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dustinboehm-blog1 · 7 years ago

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Writing about the Environment: Prosperity and Sustainability or Doom and Demise?

*Disclaimer: this is going to be a rather long but a very informational post*

My field of study revolves around the importance of environmental sustainability and responsible environmental practices so that our generation and future generations will be able to maintain a decent quality of life; however, at the other end of the spectrum, I am interested in English Literature (hence the reason I’m taking a class geared towards those majoring or minoring in English) called “Writing About the Environment” taught by professor Darrel Elmore at Florida International University. Writing about the environment is a unique course that focuses on reading and writing about important environmental topics including those that involve climate change, sea level rise, environmental degradation, and deforestation just to name a few.

With that being said, one of our assignments was to participate in service learning - a community service assignment that forces us to give back to our community in some way or another. For this particular assignment, I chose to participate in a beach clean-up that was hosted by a non-profit organization called “Everything But Water.” I’ve attended numerous beach clean-up’s in the past but this was by far one of the most organized and rewarding clean-up events that I have attended in quite a while. For this event, I decided to bring my friend Andy along who is an International Business major at Florida International University and has never attended a clean-up event before. Before we started our trek down the beach hunting for trash, the CEO of Everything But Water asked us to download an application on our phones called “Clean Swell” which allowed us to record every piece of trash that we collected (i.e - cigarette butts. plastic straws, balloons, bottles, etc.). I’ve added images below that represent the distance that we covered and the time that it took us to cover that distance, the different types of garbage that we collected, and the amount of each item that we collected:

As you can see, we collected 12.64 pounds of trash and covered 0.83 miles in a little over an hour. The number at the top right of each square in the second and third images shows how many individual pieces of that particular litter we collected. A majority of the litter consisted of cigarette butts and random small pieces of plastic and although I had expected to see more food wrappers and bottles, that just wasn’t the case and I totally assumed that the bigger items would be more of an issue than they actually were. I was additionally surprised to see some strange things that I would have never expected to find on the beach such as a toothbrush. Overall the experience was absolutely amazing and I’ve come to realize that beach clean-up’s are completely and absolutely necessary for a couple of reasons other than helping the local ecosystem thrive and survive.

In their article titled “Can Beach Cleans Do more Than Clean-Up Litter? Comparing Beach Cleans to Other Coastal Activities,” Kaleyigh J Wyles et al., say that central to volunteering or the motivation for people to volunteer is simply well-being and learning factors. The authors go on to note that “volunteers experience greater hedonic well-being benefits (relating to pleasure), such as greater positive emotion, compared with those who do not volunteer.” My views are parallel to their implications because after I participated and completed my very first beach clean, I felt particularly euphoric and content with what I had done and it motivated me to participate in more beach cleaning events. In fact, my friend Andy and I even discussed organizing our own clean-up each month! The article by Kaleyigh J Wyles and others is extremely well written and is easy for the average reader to understand. Ms. Wyles graduated from the University of Plymouth with her PhD combining Environmental Psychology with Marine Biology. Anyone who is interesting in doing volunteer work for their own well-being and to create a sense of general satisfaction among themselves should take the time out to read this article.

Here are a couple of pictures that I took at the clean-up:

(1) Me (on the left) and my friend Andy (on the right)

(2) Me (on the right) and Prof. Elmore (on the left).

I want to leave you all with one last thing: Click HERE to watch this brief TedTalk that discusses a technique that we could implement to solve the problem of ocean plastic pollution AND extreme poverty at the same time! David Katz, the CEO of The Plastic Bank states that the “last thing that we need to do is clean the ocean” but not because he doesn’t think it is important. He compares the plastic that is flowing into the ocean to that of a water tap that is overflowing a sink. What do we do to stop the sink from over flowing? We turn the water off. In other words, we need to reduce the amount of plastics that are entering our oceans rather than focusing on cleaning up because the amount of plastics that are currently flowing into our oceans are endless and we just keep creating more and more.

Citations:

Wyles, Kayleigh J., et al. "Can Beach Cleans Do More Than Clean-Up Litter? Comparing Beach Cleans to Other Coastal Activities." Environment & Behavior, vol. 49, no. 5, June 2017, pp. 509-535. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1177/0013916516649412.

#environment #environmetalists #beachcleanup #pollution #community #volunteer #summer

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