Something I do regularly that produces waste and pollution is online shopping. Although most people can agree that it is a convenient service, we also tend to forget that this is a massive producer of pollution. Everything from the multiple forms of transportation to the packaging it comes in produces pollution and waste that while we all know exists, we do not talk about as much as we could. If regulations were put in place that banned pollution from this, I do not think the service would entirely disappear, but rather it might be delayed while the companies adapted to the new rules. Many companies are already making their packaging more sustainable, while others are making their packaging and practices look better for the environment without making proper or significant changes. As for the transportation of products, the easiest way to find a solution would be to make all transportation powered by electricity, but even that might lead to some pollution, so finding a pollution-free mode of transportation might pose a threat to many businesses.

One of my hobbies is jewelry making, because of this I have a large collection of beads and charms. When I get new beads they always either come in plastic bags or they come strung onto a piece of plastic string. I am always aware of this in the back of my mind yet I continue to buy beads. Whenever I visit my old town, I end up going to the local bead store. When I get back and go to put the beads into my bead box, I end up creating a pile of trash from the packaging. The spring that most beads are strung on when I buy them is not reusable and I end up having to throw it away. When I get beads in a plastic bag, they are often sealed in a way that I cannot reuse the packaging. These problems come with how the beads are packaged, but this is the most convenient way to package beads so that they do not spill everywhere. I try and bring my small containers when I go to the local bead shop, but it is impossible to do the same with general craft stores.

Something I chose was writing in notebooks, during K-12 education, and even higher education. This isn’t much of a regular activity anymore for me, since I use my laptop for everything now, but it’s still relevant. It’s a normalized contribution to the waste that is barely talked about. Multiple notebooks for each subject per kid, then multiplying by the majority of our youth population it becomes a lot. I think it would be very unfair to just prohibit this due to the accessibility of notebooks. An alternative to notebooks would mean something related to technology, which is expensive and requires an alteration to the K-12 education curriculum.

I love to paint and one of the most affordable types of paint is acrylics. Acrylics are microplastics: everytime I wash my brushes I’m dumping plastic down the drain, everytime I paint all i’m doing is smearing plastic on cotton. Where is this art gonna end up when I’m dead? What about when I decide my art isn’t worth keeping anymore? It will all be trash. I’m working with materials that will never leave, materials that when returned to the environment do nothing but cause harm. I can make art without polluting. There’s a better way, people have been painting for centuries, way before plastics were ever invented. Maybe I can make my own paint! As an individual I have the time and resources to seek out non-polluting paint alternatives, but it shouldn’t be an individual’s responsibility. Alternet paints should be accessible, they should be sold in stores, they should be cheap enough to afford. That statement can be re-apply to almost anything. Water should be accessible, food should be accessible, housing should be accessible. DAMN! Everytime I run a tap to get water I’m polluting, aren’t I? The plumbing system, what is it powered by? Is it powered by fossil fuels? Everytime I eat, I’m eating foods that have traveled miles on a truck to get to me. Every action to maintain my own life is an act of pollution. We have been made reliant on a system that pollutes. AGHH!

One of the regular activities that has changed for me this year is taking the trash out to the bumpster in the Enfield Parking Lot. There are two dumpsters out there. One being for trash and the other for recycling and yet most of the trash thrown in both of them are a mixture of all sorts of waste. From the kitchen trash can in my Mod gets filled very quickly. I live in a seven person Mod and the amount of trash we make is kind of crazy to me. The difference between how much trash I make at home and on Hampshire campus are drastically different. At home my mother and I are very conscious of what we reuse and throw away. We do have good habits like collecting the bottles and cans we use to return them to supermarkets to get money back from them. On the other hand we still have to take the trash out about every 3 days. Accepting the amount of trash that I make shows me that I might need to change some habits. The problem with this is that I think less about what is happening around my waste because I have so many other things to focus on. Life gets complicated and the fastest and easiest way  to deal with it is just throwing something in the trash and forgetting about it. This seemingly makes it not my responsibility any longer.

Humans love for taveling releases many fumes and Carbon dioxide in the air that harms the Earth. Whether it’s traveling from a to b in your nearby cities close to home or traveling across the globe, our transportation is polluting the air. When you fly from New York to France or wherever you’re flying to, How do you’re think you’re flying? What is the planes intake to fly and what is it releasing? Well, planes release carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide. As we easily flying in the air these harmful pollutants are closer to the atmosphere than the frames we release from are vehicles. To create less pollutants we should normalizes electric cars and make them more affordable. For fly we should explore ways to fly speeding less fumes.

I think a very common daily activity for most people, including myself, that produces a lot of pollution, is driving. Vehicles that run on fossil fuels obviously produce carbon dioxide, which contributes to climate change. There have been a lot of recent efforts to move towards electric cars, but I see multiple issues with this, too. First of all, those cars are pretty unaffordable for most people, and are something that, at the moment, is only accessible to the elite class in the US. Also, except under the circumstance that a person with an electric car has solar panels or another form of green energy to charge their car off of (also only available to the elite), electric cars are powered by the grid, which is powered, at least in large part, by coal. This, although maybe less wasteful than gas or diesel, still has a significant environmental impact. I don’t know a whole lot about cars and the pollution they produce, but what I’ve gathered is that the only real way to eliminate pollution entirely from the practice of driving is to have exclusively electric cars powered by solar panels. Most of America struggles to afford to get our basic needs met, and, on top of that, all of our cities are designed to only be accessible by car, and are not walkable at all. People have to drive to work, to the grocery store, to bring their kids to school. We are a long ways away from being able to achieve this vision of pollution-less driving, and it is entirely unfair to expect most individual people to take responsibility for enacting it. What we need to do first is eliminate economic inequality, switch over on a country-wide scale to more sustainable energy practices, make our cities more accessible, place stricter regulations (at the very least) on the practices of large corporations, and put our money and resources, as a country, towards the people and the environment rather than whatever the hell we are putting them towards right now- all of these things will then set us up to be able to make lasting changes in our rates of pollution and c02 emissions. Making more Teslas is not going to cut it.

Sometimes when I’m anxious I go for car drives. Especially when I’m home and I can drive for miles without seeing a single car and I can escape deep into the music and my own internal monologue. I feel as though people do talk about the pollution from cars as a whole yet not as a singular person. I know that if we got rid of cars, or cars that run on gasoline, functioning in Maine would be much harder. We don’t have a public transport system that runs like in Amherst with the buses. Going to work is a 20 minute drive, and going to Walmart is a 45-60 minute drive. I do believe that doing that would ruin everyday functionality, unless a safer available alternative was given to the general public. 

Pollution is not something I usually think about in my daily life except for my daily routine of taking out trash and recycling. But in our everyday lives we need to travel farther and farther distances meaning the use of transportation that burns fuel and puts carbon into the air. To avoid this is hard without inconveniencing ones self for the long distance to travel. Public transit is the usual answer though the safety of public transit is questionable along with the lack of advancement for the every mans bus. To change this would be make our life styles very different and it will be a shock for a while. To eliminate pollution entirely is almost impossible but limiting it is closer and with new cars and advancements the limiting factor doesn’t seem too far away.

Ever since I was a kid, I remember the beach clean-up commercials plastered across my television screen begging people to join in on community clean-up projects. Despite not actually living near a beach, I did have my fair share of encounters with littering in outdoor spaces. My experience was located on hiking trails. Class conversations over whether or not dirt is dirty make me think of how even if we say no, the ways our actions may say yes.  Within these two spaces, people physically reveal more of themselves at beaches. For example, we often see people in bathing suits and even nude beaches exist. While on hiking trails, even in hot weather, most people are spotted wearing shorts and a T-shirt. While the beach attire is because of tanning and swimming opportunities, water sources on trails are sometimes present, and the ocean isn’t exactly known for being the cleanest water source. I do feel sand and dirt are similar in the sense of something that is fine when people are the ones engaging with it, but neither are things people like entering their own personal spaces. Another thing that comes to mind is the idea of being visible to others and how that affects people’s actions. For example, beaches are typically very open and for extended periods of time, you could be just feet away from multiple groups of people. While seeing someone on a hike is met with a brief hello. Even if one is not interacting with anyone else at the beach, one’s proximity to them still influences how one acts. Oftentimes when I have been on hikes, the further along you are on the trail, the more trash I find. I don’t quite understand why this is. My guess has always been that since one is deeper into the woods, people feel there is more anonymity and therefore less accountability needed to be taken. Something about the lower chance of being watched or caught is something that I’d say inspires questionable behaviors amongst humanity as a whole, especially when it comes to how we treat spaces. Overall, examining how specifically beaches and hiking trails are treated as potential sites for pollution gives me insight into how I interact with these spaces and wanting to challenge those ways.