are their graphs. The one above is a pretty typical one. It its trying to show how CO2 emissions have nothing to do with the rising in temperature. It shows how since 1998 CO2 levels in our atmosphere have continued to rise and the temperature is actually dropping. They might by right, that in the past 10 years the temperature has gone down a fraction of a degree even thought CO2 levels are still rising but what they are not showing is the past hundred or even 200 years. What is really important are the large scale, long period of time changes. This trick to only show your the past few years is actually used very often by people who think global warming is a hoax. Because it is easy to look as small trends, trends within about ten years, and say that everything is fine, that this is just natural. But when you look at this big trends, the changes over large amounts of time it is undeniable that CO2 levels have to do with temperature rising. I posted a longer time graph to show you. 

You see me ride my bike through our part of campus and you scoff. You see my mountain hardware day pack and you think it's ugly. You see me coming back from a hike or a canoeing trip to eat at hamp and you look me up and down like I'm from another planet. You look at my plate in the dining hall, heaping with food other that the dressing-less salad and fruit that you eat and think you are so much healthier and fit than I am. Well I will have you know people of south-west, that I love that I walk around campus in hiking boots, that I eat pizza after a ten mile hike, that I bike around campus with an orange hiking backpack and a bright green bike. So when I come to your dining hall, after spending three days canoeing from the boarder of Canada to North Hampton I am obviously going look a little different than you. Yes, I haven't showered in 3 days, I probably have mud somewhere that I don't see, my face is sun and wind burned, I know that I look like I haven't slept longer than 4 hours in a row and I love it. I love that I look like was just part of a team that canoes 200+ miles in three days. I love that you can tell that I have been living out of vans and sleeping on docks for days on end, I love that you can tell all of these things because why would I want to hide that? Why would I want to hide the mud that I carried a canoe through? I am proud of the mountains I climb, the rivers I paddle and the rocks I climb. And I know you are proud of your gym body, god knows I don't have the patience or discipline to work out inside everyday. I know you are proud of your will power to stay away from the desert and pizza, two things that I am truthfully terrible and avoiding. But just know that I am not like you and I am not ashamed of it so you shouldn't judge me for it. You can spend your weekends the way you do and I will spend mine outside, lets be understanding when we meet at our common eating ground, which does not happen too often, be respectful and hold your judgment. 

The amount of people that I see with eco rep stickers all over their lap tops and doors drives me crazy. Because I have also seen those same people carrying GIANT cases of water bottles to their dorms! Just a heads us, anyone I see with a case of those I want to punch in the face. Just buy one Nalgene and you will never have to buy all that water again and create tons of waste again! Tap water also is not gross or bad for you, it has not been sitting in a plastic water bottle for weeks, it has not been processed and chemically treated like all the water in the bottles has. DRINK TAP WATER.

Just look at this website and it will explain everything. http://www.globalclimatescam.com/

I appreciate that this blogger is talking about this because alot of people think that anxiety is just people being babies and not being able to handle what life throws at them. But I know it's alot more than that, its not a choice and it's really hard to just tell yourself to get over it. It can take a long time to get over anxiety and alot of courage to deal with it, especially if it progresses as badly as it did with my friend. 

Earth hour is something that has been happening for a few years now, something that I think alot more people should participate in or even just become aware of. The idea is to get as many people in the world as possible to turn off as many things that use electricity as possible for 1 hour a year. Just one hour a year where you wouldn’t use any electricity, that doesn’t seem so hard. Think of all the awesome things you could do in that one hour without the distractions of electricity, like make a camp fire with your friends and just hang out for an hour, or take a relaxing candle lit bubble bath for an hour, or sleep for an hour, or read by candle light for an hour. Not only would doing this for an hour save butt loads of energy, it also just raises awareness about how much electricity we really use. As you go through your house and turn off everything using electricity maybe you will realize just how much crap that uses electricity you have that you don’t really need. Or maybe you’ll enjoy that hour so much that you’ll just spend more time doing non- electricity related things. I think the repercussions of this hour and what it makes people realize could be way more beneficial that the actual hour of energy it saves it’s self.

So I realized that I'm asking people to appreciate nature alot, and alot of you might think that thats kind of difficult because its hard to see the really amazing and beautiful parts of nature. So far I have been showing you pictures probably taken by professional photographers who when on these crazy awesome expeditions that no one in real life usually goes on. So I decided to show you that normal people, people just like yourself, are just as capable as seeing amazing places. All of the pictures above were taken by my friends from Umass. Some of them are from out west, some from Alaska, and some from Maine and New Hampshire. But they are all taken by real people, not edited in anyway. You can see places like this too!! 

I just thought you all could use a little nature pick me up! When ever I'm stressed or am missing being outside I look at pictures like these. These pictures are pretty and give you even more reason to appreciate nature! Seeing things like this should make you appreciate and want to preserve nature! All of these pictures came from of my favorite blogs called the-three-trees. http://the-three-trees.tumblr.com/ CHECK IT OUT

There is really only a small section of this video that I find relevant and important to my issue. It is at 1:28 and the quote is "In Chinese, the word for nature is ziran, which means that which happens of its self. Not under any control of an outside boss." Besides this video being incredibly beautiful and moving think quote in particular almost made me cry. Maybe because I was having an incredibly stressful week and I was in the middle of a melt down but when I heard that part about nature I suddenly felt so much better. Because it made me think of just how incredible nature is! Because nothing in nature (in real untouched nature) has been influenced by man in its creation, is it created completely of its own. Now this may not seem like a big deal, yea obviously nature isn't man made, everyone knows that. But when you think of how freaking incredibly beautiful and giant and vast and intricate some things in nature are then the fact that it is all done just by natural means is crazily beautiful. Think of a mountain, or a waterfall, or even a flower, to me those are some of the most beautiful things ever created, and we had nothing to do with it, it just exists, it lives without our influence. Think of the Grand Canyon, holy shit that thing is HUGE!!!! It's way more powerful, giant and beautiful than anything we could make, so stop fucking those things up! Just leave them alone, especially the really beautiful and amazing stuff, like the rain forest?! Jesus christ that place is amazing, everything is living in harmony, those ecosystems are crazy intricate and complex so lets stop messing with it and let something that amazing be so amazing! 

The Lorax is by far one of my favorite books, he gets my message. I think these quotes are pretty relevant to my issue. One thing that I try to emphasize the most is that the earth is not going to heal it's self at this point, we are going to have to do some serious work to make the earth healthy again. And we need to start somewhere, and that somewhere is simply caring. We just need to get people to care about this, to see that the earth is worth saving and not destroying any further. We can't leave it up to other people or else it will never get done. 

Once again, more veganism!