Colloquium Blog Entries

"Telling people that they "should" change causes a shield to go up. If we hope for people to change, we must give them something that is so compelling and so easy that they want to move toward it." I find this to be true for a majority of people. Everyone is dealing with their own personal crises; it is difficult to see past them to a larger issue affecting the world. The more it is positioned that helping the environment in turn helps everyone, will promote change itself. The collective effort is thrown by the immediacy of the issue. The planet is using resources past its capacity. Pollution and food scarcity is an immediate issue for many people in the world. What differentiates the people who are facing those problems versus the people facing personal problems is their directness to the issue. If a politician were to dictate what we should or should not do, it will be ineffective because people do not respond well to direct commands. Even though this is the cas

"Right outside our doors is a vast, living "instruction manual." Our task is to understand as much as we can about how systems function, that is, to read the instruction manual carefully, so that we can propose positive solutions that work." The way in which we take care of the environment around us can be taught formally or non formally. Anyone can get otdoors and study, analyze, take note of the natural processes happening around them. The first step is, ass the qoute mentions, stepping out to see it. The awareness of nature is brought about throughout the experience of it. Natural processes are natural teachers, they teach us patience and how to to be gentle. It is nature that have survived for 3.8 billion years. It has not been inhabited by humans for 150,000 of those years. What we are left with is what has been sustaining itself for a large amount of time. It is now up to us to continue the process of the natural environment. The way in which to do that is o

"Resilience is the capacity to accommodate disturbance ans still retain its basic function and structure." When reading the definition of resilience, it was natural for me to relate the definition to a personal level. I am now considering different examples of ecological resilience. The ecological resilience of the land after Hurricane Irma is what my mind immediately goes to. Being that there were many places that withstood the storm, there were many other places that were drastically altered. Agriculture was hit hard during the storm. There was an estimated 2.5 billion in damages to agriculture. Through a trip to the Food Forest on FGCU campus, we learned what makes it a ecologically resilient place. To build a resilient environment is to create a self-organizing, diverse, environment. https://www.express.co.uk/news/weather/853576/Hurricane-Irma-damage-aftermath-death-toll-caribbean-florida-usa "The researchers have found that humanity has already exceeded the