Summer Approaches

This Monday, May 22, 2016, Mr. Stewart's 6th period Sustainable Agriculture class was busy at work preparing for the summer months. During the class period we weeded the class beds and did maintenance work like irrigation around the farm. The whole class needed to be focused and engaged if we were going to finish preparing the beds for summer. We have completed most of the work but have a ways to go before we can consider our work to be done.

The next day, our class was allowed to work on our final projects. I worked on a sign showing how to make compost tea. Compost tea requires 1 part compost, 1 part forest dirt and 1 part local dirt in order to make a suitable habitat for bacteria. After acquiring the dirt, place it in a five gallon bucket and fill it up with water. The bucket only really needs one cup of each dirt to do its job. After adding water, I needed to stir periodically for four days.

On Wednesday, May 25, we met in the classroom. We were met in the classroom by a guest speaker. The guest speaker's focus was on making people "rethink plastics". The most memorable part of the speech was her comparison to plastics as a "toxic love story". She highlighted that people love plastics because they make everything convenient, but it is toxic to us, our world and animals

There were three surprising things that I learned Wednesday and would like to put out there. First, when you recycle, the material is predominantly shipped over seas. This just shifts our problem to a different place. Usually, these places are underdeveloped and the people there are working with toxic materials everyday: secondly, 60-80% of the world's plastic ends up in the ocean. This results in massive die offs of birds, mammals and aquatic life. Lastly, there is diminishing land space in the world to store trash.

So what can we do about it? Well, what I took from the guest speakers speech was I can change little things during my day which lead to a cleaner planet. The first thing a person can do to limit waste is replacing plastics while grocery shopping. Using a mesh or cloth bag will suffice. Secondly, replace all plastic wear with glass or reusable material.

Lastly, although recycling is not a closed loop, recycling old bottles and making sure to use an item more than once can make a huge difference.






David Hall