Going Green

In class, our current unit is all about Mother Nature. Ways that humans are harming the earth, ways that we can help the earth, and ways that we as a class can help our school to become more Green. To make our school more Green, our class has split up into two seperate groups. One is focusing on implementing collabrative consumption into our school, and the other (the one that I'm a part of) is forming a "Green Team" at school. This Green Team is a conscious effort by both the faculty and to follow the three R's, reduce, reuse, and recycle. To gain some support for this movement, we are organizing a Flick Tournament at school. In the Flick Tournament, students will bring aluminum cans, and there will be tournament-style flick wars, with the loser leaving the tournament and the winner moving onto the next round. We are then going to take the aluminum cans that the students have brought and recycle them properly. Our group's hope is that through this fun activity, students throughout the school can see just how easy it is to recycle, and make positive choices in the future. In the Green Team, I have been helping everyone out, looking up recycling facts, helping to come up with the concept of the Flick Tournament, being a human dictionary when my fellow classmates write letters to the administrators and staff concerning the Green Team. I guess you could say that I have been all over the place.

We have learned more about the need for recycling by watching a documentary called Tapped. This movie has probably been the most effective, for me, in that it makes me want to recycle more. The images in this movie of darkened skies over factories that make water bottles, clear oceans filled with plastic bottles, and towns being depleted of their resources because of the bottled water industry made me want to change my ways immediately.

Since we began our journey to become more eco-friendly, I think that I have changed. I have always recycled my cans, bottles, and papers, but since we began our Green unit in Gifted and Talented, I have become a lot more aware of all of the issues concernint the environment. I feel that my greatest gift from this unit that sense of awareness that i have gained. Now, when I drink out of plastic water bottles (yes, I still drink out of plastic water bottles), I feel guilty because I know the repercussions that this will have on nature.When I use plastic bags at the supermarket, I know that it will take years for that thin little bag to decompose in a landfill. This unit has been both informational and interesting. Learning about Terra Cycle (a company that uses all recycled items to make their goods), and collabrative consumption (look at my last blog post for a more in depth explanation) are two things that I found quite interesting about the Green unit. Overall, I definetly feel that the knowledge that I am gaining now will go everywhere with me for the rest of my adult life.

Zopa.com: A Revolutionary Website

In class the other day, we watched a TED talk by Rachel Botsman. She is Oxford and Harvard educated, and wrote the influential book What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collabrative Consumption. Botsman has come up with an entirely new way to recycle, and is sure to become a big name in the years to come.

After watching the video, we each had to pick a random company that followed the idea of collabrative consumption, and I got Zopa. Zopa is a peer to peer lending company where people can go and say how much money they'd be willing to lend at what interest rate, and then borrowers go and choose which offer they'd like to take. The whole transaction is free of any bankers, so there's no overhead. Zopa is an idea that could potentially revolutionize the lending industry.

Not only is Zopa a revolutionary idea, but it's also quite safe. They conduct background checks on all of their members, and have them all sign background checks. The borrowers also pay the lenders back through direct deposit, and if any payments are missed then a collection agency gets involved. It seems to me like Zopa is a great thing, and that it'll definetly take off and become something huge.

National Holocaust Museum

Friday we our Gifted and Talented class took a trip to the National Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. For weeks I had been hearing about how powerful the experience would be and how emotional I would get. To be honest, I simply brushed off these comments and was simply looking forward to missing a day of school. How was I to know that after leaving the museum, I would be one of the people singing the museum's praises?

When you first get to the museum, you get crammed into this tiny elevator and brought up to the top floor, then you're set free to roam around. The thing that I noticed first was how silent the entire museum was. You could literally hear a pin drop. People were in awe of what was being presented to them and they had no words. When I started to move through the museum I kept being hammered with images and information, it was almost too much to handle.



The most powerful part of the museum was the room filled with shoes. There was literally a room filled with shoes that were taken from the Jews that were killed in the concentration camps, and they were piled three or four deep on the floor. You hear that millions of Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and you never give it a second thought because it's only a number. Then when you see something that belonged to an actual person it suddenly becomes real. The sad part is that there were a lot of shoes in the room, but the number wasn't even close to the actual number of people who died in the Holocaust. Overall, I would definetly recommend the museum to everyone, it's a great way learn about the Holocaust while also seeing the emotional side of the tragedy.

Crisis in Egypt

Inspired by the people of Tunisia who have recently overthrown their government, the Egyptians are protesting Hosni Mubarak's 30 year rule of their country. After days of protesting, Mubarak announced that he had fired his cabinet, and that he recognized the demand for political and economic reforms. This did not satisfy the protesters,and clashes continue around Liberation Square. The protesters had planned a peaceful march, and the government announced that they would not fire on those taking part. While the police surrounded the protest, nothing violent was happening to the protesters, and it seemed like things would work out. On February 1, Mubarak announced that he would not be running for another term, thinking that this would satisfy the demands of his opposition, but this was not the case. They waved their shoes in the air (an insult in the Arab world), and vowed their protests wouldn't stop until Mubarak quit the presidency. The next day things got violent as pro- and anti- Mubarak protesters battled each other in Liberation Square, using rocks, chunks of concrete, and Molotov Cocktails as weapons. Anti-Mubarak protesters claim that the pro-Mubarak protesters include plainclothes police officers encouraged by the government to fight. Recently, there have been multiple attacks on American journalists and citizens in Egypt. To help stem the spread of revolution early on, the government shut down the internet.

Honestly, the whole crisis in Egypt scares me a lot. Under Mubarak's rule, Egypt made peace with Isreal, and gave Americans an ally in a place where we have few. While he may not have been the best ruler in the world, it is beneficial to the United States to have him in power. With Mubarak out of power, who's to say that a radical anti-American group doesn't gain power under the cloak of democracy? While the revolution may be a great thing for the Egyptians, how will it affect us Americans? We can only hope for the best I suppose.

Sources:
http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/02/03/egypt.protests.timeline/index.html?hpt=T1

Finished!!

So, we finished taping all of the interviews for our hope project, and they ended up suprising me a lot. Instead of everyone having disctinct answers, the answers that were given were very similar in nature. Most people, when asked to define hope, said that it was optimism, or the feeling that things can always get better.I thought for sure that people's backround and beliefs would alter their answers. It seems that hope is a universally definable word.
 What I found interesting, and slightly depressing, was that some people said that they didn't have hope for humanity. When asked, they replied that the shooting in Arizona that had happened just the week before had taken away their hope for humanity. I find this really sad; how can you have no hope for humanity? No hope that there's people out there that are good? No hope that people are trying to make a change? All I know is that if I didn't have any hope for humanity, things would be very bleak.
Okay, on to the video that we made. We ended up only making a preview sort of video because of a time crunch, but I think that it was pretty powerful. Like I said earlier, we taped people of all ages and backgrounds to learn their perspective on hope. I'll attach the video later, because the computer is being tempermental, but I think that we did a great job on it. Later, we'll hopefully be able to make a video that includes all of our interviews.

What does hope mean to you?

To further expand upon our hope and the human spirit unit, a couple of girls in my Gifted and Talented class and I are going to make a video where we ask random people at the mall various questions about hope. We hope to gain a better understanding of how the general populance feels about hope. The question that I feel will have the biggest impact in our video is "What does hope mean to you?" There are countless ways to answer this question, and in order to do so people will have to use their own experiences. To help us get started on our project, I'd like to pose the question to you. So, what does hope mean to you?

Ubuntu

Our society is very filled with hate, we really need to follow the lead of the people in Africa and start practicing Ubuntu. The word itself comes from the Bantu dialect of southern Africa and is directly translated to mean "I am what I am because of who we all are", but more simply put it means that we are all connected. The idea says that there is a common link between all of us, and it is through that link and our interactions with others that we discover our own human qualities. Through Ubuntu, your pain is my pain, your suffering is my suffering, your joy is my joy. I feel that this is a very interesting idea. What if we thought this way every day, all day? Would there be poverty? Would there be starvation? Would people be begging on the streets to feed their children? I feel like this philosophy, while slightly utopian, is a very effective way to end all the problems in the world. I know that this seems a bit extreme, but even if it didn't solve all of our problems, it could solve some of them. By helping others, we show our humanity, which often times doesn't get the chance to shine.
This ideology really relates to Rifkin's RSA video very closely (you can access it here). We all need to work together to form a better world, not only for ourselves but for all lifeforms living on the planet. We need to forget all of the mental boundaries we have set up around ourselves (political views, religion, social class), and work together as a united group to better our world. We should adopt both of these ideologies, and we should embrace our link with others and break down the barriers we put up to form a society where we all work together to solve problems.
This idea is very relevant to our hope and the human spirit unit. When we face problems, we can either break out into chaos, or we can band together to solve that problem. People who overcome extreme situations obviously choose to band together with others rather than simply giving up.




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(philosophy)
http://www.africafiles.org/article.asp?ID=20359