Hey Y’all, Max here.
It’s crazy to think that we are all just living on one big spinning rock, floating in the middle of the galaxy. The earth has been around for at least four and a half billion years, and homo Sapiens ( modern humans ) have only existed for roughly 200,000 years. In that time, we have explored every last corner of this earth, settled and built civilizations, and have made scientific achievements in the advancement of humanity. But we have also destroyed, whether it be each other, species of animals, or most relevantly, the environment. This is what our first humanities project, People and the Environment is all about.
This project began on the 8th, the day after we returned to school. The entire point of the project was to send a letter to a person in a position of government within BC. The letter was meant to contain a thoughtful, well-crafted letter that details a certain environmental issue. We were to send those letters out sometime around October 20th. That’s an awful long time given to write three or four paragraphs if you ask me. Not that I’m complaining. Additionally, a lot of the time we didn’t spend focused on the letter, we were doing writing / reading lessons called commonlits. They usually centred around one story or passage, and had a bunch of review questions, multiple choice, writing exercises, etc. They were essential to another part of the project, but I’ll get to that in a second.
The commonlits we did were pretty short, and all had environmental themes. The first we did, Lee Sherman and the Toxic Louisiana Bayou, was about Louisiana’s water pollution, and how big companies mistreated their employees, and their environment.
The second was He-y come on Ou-t , which was my personal favourite. It was about a small Japanese village that discovers a mysterious hole which seems endless. When they dispose of things in it, they seemingly disappear. The main lesson was that the problems people try to get rid of quickly will not be gone long, and will inevitably come back to haunt them. There is a really surprising plot-twist at the end of this story, but I will not spoil it.
The third and fourth passages are both about the dangers of rising water. Quiet Town takes place in the near future and the main characters have to deal with the threat of rising water threatening their livelihood. The Sea also Rises is very similar, except the people and setting are real, and there is actually an island in southwestern America that will likely be underwater in the next 50 years.
As for the milestones, there were less of them this time around. The first was a letter conference plan with both Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Harris. It was basically me having a general idea of what I wanted to do, and all of us deciding what the next course of action was. The second milestone was actually just all the commonlits.
The third and final milestone was writing. We were given one hour to write a very compelling and interesting three paragraphs as to why/how the themes and texts in this project support the themes in our letters. I thought it would be easy because I am a natural writer, but I found it rather difficult to stay on one subject at a time, and I think I must have repeated ideas from my letter at least half a dozen times. The only thing we could use to help us during the writing was a page that basically guided us through, filled with our own commonlit quotes and connections, as well as ways we can connect our own writing to the project.
My actual letter went through several changes throughout the project. I decided very early on to write to whoever is in charge of development and housing ( which ended up being Selina Robinson ), because the subject I was writing about was Urban sprawl , which is the development of rural and farm land. It’s a really big issue that is affecting not just BC but the whole world. Environments and ecosystems are being destroyed because of urban sprawl, yet I don’t hear anyone talking about it. I think I had my basic themes and paragraphs figured out in the first or second draft, but it was difficult to find where was the best place to put each theme and point of interest. I have compiled all the drafts underneath. There are five in total.
Draft 1
To wrap up this blog post, I will give my final opinion, then answer the driving question. I thought this was a cool and interesting project because of the ultimate goal, which was sending a letter to someone in a position of government. I am actually quite surprised everything went so smoothly. I felt very little stress and anxiety while completing the project, and there were rarely any deadlines I had a hard time meeting. Let’s hope this luck lasts the whole year. As for the driving question, this time around it was: “How do People and the environment affect one another?” This is a big question, and I probably couldn’t put all my thoughts into a few lines. To answer this in short, I think that our environment, local and global, is a delicate thing that people have mistreated for centuries. We don’t realize that by trashing our earth, we are destroying our future until it is almost too late. It seems like an unsolvable issue, but if the good citizens of Earth get their act together, I believe we can conquer global warming
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