Reflections: Week 13-14 & Overall Course

Weeks 13-14:

Over the past two weeks we have done several interesting things to wind down the class including finishing our Advocacy Projects, Eye Opener exercises, and Eco-chic Lifestyle Changes.  We also had a show and tell with our junking projects (mine is shown at on the right) and had a chance to tour Goodwill Industries.  I realized how important Goodwill is to the communities it inhabits.  They provide an excellent place for good to be recycled or donated, with the money going to help the communities.  They also provide a lot of jobs for people of all abilities.  My junking project involved recycling old beer bottles into new drinking glasses.  I had a lot of compliments on them from the people I showed, and I will be doing more of these in the future.


Overall Course:
Overall there are things that we learn in this class that will affect far more than our academic lives.  Of all of the classes I have taken at UMD, this is the one that I feel will affect my day to day life more than any of the others.  This class has changed the way I look at waste, recyclables, the food I eat, and the way business works.  I found it really interesting to see how the food industry operates.  I found it to be very shocking to find that a patent can be put on life when we watched the documentary focusing on the court cases of Monsanto.  Or how the bottled water industry works on the 'Tapped' documentary about water mining and bottle pollution.  The book I read for Read 'n' Seed, The Omnivore's Dilemma, was a good read that helped me understand how the food industry does work, and how I feel it should work.  As I said in the opening sentence to this summary, I know that what I have learned in this course will not soon be forgotten.  This class has taught life skills that will help me for many years to come.