Patrick Dolan

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.