Eye Opener: Online Learning Activities

I completed Derek's, Sara's, and Kevin's online learning activities
Derek's Online Learning Activity
Know Your Drinking Water Quiz
The quiz was based off of the costs of infrastructure in the United States. I got an 80% on his quiz...it was a toughy! I'm not very educated on the whole water..money.. business He provided some good sources that I looked through. They had some really insightful information. I think it made me realize how much I take for granite the water that comes so easily out of my faucets.

Sara O's Online Learning Activity
Spelling Bee
It was asked that we choose between 4 activities, I decided to do the environmental/healthy online spelling bee. It's a little embarrassing how bad I did! I couldn't spell... anesthesia for some reason (sure now I can spell it right on the first try, must have been the pressure!)

Kevin's Online Learning Activity
Urban Sprawl Quiz
I got an 83% (It told me I would make a great lobbyist ha) on Kevin's quiz. It was about Urban Sprawl. I never really even knew what "urban sprawl" was until his advocacy posts. I have to admit that it is an interesting conecpt.

Eye Opener: Photo Essay

Over spring break I went on a 50 mile hike on the Appalachian Trail (AT). I thought it seemed like a lot of miles, but compared to the whole trail being about 2,178 miles from Georgia to Maine, it's just a tiny mark on the map! We started at Sams Gap North Carolina and went south bound to end in Hot Springs. It was an awesome experience! Going into this, I knew we were doing this photo essay so I decided to find things on the trail that I thought were interesting and I could share with the class. This post mostly focuses on the maintenance of the trail, clean water sources, and my experience compared with everyday "convenient" living.

As we were walking along the paths I often wondered... who managed the paths and how could they keep up with it?!

About the time I took this picture is where we ran into people (workers and volunteers) who came around to monitor, maintain and protect the trail.They were often taking care of vegitation that was coming onto the trail, storm over blow, maintaining overnight shelters, marking boundries etc. After starting this essay I decided to look a little deeper into the maintanance of the AT. The trail has been around since 1937. It is protected by all 14 states that it touches and is a unit of the National Park Service. The volunteers and workers came from the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC). It's basically a HUUUGE organization full of over 6,000 volunteers per year, plus year round employees with a mission to preserve and manage the natural, scenic, historical and cultural resources associated with the trail. This website provides a lot more in depth information on it.

There were many signs along the way giving credit to the wonderful volunteers.."over 2100 miles maintain by local volunteers". I thought it was really cool just showing that little things making a big difference.

I also thought this sign was perfect for explaining a little history and who the trail was protected by...

We averaged anywhere between 6-12 miles a day carrying probably a little over 40 pounds because of all the food we had to pack. We made most of our meals just by adding water to things such as oatmeal, malt-o-meal, chili, macaroni etc. It wasn't too great but after a long day of hiking anything is good. Going on this trip also made me realize how lucky I am to have clean water! We had to hand pump our water from little streams and waterfalls that were few and far between.

Drinking the water "raw" from the stream can be dangerous, it really put things into perspective for how lucky we were to have resources available to make the water clean to drink.
We actually all ran out of water our second night! We had been hiking for too long and had to ration about 2-3 waterbottles between 10 people at our campsite. I swear I have never been more thirsty before, we were all dreaming of water that night!

It was almost worth it though because we woke up to this amazing view at our campsite (when we arrived at the camp site there was a lot of fog so we couldn't see out)

As for sleeping, most of the time we slept in tents, but along the trail there are shelters about every 5-10 miles apart. Usually there is a water source and bear hangs (to hang your food up at night).

These shelters are really convenient to put things out to dry in. It's a first come, first served basis until it is full. They were my favorite because the nights got reeeally cold so the more people huddling in those things the better! At night I would literally wear everything in my suitcase. It put heat into another perspective as well! The shelters are maintained by volunteer groups that repair and build these shelters on a regular basis. Without the help of these volunteers these shelters wouldn't be available. You'd be surprised how a little shelter can really make a difference when it's raining!

This trip was really challenging at times. There were days where we would go up 2,000 feet within a couple miles. I think I learned a lot about myself and the little things that we never really stop to think about during the day..such as clean water, warm food, shelter, warmth..it really was an eye opening experience.

Here was me on my favorite view of Blackstacks Cliff..We could practically touch the clouds!

Going on this trip was a little out of my box and I encourage everyone to give it a try. Superior Hiking trails are close by..they're great for day hikes or backpacking with about 205 mile long footpath. Also UMD provides great equipment that you can rent! If anyone is intersted in volunteering and getting involved. All the information is provided at these websites!

We had a quote that we all liked it was "Not all who wander are lost"..so wander on and make a difference!

Eye Opener: Environmental Working Group

For this Eye Opener what we had to do was visit the Environmental Working Group's Skin Deep Cosmetic Safety Database and type in 1 cosmetic product that we use regularily. I chose to type in my Pond's face lotion. Face lotion is the one type of product I honestly don't think I could live with out (I know I'm being a little dramatic) but I use it everyday, in the morning and evening. My hazard score was a 6. The website said that some of the ingredients in the product were linked to cancer, developmental/reproductive toxicity, allergies, and a few other miscellaneous concerns. It surprised me that something I put on my face every day could give me cancer or even reproductive issues??! I used the same website to find some other low hazard face lotion products, most I've never heard of (which I'm not surprised). It seems a little unrealistic to me to stop using every kind of cosmetic that I own but I'm definitely going to start paying attention to lables, I might even type something in this website before I make my next cosmetic purchase! It seems now that everything is linked to cancer, and I'm not really sure how or what to think about it.

Eye Opener: Summary of Reading

Growers and Greens Unite
The title of this chapter really sums up what seems to be happening in some areas of our country. Despite the sterotypes of the diverse groups of farmers and environmentalists, it seems that they are overcoming this "mis-trust" to work together. "People with wildly different backgrounds are learning more about each other as the come together to defeat common opponents". The book stated stereotypes such as farmers are often seen as stubbon and narrowminded by the environmentalist and the environmentalist are seen as people who dispense rules and don't understand what really goes on in a farm. At this point, when farm factories (CAFOs) are becoming detrimental to the environment (and the surrounding people) farmers are even known to defy the Farm Bureau to join the environmentalist to help with certain issues. It was interesting to see that in hog farming factories, 1 hog produces two to four times as much raw sewage as a human being! In reality there are only about 8,000 farms that are "certified organic", but their profits are growing 25% each year. If only the CAFOs didn't consider this "alternative" farming as risky, they could see that there are other options. Durastic change isn't going to happen over night, but it's good to see that there is common ground of interest in change on the rise.

A few questions for discussion: Would our environment change durastically if these farms went to all "organic"? What would happen to the price of food? Would organic farming really be "risky" or is it just different?

Bottom line, whether or not a farm is organic or a big factory, they are all just trying to survive. With a main issue of whether they are doing it environmentally friendly or not, regardless it has to be a combined effort on both sides.

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Eye Opener: CSPI

I visited each site briefly in the Eye Opener section: Food Tour, Eating Green, and Score Your Diet. I decided to further explore on the Food Tour because I thought I could get some interesting new facts!

Basically it was a virtual process of where our food comes from and what is done with the fertilizers, land, slaughter house, super market, and much more.

Some interesting facts I learned:

Ferilizer Facts: Producing feed for the U.S. livestock, consumers about 22 billions pounds of fertilizer annually, and that energy used to manufacture it coule provide one years worth of power for about 1 million Americans.

Factory Farm: I was not aware that Farm animals in the US are not protected by strict laws and are often tortured and/or badly mistreated.

Animal Feed: Livestock are fed trash! At one point they were even feeding cattle with other cattle remains (YUCK!) which caused Mad Cow disease, which is illegal now.

Manure Lagoon: The methane released from livestock and their manure is equivalent in environmental destruction to the annual release of CO2 from about 33 million automobiles.

Super Market: Contaminated food cuases about 5,000 deaths each year. About 1/5 of them are linked to meat poultry, dairy and egg products. (Any one hear about the peanut recall?!

Hospital: The CDC estimates that contaminated food causes about 76 million illnesses, 325,00 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths each year. The main culprits ranging from hamburgers, milk, and eggs.

Obviously if I put in all the things I learned from this site, it'd be a little over kill. I just put in the ones I thought were most interesting. If anyone hasn't seen this website I highly recomend it. There are tons of facts. Although these facts were alarming, I have a hard time believing that all farms contribute to some of these horrendous things (such as the cruelity and contamination), but it was interesting learning about them all! If anyone was considering being a Vegitarian, this site will pull you towards that for sure!

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Eye Opener: Ecological Footprint

How much of the Earths resources does my lifestyle take up? According to this quiz from the Redefining Progress, if everyone lived the lifestyle I live it would take 4.35 Earths! My results seemed to be somewhat below the Country's average, but it still surprised me that 1 poor college student took up over 4 Earths!

Since college I have defintely been introduced to the advantages of conserving electrcity, water, gas, heat, etc. not only for my wallet but for the Earth in general. We as Americans rely so much on water, electricity, heat, air-conditioning, driving etc, that we don't realize how much is going to waste.

I'd like to think that I contribute by taking the bus, carpooling, recycling, conserving, using hand-me-downs (it seems the list could go on and on) but there is always room to improve which I think I could.

What I found challenging about conserving had to do with the house that I live in. It's an old house, with old windows, oil heat and we rent it. That itself makes it difficult to be eco-friendly. We do try hard to contribute by puting in the correct light bulbs, blocking off windows and doorways, unplugging and turning things off, and keeping our heat in the high 50's (which believe me is chilly, you don't see us walking around our house with shorts and t-shirts on, it's more like jackets and hats still on!)

I thought this activity was fun but it just made me feel guilty that I need to do a lot better. I wish I had the money to have the hybrid car, or the solar panels in our house, but it's looking like that isn't happening for me any time soon, so I'll keep doing my part the best I can. I think the little things like recycling, turning off lights/appliances, and using public transportation can make a big difference!

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Introduction

Welcome to Going Green With Jayme!





My name is Jayme. I am a Community Health major at UMD. This blog is created for Environmental Health. We will be using it for various ways to show our progress in this class and to share fun and interesting things about the Environment.

There are 5 possible types of posts on my blog. They include:

Advocacy Project
Eye Openers
Reflections
Reviews
Share and Voice

If you notice at the bottom of this post, the categories will be listed as labels. This post is has been labeled with all five kinds of posts. You will also see the number of each kind of post in my Labels Gadget at the top of the page. All post titles from now on will begin with one of the categories above.

The members of my web group are:
1. Sarah O.
2. Derek
3. Randy
4. Kevin

You can subscribe to my blog by clicking the subscribe gadget in the gadget column. You can also follow my blog by clicking "Follow this Blog" in the gadget column. I am subscribed to all the blogs in my blog list gadget. You can see my complete profile and all the blogs I am following by clicking on "See Complete Profile." (Make sure all these gadgets are in place).

I hope you enjoy my blog!