Parker Hula

For this week I had chosen two new daily challenges to up my challenges to 10 daily, and two more one time challenges. I decided to choose supporting a sharing economy, meditating 15 minutes a day, trying a new way of prepping food, and exploring my area.  I decided to choose what I believed to be easier daily challenges at this point, as I began to struggle last week with keeping up on challenges. Taking this route had helped me a lot to keep up with my goals, although on Tuesday I had accidentally forgotten about my challenge of two meatless or vegan meals a day, and had meat at breakfast. I believe that meditating had helped me a lot this week, as my roommate in my house is really big on meditation and had advocated for me to do it with him at some point it helped me get to know him better, as well as destress during some of the heaviest workloads I’ve had for ROTC and class this entire semester. I have done meditation before in my past, so it was easy to get into, and I don’t necessarily believe 15 minutes was enough for me to get really into it, but I found myself meditating a little bit longer each day. As for supporting a sharing economy, I have been taking rides from friends whenever I can when I needed to go off campus, and in doing so I cooked for them afterwards.  My favorite challenges from this week were easily from trying a new way for meal preparation and exploring my area. Both on Friday and Saturday, I went rucking off campus, once on the rail trail and once at Cherry Springs. I did an 8 mile trail then a 6 mile trail on these days and it really helped me get back into the beauty of the area around campus, even during this pretty harsh winter. On Saturday I baked bread and pickled some peppers that I had picked up at the farmer’s market recently, which was good experience, but it is something that I do pretty consistently when I am home. I can honestly see myself doing all of these after class is over, as they weren’t too much effort and really involved things that I like. Before meditating I did read the New York times article posted for meditating on the ecochallenge site, but I followed my roommate’s instructions instead, by listening to Tibetan bowl sounds instead. As for canning however, I did follow the resource from yes magazine on canning, and used their recipe list.

For this week I believe that it had become overwhelming alongside my work outside of class to a certain degree. With ROTC starting to pick up more and more throughout the semester in preparation for my summer at Fort Knox, and midterms coming up I was completely distracted from doing my new challenges from Friday to Sunday. When I realized that I had missed a few days I immediately went to the ecochallenge website and looked for challenges that I had already been doing throughout the week. For my daily challenges I selected skipping on plastic straws, flushing when necessary, and driving less. The past few weeks I have already been doing these challenges on my own as I am trying to have less of an impact, but I was able to truly focus on them throughout this week. I feel like it was surprising to see that I already make somewhat of an impact without even having the reminder of the ecochallenge website. As for my one time challenges, I selected starting a recycling program and installing low flow showerheads. For these two I was able to convince our house manager at the Chi Phi house the importance of finally emplacing recycling bins throughout the house, as the majority of greek life houses do not have or use them, and then changing our high flow showerheads to low flow. This was much more easy than expected, because it actually saves us money on water usage, and the vast majority of my house was in favor of bringing in recycling bins finally. All in all, with my challenges, I believe the hardest thing for me were my time barriers and scheduling of work. From Thursday night last week all the way to Monday I had been stuck studying for midterms and working on two midterm papers that are worth significant portions of my grades in those classes. As well as keeping up with daily challenges from the weeks prior it became a lot and I had honestly forgotten to select new challenges during the weekend. As a substitution I am going ahead and continuing the ecochallenges throughout spring break to compensate from the three days that I missed on doing new challenges. I also hope to take on driving less each day and skipping plastic straws entirely after I had done research on the resources for these daily challenges. I believe walking more around campus and downtown Lewisburg will not only help the amount of emissions I am personally responsible for each year, but will also give me a better appreciation of the area I live in. As I read from “Reimagining our streets as places” by Annah Mackenzie, she explains that, “streets can once again become thriving, livable environments for people, not just cars…” (Mackenzie 2015). I hope to have the ability to begin seeing the importance of street life once again instead of focusing on driving from place to place. As for plastic straw usage, I read on simply straws’ website that the U.S. consumption of straws is enough to fill Yankee stadium over 9 time a year, or over 500 million straws used in the US per year. I know that straw usage is an issue with our plastic waste, and that’s why I hope to continue saying no to disposable plastic straws.

(Repost from 2/21) This week I had chosen three new daily challenges and one more one-time challenge. In doing so I wanted to focus on challenges that would keep me motivated throughout the day for completing these tasks. I decided to choose the daily challenges; spending 2 hours each day outside, writing down three things each day that I am grateful for, taking five minute showers and the one-time challenge of switching to wash my clothes in cold water. So far from this week I would say that all of these challenges were very helpful for my journey through a more environmentally friendly month. I haven’t noticed any changes whatsoever using cold water for my laundry, and since I already take short showers, pledging to take 5 minute showers was not hard. I will have to say however, that with the weather this week, especially Wednesday, spending two hours a day outside was somewhat tough. This weekend it was extremely easy, as I went for a 12 mile run on the rail trail Saturday, and Sunday I went to Milton State Park. As for during the week, I have been usually doing my homework outside, as well as going for runs on the rail trail every day. I believe the only barrier to make this one permanent would be dependent on weather, although I was still able to spend about two hours outside on Wednesday, I would not want to do that if it was freezing rain all day. I also believe that shorter showers, even less than five minutes are completely possible for me to continue into the future, as well as doing my laundry in cold water (as I haven’t seen any differences in doing that so far). I also believe that writing down three things that I am grateful for each day is amazing. I keep a notebook in my room where I can write these down each day, and has honestly made me feel a million times better each day after doing so. It has truly helped me stay motivated for the challenges in this classroom and outside of it. I hope to make washing my clothes in cold water a regular occurance now even after our challenges end. From researching this on https://coldwatersaves.org/ I learned that 90% of the energy used in laundry machines is from heating the water, and " Washing 4 out of 5 loads of your laundry in cold water could cut out 864 pounds of CO2 emissions in a year." (ColdWaterSaves).

In all I believe that week two has been extremely successful, even though I have added on so much more now from last week. I am ready to plan out what new challenges I will be partaking in for the next few weeks, and I hope to keep this streak going of having a nearly perfect record in keeping up with my goals.

This week I had chosen three new daily challenges and one more one-time challenge. In doing so I wanted to focus on challenges that would keep me motivated throughout the day for completing these tasks. I decided to choose the daily challenges; spending 2 hours each day outside, writing down three things each day that I am grateful for, taking five minute showers and the one-time challenge of switching to wash my clothes in cold water. So far from this week I would say that all of these challenges were very helpful for my journey through a more environmentally friendly month. I haven’t noticed any changes whatsoever using cold water for my laundry, and since I already take short showers, pledging to take 5 minute showers was not hard. I will have to say however, that with the weather this week, especially Wednesday, spending two hours a day outside was somewhat tough. This weekend it was extremely easy, as I went for a 12 mile run on the rail trail Saturday, and Sunday I went to Milton State Park. As for during the week, I have been usually doing my homework outside, as well as going for runs on the rail trail every day. I believe the only barrier to make this one permanent would be dependent on weather, although I was still able to spend about two hours outside on Wednesday, I would not want to do that if it was freezing rain all day. I also believe that shorter showers, even less than five minutes are completely possible for me to continue into the future, as well as doing my laundry in cold water (as I haven’t seen any differences in doing that so far). I also believe that writing down three things that I am grateful for each day is amazing. I keep a notebook in my room where I can write these down each day, and has honestly made me feel a million times better each day after doing so. It has truly helped me stay motivated for the challenges in this classroom and outside of it. In all I believe that week two has been extremely successful, even though I have added on so much more now from last week. I am ready to plan out what new challenges I will be partaking in for the next few weeks, and I hope to keep this streak going of having a nearly perfect record in keeping up with my goals.

Throughout this week I was expecting for these daily challenges to be somewhat hard, at least for the reasons of changing my diet so drastically. Although changing my diet to 2-3 meatless or vegan meals a day has had an impact on me physically (I have become much more tired throughout the day, but this is more so linked to lower protein intake than I typically have), it has not been mentally tough whatsoever. I decided that my number one priority to begin these challenges was to change my diet to a much more environmentally conscious one, as I typically have red meats in almost all of my meals while at college. Surprisingly I found that eating less meat was the easiest of them all. As I have been able to eat vegetarian or vegan for nearly every meal since last Friday it has opened me up to many more cooking option and has honestly become very fun for me. Cooking is a very important part of daily life as I was raised to cook big meals for my family and friends, I have found quite a bit of enjoyment looking up new recipes and trying different meals or even substituting meat in my meals with other protein options. As for researching more environmentally conscious fish, I found this to be somewhat redundant every day. I felt as if I could only read this material so much every day, so I substituted it with better meat and produce options as well. This made the researching much more enjoyable. For the one-time option, I chose to shop for at least 6 meals at the farmer’s market. In doing so I ended up going to Ards Farm during the weekend in case the Lewisburg Farmers Market would be closed due to weather or the season. I was easily able to pick up my week’s groceries knowing that my produce and meat were locally sourced.

 

As for the barriers that I might face in making these changes permanent, I know that changing my diet to a nearly meatless one might be difficult for my time in the Army as there are little to no meatless or vegan options for soldiers on deployment. I know that this isn’t much of a barrier, as I know I want to make this change for sure as I am living a civilian life after college, and I am open to the changes. I am willing to make this change permanent at some point in my life, whether now or after the military, but I believe that making an impact on eating less or no meat in my life will help somewhat or even inspire others to make a more environmentally friendly change within their diet and eventually their life. As for shopping at farmer’s markets, I have done this almost my entire life and am very open to doing so whenever I have the ability. So far I can say that the ecochallenges have been easy for me, albeit I am still in week one. I am excited to see any other changes I make in the future during this experiment.