Brock Hoehn

My experiences with the challenges from weeks 3 and 4 have not changed at all. I still don’t miss the extra two degrees on the thermostat because I just wear a sweatshirt instead. I also still don’t mind decluttering my room because, in the past week, I have been given even further reason for daily cleans. The house that I live in is surrounded by mud. This is likely because the property is lower on the water table. At first, we just dealt with all the mud being dragged in, but this quickly became annoying to clean. Thus, we invested in bales of hay which we have covered the ground in. This has solved the mud problem, but it has created its own problem with tracking in hay. Obviously, it is much easier to clean up the hay than the mud, so it was a win. However, I now vacuum daily along with the rest of my cleaning routine. Regarding the daily walk, I still find it difficult to motivate on the colder weeks, and I have begun to get tired of the same walk every day. I also still hate the shorter showers challenge, but it seems to be an important change to make. I have been keeping up with it, but I may integrate a 7-8 minute shower after this challenge is over. I want to help but a 5-minute shower just doesn’t give the same relaxing effect. As usual, the new challenges still have a luster. I generally grab something to eat for dinner which often comes with a plastic straw. Nowadays, I go out of my way to make sure I don’t get a straw with it. I have never minded not using a straw, but they tend to just give you it. This challenge has provided me with a good excuse to specifically ask for no straw. Since I don’t want it anyways, it is worth it to skip it. I have also been carpooling to campus with my friends a lot more in order to fulfill my drive less requirement. This also hit my one-time challenge because I made a group chat with 30 of my friends for campus rides. Since the chat is exclusively for rides, it doesn’t get annoying, and I am finding all the time where I would normally drive but can find a ride now. It also saves me gas money which is very nice. Due to this car share chat, I have taken probably about 4 miles a day off my daily driving. I tend to drive several times a day for quick trips to buy food, groceries, pick up a friend, or any other short trip around campus. Now, I have probably cut down roughly ½ to ¾ of that just riding with others. Additionally, the driving less challenge will be easy to make permanent because of my one-time challenge. Since I already made the ride share group chat, there is really no reason to go back to driving alone more frequently. As stated in previous journals, the adjusting the thermostat challenge and the decluttering my room challenges have already become second nature and are here to stay. The daily walk will likely be reliant on temperature and be seasonal in the future. As said before, the shorter showers will likely be 7-8 minutes in my future. Lastly, the skipping the straw challenge will take a little effort to engrain, but I see it being permanent in the future. I have never really seen the point of a straw, but I just accepted them because they tend to give you one. I don’t think it will be an issue to just ask to not get one in the future. One of the resources I read this week was the video on Transit Oriented Development. TOD is an idea for the planning of our communities. Its focus is to create communities where things are easier to walk to. They want to force people to drive less and walk more because it is good for the environment and better for our health. Obviously, you can’t make everything you need withing a walking distance of your home, so they also plan public transport systems into the city designing such as mag-trains. This allows people to get around walking and using transit which also frees up space that would be dedicated to roadways. Overall, TOD sounds like the future and how all areas should be developed. However, there are two main issues. First off, the world is mostly developed, so you have to work around what is already there. TOD is a lot easier when you have a blank canvas to develop. Additionally, it is very expensive up front. It takes a lot more planning before building, and it relies on businesses investing in the development. Businesses pop up where there is a demand. You have to convince people to build a business where there will be a demand in the future.

First off, the challenges from last week became a little bit less exciting in week two. Especially because there were newer and more interesting challenges to experiment with. I still took quite a bit of pride in decluttering my room every day because it’s fairly meditative to me, and it helps to keep my head clear. The article I read last week about the benefits of decluttering my room really forced me to commit to it. On the other hand, the daily walk almost completely lost its luster this week. At first, it was a great study break, but it has quickly become a nuisance because of my deep hatred of the cold. It has just become such a process to change out of my shorts, for around the house, and into many layers for outside. Then, I have to strip back down when I get to my house. The newer challenges were exciting to try though. The one I was most excited about was to adjust the thermostat. This is because I have been in a constant war with my roommates where we are constantly putting the temperature up and down. Obviously, this was a fun joke for a while, but it is nice to just give up in the war. I have just allowed my roommates to bring the temperature back down to the lowest setting, and I just wear a sweatshirt inside now. Wearing a sweatshirt is a small price to pay when you are saving money and the environment. The other new challenge was the 5-minute showers. This one is still interesting at this point because it is like a race to shower in such a short time, but I do see it getting quite old. Since we have many weeks to come with many new challenges, I can see myself growing to hate this challenge. I have always taken really long showers because it is relaxing, so we will see how this challenge continues to progress. My one time challenge this week was to choose LED bulbs. This challenge was specifically chosen because one of the bulbs for my lamp went out, and I had been procrastinating replacing it. Thus, this provided an excuse to get an LED bulb for it as well as replacing the still functioning bulbs while I was at it. Overall, the major barrier going forward is going to be the ever-increasing number of challenges. Some of these challenges like decluttering my room will become second nature naturally, but some challenges are an active thing every day. Thus, it will become more difficult to juggle them all as we move forward. I also see the 5-minute shower challenge being an example of me biting off more than I can chew. I think that the adjusting the thermostat and decluttering my room challenges have already become permanent to me, so I’m happy that I chose them and proved to myself that they are easily accomplished. The daily walk on the other hand will probably be a seasonal thing in my life. Once the temperatures drop to a certain level, I will likely stop. However, I can see it being very rewarding to go on a daily walk in the summer. The shorter showers challenge is just not going to be applicable to my life. I just enjoy a long relaxing shower way too much to eliminate it. As for the replacing light bulbs with LED bulbs, I am certainly taking this with me forever. It saves you on your energy bill, and they last so much longer. This week the resource that stood out to me would be the article on the impacts of changing your thermostat by just 2 degrees. I thought that it was going to just be a bunch of numbers, and I thought it would be very interesting to see how big an impact that would make. I was quickly surprised to find out that it went about the impacts in a completely different and more powerful way. It went into the individual species that are saved by such a change. As a Biochemistry major who has a love of animals and biodiversity, the impact was huge. It talked about how it saves the polar bears, humboldt penguins, butterflies, and more. It didn’t give a ton of specifics, but I am a sucker for all the photography of these unreal animals. Most importantly, the article talked about how it saves bumblebees. This was the most impactful to me because bumblebee populations have been rapidly declining for a while which is very alarming. They are such a valuable pollinator which we rely on for our crops. Thus, I am very willing to change my thermostat by 2 degrees if it means that humanity can eat in the future.

Journal 4:

 

            The challenges I did this week were honestly quite easy to integrate into my life. Since these were technically homework, I used these challenges as fun breaks between other assignments. This made them especially rewarding because I was both accomplishing something for myself and for the environment along with the challenges being enjoyable in and of themselves. The two daily challenges chosen for this week were going for a daily walk of 10+ minutes and de-cluttering my dorm room. Both of these challenges were things I had considered integrating into my daily schedule, but I never had the personal drive to force them into my schedule. However, the external force of the eco-challenge has proved how easily these actions can be fit into your schedule and how positive they can be for your mental health. I normally do all my homework in one sitting right after I get out of class. The daily walk has given a great excuse for a break in between these long and arduous homework sessions. I find the first half of my homework to go by quicker because I am looking forward to my walking break, and I get back to finish the rest of my homework with a much happier mood which also helps to expedite the process. De-cluttering my room has also proven very helpful. I am used to cleaning my room sparingly, but a daily clean makes the process so much easier to stay on top of. Additionally, I feel more focused in a clean room, and I feel like I sleep better knowing that all is in order for when I wake up. As for the one-time challenge, I explored my area which was also very rewarding. I often stay pretty confined to the Bucknell campus because I am too lazy to go anywhere. However, this challenge gave me an excuse to explore which is always liberating. I basically walked from one local park to the next. I started at Hufnagle Park, went to the Lewisburg Park, and ended my journey at the St Anthony’s Park. While I have traveled around Lewisburg quite a bit, I had not stopped at any of these 3 parks, so I decided to scope out the local parks. Having done so, I realized that these were great places to go to when trying to clear your head, so it is nice to know that I can always go there when needed. Since I enjoyed these challenges so much, there were no real barriers in making these lifestyle changes permanent, but I will say that it is only the first week. As the number of challenges grows, I’m sure that it will be more difficult to negotiate these challenges. Further, I see potential that the luster of taking a daily walk will fade, and I may be less motivated to take a walk in later days when there are so many newer and more interesting challenges. I also think that time constraints may come into consideration during later weeks when I will be having exams in many of my other classes. I do think that I will be able to integrate these challenges in my life in the distant future, but I think that I will have to take days off here and there when I am busy or just not feeling it. Overall, my first week’s experience was quite enlightening and positive, but I do see the potential for issues long term. However, I am certainly willing and want to make these lifestyle choices permanent. I just tend to be a realist and must concede that the idea of a daily challenge is not bulletproof at least when considering doing it every single day. The challenge about decluttering your room seemed very attractive to me because, put simply, I needed that challenge, but I wasn’t so sure what it was trying to accomplish. Thus, I reviewed the resources on their website. I found that a decluttered room helps with time management, improves overall mood and vibrancy, helps you reach deeper sleep, and you trade a bad habit for a good one. All this topped by the fact that you may very well find money while searching. Overall, the article made some very good points about how decluttering your room will make positive changes. However, a few of them seemed fairly superstitious to me. One such example was that you can “trust your intuition more.” First off, what is that supposed to mean and secondly how does it have this effect?