Serving the community that you live in is a great way to help out and contribute to cleaning up the world. Pollution takes over more and more of our globe every single day. For my 5 service hours I collected ten bags of garbage from places I drive by and see everyday in my attempt to "Keep Denton Beautiful". Picking up the trash from these areas made me feel good about being able to make the area that I live in more aesthetically pleasing, and clean. While I was picking up trash on littered streets, ditches and highways I kept in mind the idea of "environmental justice". If we were all to do service projects such as this more than once a year, or even just whenever we see any garbage on the ground, then we would be able to make a difference in the world. In my opinion, picking up littered trash is a form of social justice that I can actively participate in every day. To me, social justice is holding up my understood responsibilities towards others and my community, involving cleaning the area that I live in. In the "Environmental Justice and Social Ecology" reading, the author describes some harmful effects that pollution can have on our environment, societies, and even our bodies. The most predominant idea in this article that I kept in my head was that doing acts like cleaning are our responsibility to society and the earth. Any way that we can reduce our ecofootprint is a step for a better future.
In the "Environmental Justice" reading by Figueroa, he presents a question that I put a lot of thought into. "How are environmental benefits and burdens distributed across populations?" (pg. 1). While pondering this question I came up with a few realizations about how we operate and interact with the environment. I have realized that we all operate with a somewhat restorative justice approach as to how we look at things. This restorative justice approach that we take is one where we understand and realize our obligations to right the wrongs that we have done in the past. With this obligation we strive to achieve repairs and reconciliation for these wrongs and reassurance that we will have a better, more beautiful future. Also, tied into this restorative justice is another widely accepted approach, distributive justice. This idea that we as humans should feel the need to compensate for others overuse of resources, because we know that some are taking full advantage and using too many resources, we can do our part in saving the planet by compensating and using less to somewhat balance the scale. This is probably the most prominent approach that I take in my life. I always try to use the least amount of resources possible to make up for my human counterparts that over use them. As Americans, we produce and consume so much that we are almost forced to place our environmental burdens on other countries as well. We make our environmental burdens be distributed to other populations simply because of our over consumption. There are plenty of ways for burdens and benefits to be spread to affect everyone. We can widely distribute environmental benefits with environmental justice, restorative justice and distributive justice. It is amazing to me to realize that our "unharmful" practices can easily be spread to other populations. We can affect the global environment, both helping and hurting, with practices started here in the U.S.
I have come to further realize that we are not one world divided into many separate nations, each pertaining to itself. We are just one world as a whole, and what we do to better the earth can spread like wildfire across to the rest of the world. If we, as individuals, can carry out the Green Revolution then we can provide this help to other nations. Though I only picked up trash around the area that I live in, I have helped to reduce our ecofootprint and participated in restorative justice and distributive justice to better the world. I have definitely learned that it is not out of my way, or a hastle for me to pick up trash in my path or clean the environment around where I live. I also learned that it is completely wrong to take this wonderful world that we are given for granted. Cleaning the environment is a great way to show thanks to mother nature for supporting us and putting up with our filthy lifestyles.
-Allison Williams
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