5/14/2012

Journal #2

Day 2 of Class

So even though we had class on Friday, today (Monday) is technically the first day of class. Especially since we will be in class, legit, 9 to 5; but luckily we won’t be stuck in the classroom all day. We get to go to the beach!

So I walk into class and sit down at a desk and wait for Andrea to get there and tell us what we will be doing. She comes in and takes roll, and introduces her assistant for the week Michael. She then moved us onto the basic outline for the day; that we were going to go to a beach and talk about environmental stewardship and land ethic. Before we left, we watched a short video about land ethic. It was very interesting to see the different definitions and the different reactions to it.

So we all went to the vans and headed out. We ended up going to one of the beaches that I have been too many times, the beach in Roques Bluff. We parked, and walked down the beach a ways to find a dry spot so we could sit and talk.

Before we started talking about what we were there to talk about, Jonathan did his activity that had to do with “Leave No Trace.” It was more a demonstration and information thing, but it was full of great information and I learned a lot. We then talked about stewardship and land ethic for awhile as a group.

The next thing Andrea had us do was to spread out, away from each other, and write in our journals about what our personal ethic is, how did we define right and wrong, and what were our gray areas if we had any. Here’s what I wrote:

                “Defining what is right and what is wrong can be a hard thing. Doing wrong to the land is like poisoning our present and future, we need the land to survive. Things like pollution, un-natural contaminants, and trash are not right and should not be in our environment. One grey area for me is erosion. It’s not good thing, but it is natural and we need to be aware of it. We need to be taking better care of our lands to ensure that we will have it in the future. Even the smallest things like picking up a piece of trash or recycling will help. The future of the land should be a priority, and we take it for granted just because it’s there now and always has been doesn’t mean that it will always be there. The land is and will be our legacy to our children and generations to come, don’t we want it to be there for them to enjoy?”

After having time to write this, we reconvened and discussed what we wrote. Then we broke for lunch and went back to campus because it was miserably cold outside. After a short break we met back in the classroom and discussed more about the “Leave No Trace” concepts that Jon had talked about earlier in the day. There were seven concepts that we talked about:

1.       Plan Ahead and Prepare

2.       Disposing of Waste

3.       Campfire Impacts

4.       Leave what you find

5.       Travel and camp on durable surfaces

6.       Be considerate of other vistors

7.       Respecting wildlife

After talking about what each means and what we should do, we ended for the day. Tomorrow we are going for a hike, can’t wait to see some more of Maine’s forests.

 

The pictures above are of Roques Bluff.