Patrick Dolan

I mainly use public transportation as my mode of transport for my everyday activities. I generally enjoy it as it is cheap, it allows me to momentarily unwind and relax (and sometimes nap) before I reach my destination, and I've made a few friends along the way. Though I really like Portland's public transport, it really bums me out that they are facing severe budget cuts and have seen some of my routine bus stops being rerouted or halted entirely on the weekend. I wanted to expand my sustainable transport use this week, and since I do not have a bike, walking more often was my only option. Overall, it was a great experience. Though the weather was not as nice as last week's, walking gave a minute to relax and slow down even more. It was like a meditative process, allowing me to ground myself, look at my surroundings, and ruminate more peacefully on what was on my mind.

I started off this week by connecting with my neighborhood’s council/community group to help with an invasive species removal. We met up on Wednesday and worked together physically removing invasive grasses and weeds in a wetland and creek that runs through the neighborhood for a few hours. I’m not going to lie, the work was a little back breaking and tedious, but knowing I was able to make my local environment just a little bit healthier made it worth my time. Furthermore, I was able to connect with neighbors I had never met before, and bonding while working together was genuinely a great time and I feel it made my community closer.

For this week's challenge/reflection, I decided to try and expand my initiatives outside myself and towards more people/environment. With the sun coming out more often and the growing season beginning, I decided this week I would try and spread as many native species seeds along paths, parks, and green spaces as much as possible. This is because native plant species thrive under our conditions, offer numerous ecosystem services, and, most importantly, have less of a water demand than foreign or invasive species. Though I cannot immediately see the fruits of my labor, I will periodically check the areas I sprinkled in hopes that some blooms arise!

For this week I aimed to reduce my personal ecological footprint by reducing the amount of meat and products from large scale farming operations I consumed. I’m not gonna lie, initially it was quite hard. Meat and meat related dishes are a big part of my daily meals, so finding new vegetarian dishes to make was a little difficult. I started by eating just individual vegetables and quickly realized that I could not do this long term and I looked rather silly doing so. Thankfully, I was able to find some very good Indian vegetarian recipes and dishes that I was quite fond of and made up the majority of the meals I ate.

This week’s discourse on waste was quite eye opening, especially the portion of class where we went through our own garbage. When rummaging through my garbage, I noticed that: 1) almost all of the waste came from food packaging and 2) most of it was either plastic or cardboard. Being an environmental science major, sustainable and green approaches to management (especially waste management) are something that is always on my mind and is also something I should practice as much as I preach! So, to address this waste dilemma, I decided to recycle as much of my waste for gardening, as it is a big hobby of mine and Spring is the perfect time to begin such a task.