California is the latest state to ban plastic microbeads that have taken over the cosmetic industry. These little plastic balls are used as exfoliants usually, but once they are washed down the drain, they enter the oceans and other resources as more toxic beads than they originally started out as. This means that fish consume them, then we eat them. According to the New York Times Article from last week, California has one of the strictest laws of all states that have banned the beads; they have banned industries to even create biodegradable microbeads.

The article also referred to the “Story of Stuff” video on microbeads, which went into more detail on why they are so bad for the environment and for humans. This brings me to my own personal care product created by “Neutrogena naturals” which is their purifying pore scrub using willow bark and jojoba beads for exfoliation. I bought this product over the summer and I have been very happy with the result, but also happy to not feel guilty about the product I’m using.

NY times article : http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/09/business/california-bans-plastic-microbeads.html

Story of Stuff Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=131&v=uAiIGd_JqZc

Eco Friendly face scrub by Neutrogena: http://naturals.neutrogena.com/products/pore-scrub

Have you ever seen the spiders hanging out in the parking deck? Maybe not during the day, but at night they’re hard to miss. These spiders have spun their webs around the bright lights illuminating the parking deck on each floor because this is the most efficient way for them to FEAST. These lights attract tons of little flying bugs, so the spiders set up camp right there. Not too bad for a spider, right? So have spiders actually benefited from human impact on nature? Would you find more spiders in the city than in the forest because of the ample bug and light sources?

“The special power of the tree in the wilderness is to remind us of this fact. It can teach us to recognize the wildness we did not see in the tree we planted in our own backyard. By seeing the otherness in that which is most unfamiliar, we can learn to see it too in that which at first seemed merely ordinary. If wilderness can do this–if it can help us perceive and respect a nature we had forgotten to recognize as natural–then it will become part of the solution to our environmental dilemmas rather than part of the problem.” (88)

This passage hits home because it tells us that our home can be the wilderness.  Someone can seek out such places as the Grand Canyon, Muir Woods, or a hike 50 miles away but their own backyard doesn’t deserve the same attention and love as those others? Is that why we can’t protect our entire planet, because we only value the protected or famous wilderness areas?

“The curious result was that frontier nostalgia became an important vehicle for expressing a peculiarly bourgeois form of antimodernism.” (78)

The modernizing world had become too overbearing for the wealthy who had created it, so they sought out the untouched land. Their idea of wilderness mirrored those who came before them and transformed this frontier.

Yesterday’s 10-mile excursion down the Delaware River made me reflect on daily life. The calm moments were those with no rapids and the time spent hanging out on the shore with no phones waiting for you to drop off the vans. The stressful moments consisted of rapids, physically leaving the water, and turning on my phone again. However the moments not paddling and drifting slowly down the river were able to put a smile on my face because of the sheer beauty and unaltered landscape of the Lehigh Valley. I reflected on what the times before trains, automobiles, and factories could have been like, but also the appreciation for the hundreds of unaltered miles of river that we are still able to flow down due to the protection of wilderness and how important this land became to us only a century ago.

Our trip yesterday also reminded me of a movie I saw about a year ago called Deliverance. This is a  film from the early 70’s about four ‘cultured’ businessmen taking time off to canoe down a pristine river in rural Georgia before it gets dammed. In a beginning scene, called the “Dueling Banjos” (please youtube it, great scene), the businessmen stop for gas at a very local place (actually a house of a local family). The relationship between the businessmen and locals (called rednecks in the film) is eye opening and almost frightening. There are two types of people occupying the land in two very different ways, and this conflict leads the group straight into local savages.

The connection between the movie and our rafting trip was the span of time we were within earshot of the rafting gentlemen who weren’t afraid to hoot and holler and have a good time out on the river. Their use of the river was completely different from ours. While we observed the birds and fish, they were drinking and telling ridiculous stories. We’re not all meant to do one or the other, but seeing the difference in motives for going down the Delaware caught my attention.

The other day after my 1:15 class let out, I was checking my phone for texts and social media updates while walking away from the academic building. When I finally tore my eyes away from the little screen to dodge a human body walking towards me, I realized I had also just passed by one of my other professors, our very own Andy Smith. He was actually doing the same exact thing as I was, which was checking his phone for updates (I presume) while heading to his next destination.

This actually saddened me a bit. Not only did I miss an opportunity to say hello to my professor outside of the classroom environment, but both of us also weren’t doing what each other ‘promised’ to say we’d do.  We weren’t OBSERVING our campus in times like these; the five minutes outside between classes to take in the environment around us. So this brings us to the reading for today. We have an issue disconnecting from the norm of constant cellular device checking and constant responding. We lose those five minutes to an e-mail, or a scroll of Instagram, or texting. We lost that opportunity to make a human connection. We even lose our ability to walk straight down a sidewalk and with the high possibility of smacking right into someone (That’s uncomfortable). As the “Don’t Drink and Drive” commercials always say…

It can wait. Oh and pick your heads up, you don’t want to miss anything.

 During the first class on our ‘ramble’ at the second stop we talked about reflective glass on buildings and how buildings cause so many bird deaths. I was wondering at this time if there was a chemical in the bird’s eye that could discern between real and fake objects they’re flying towards, like maybe a glass coating on building’s windows? So I did a little searching and a simple solution was this…

http://www.collidescape.org/

It’s a film to put on windows that makes them visible to birds! (pretty cool right?) Any thoughts? Hesitations? Is this even an actual thing? There are other solutions to this awful problem, but this solution seemed most interesting to me.