Kate Mercer

For the community aspect of this challenge, I chose to help people throughout my desk. What this meant was that I had to come out of my shell and step outside my comfort zone in order to ask people if they needed help. This is something that I don't typically like to do because I am inherently a very anxious person, but I found that the response was always positive. I think that I fear that somebody will respond negatively to me, but this proved me otherwise. My daily challenge is for the waist category consisted of printing double sided and also reducing single use plastic. I made the choice to put the reduction of single use plastic in my challenges early on before we were supposed to because that was that was a goal of mine personally outside of class and I got excited to have the opportunity to integrate it. After reading about the plastic House of tomorrow in Disneyland when I began to look around my own room. Obviously not everything in my room is made out of plastic however it's difficult to find objects that didn't touch plastic once in their lifespan so that be they currently have plastic parts to them, or they were packaged in plastic or something like that. It's absolutely tragic that we're getting closer and closer to the Monsanto House of the Future of 1957. For these challenges I have learned that it is easy to have a conscious and positive relationship with the environment. People often think that in order to have a real impact you have to make some massive changes that will hinder your life. They think of people who go all the way and produce 0 waste and how switching to that lifestyle would be hard initially, but they don't realize that there are so many small changes that they could make to benefit the environment now. My favorite part of this challenge was seeing my personal impact on the side start to build. It made me feel like I was accomplishing something and gave me more and more motivation to want to continue. The production of meat specifically red meat houses so much pollution and so making small choices to incorporate meatless or vegan meals into your day he's not that cumbersome but has huge impacts. Companies are not creating food objects that are best for the consumer but rather best for their bottom lines it's imperative that because of this we focus on things like joyful movement that help us to feel good in our bodies. That was one of my challenges that I greatly enjoyed as a former dancer. Moving your body is so beneficial to your mind and your overall mental health. Reading and learning about all of the different issues that we have with how people treat the environment especially when talking about waste management can be really stressful. Hearing how we choose to put most of our trash in landfills, incinerated, the ocean, the land, or other problematic places can really take a toll on your emotions. It's important to keep yourself in my mind and take those moments of joy wherever you may personally find them to keep yourself healthy so you can keep fighting for change.

Experimenting with the challenges over the past week or so has been really fun for me personally. I have had other classes that have asked us to make similar types of lifestyle changes, and I have always enjoyed doing it in the past period I personally believe that we should always be working on self-improvement and one of the ways to do that is to not only focus on the self as an individual but the self as a part of a whole. By this I mean focusing on how you can impact the world around you and not just your own life. I really enjoy being held accountable for things that I already want to do. One example of this is I chose the task to help declutter my space and this has really helped me keep a clean mind. I find that when my space is cluttered, I get stressed out more easily and it is a nice ritual to come home after classes every day and make sure that I am taking care of my space as well as myself. One of my favorite tasks that I have chosen was adjusting the thermostat. I am somebody who likes to sit in a room that is the colder than most people enjoy and so adjusting the thermostat has helped me honestly sleep better period I find that I sleep longer and deeper with my room colder than traditionally what is considered normal. Some of the barriers that I have been facing when attempting to make these lifestyle changes permanent is finding substitutes for the things that I am lacking. An example of this would be the five-minute showers. I find that this has been the most difficult task for me which I expected. I like to use my shower as almost a time to meditate and reflect and I have started to implement what I call a post shower routine that allows me to get that same time for reflection but without the added overuse of water. I will say that I generally prefer using the shower for this time over any other space because the shower feels more isolating, and I don't have to worry about if my phone buzzes or somebody comes and knocks on my door. I find that the one-time activities are a lot easier for me to complete because they don't require a change in routine. Habits are particularly hard to break due to their psychology and choosing a one-time action removes this step. While they might be more difficult to complete in the moment, I do find them particularly rewarding because the effort put in makes the gratification higher. I would be willing to make some of these lifestyle changes permanent such as reducing single use plastic because I believe that that is something that is extremely important and it has little detriment to my life. Some of the other lifestyle changes like 5-minute showers might be a bit more difficult for me to make permanent however I think that there is a middle ground when it comes to these challenges. Perhaps instead of taking 5-minute showers I could take 10-minute showers as opposed to my traditional 30-minute showers. Showering for 30 minutes or an hour uses a lot more water than showering for even 10 minutes. I also think it is important to talk about how the blame has shifted from the government and corporations to the individuals. I think, as our resources have talked about, this shift is very prominent when we look at things from the early 1900s. Although at that time they were also struggling with government corruption and corporate greed, the response from those individuals was vastly different than the responses we are provided now. With the blame being shifted to individuals it removes the corporate responsibility and the governmental responsibility from the action. This removes any chance that we have that they will take any substantial action to fix the issues they are primarily causing. Because the government and the corporation together could have such a huge impact, I believe that it is their moral and ethical responsibility to make those changes and not rely on the individual. It would be nice for individuals who choose to make these changes themselves and their impact should not be ignored however it is a measure of scale that I am discussing. Corporations and the government can create change on such a massive scale that their contributions should never be overlooked. It is my hope that one day we will shift back to the views that we have seen in some of the earlier works that we have read and focus on how those larger entities can work to create change rather than placing the blame on individual citizens.

I am very excited about reducing my use of single waste plastic. I find that, especially in college, it is extremely difficult to cut out single use plastic. There are certain ways that I already engage in conscious plastic consumption but I'm excited to have this be a goal that is written down and something that I will continue to track. One example of how I engage in conscious plastic consumption is plastic water bottles. It is extremely important to my health that I stay hydrated and if I forget my reusable water bottle and needed to purchase a single use plastic water bottle, I will reuse that single use plastic water bottle until it becomes unusable. Currently I am using a bottle of smart water and I'm simply refilling it because it is a semi sturdy plastic, and I purchased it right before I got my daith on my ear pierced. It was really important at that time that I was hydrated and had something to hold on to during the piercing but rather than throw that water bottle away after, I make the choice to continue to use it. I am also very excited about the goal of driving less. I personally do not like to drive very much but I am the only person in my friend group who has a car. I want to support my friends as best I can and do anything to make their lives a little bit easier so I will always offer to drive them if they need to go somewhere that is unwalkable. One thing that I can do to cut down on my gas emissions from driving is make it a big event, maybe once a week, and take everyone with me to go to all of our errands together. This way I'm driving less overall. I am most nervous about the idea of five-minute showers because I love a long shower. I use my showers as a way to meditate and ground myself after a long day away from any distractions or anyone else. I've developed this habit from growing up as an extremely busy student and dancer where the shower really became my only space that I was able to completely relax and forget about anything pressing or any homework. I feel that the transition from longer showers to shorter showers will be difficult at first but in the long run I can still practice those meditative qualities in that time when I am not in the shower. I think in order to accomplish this goal successfully I would need to set aside time after the shower to fully relaxed so that I can refocus myself after a long day. A one-time action that I am excited about is learning about renewable energy because I have studied renewable energy before but typically in all of the classes, I've taken prior we get to pick one type of renewable energy to study, and I always pick nuclear energy. I'm excited because this will give me an opportunity to really focus on a different kind of renewable energy and expand my horizons of knowledge.