Daniel Martin

My challenge for this week was taking public transit instead of taking a car. I take public transit most of the time if I can help it, or I just walk. This was a bit different because the main thing I needed to travel to this week was our hike at Tryon Park. It was a trip on the longer side, around 2 1/2 to 3 hours. It was 88 miles in total that I didn't take in a car. Although I did carpool with Professor Minato briefly (I appreciate it). I don't mind using transit to get around, given that I believe the use of cars are a big contributing factor to a lot of issues we face today. For instance all the infrastructure that is dedicated to cars creating impermeable spaces and making people isolated from the people in their own community. I appreciate that I live in Oregon and we have quite a bit of infrastructure for transit relative to other states, and investment in transit even in smaller towns. I think creating development around bus depots or light rail stations is a good start to creating a lot of the change we talked about in class, such as making more greenspaces, making streets a destination, using more local goods through easy access to local businesses. I am going to continue to stick to using transit if at all possible. I am going to include the route map of the bus I took to get from McMinnville to Tigard as I imagine that most people don't know that the smaller towns/counties in Oregon have their own transit systems.

For my eco challenge this week I decided to try and cut out meat of a couple meals. I ended up having two meatless meals and when I say this I mean dinners because that is basically the only meal that we cook at my house. I ended up having Alfredo pasta with salad one night and had impossible burgers with fries another. I don't think it would be too difficult to mostly cut meat out of my diet, although this was only a small trial of it. I don't know if I could completely cut out meat though. I also really enjoy the idea of meat alternatives and some of the ones I've tried are very good. I do see the importance of cutting out meat from your diet. Especially red meat as cattle contribute a lot of methane to the atmosphere as well as require a ton of fresh water to cultivate. Water that we shouldn't necessarily be using as much as we are.

One of my challenges for this week was learning about my local watershed and potentially seeing what problems may be present with it. Since I am living in McMinnville now, and moved relatively recently I didn't know anything about where this town gets its water. Apparently it is comprised of two reservoirs to the northwest of McMinnville called the McGuire and Haskins Reservoirs. They are fed by surface runoff from creeks that form in the coastal mountains around the reservoirs. It is all land owned and maintained by McMinnville water and light. I tried to look into potential issues relating to the watershed, but couldn't exactly find any. I did find a website that reports on tap water contaminants, and it appeared that there are small amounts of contaminants in the local tap water, but they are still within legal limits. I suppose that given what we talked about in last class I am very grateful that the local watershed seems clean and full. I should definitely double down on trying to conserve water so it isn't wasted on me.

This challenge I decided to look into alternative to the GDP. So one of the main drawbacks to GDP is that it misses out on important factors when it comes to the well being of a country, that's because GDP is mainly measuring monetary value and nothing else. The alternatives to GDP that have been proposed, like Gross National Happiness, Thriving Places index and Happy Planet Index try to focus on the overall well being of the citizenry. They attempt to gather data on physical and psychological health, ecology, equality and sustainability. These definitely have their own issues with collecting data through surveys and some of the data being subjective rather than objective, but I still believe these are better indicators of a countries prosperity than just measuring product being produced. Relating this to our most recent class, a high GDP doesn't given any indication as to whether that countries citizens have access to good healthy food, but some of these alternatives include that as part of their data. I am including a screenshot of the most recent Happy Planet Index and where the United States falls. The three numbers in the middle are life expectancy, well being and ecological footprint in that order. The final number being the overall index score.

I decided to sign a couple of petitions for this eco challenge. The first one I signed is actually a petition to get 2 stroke leaf blowers banned in Oregon. I thought this was apt because we had that discussion last week about how awful leaf blowers are in terms of noise pollution and actual pollution. They are also pointless in the sense that you can easily rake the leaves, but they don't even have to be moved they are supposed to be there to feed the soil. Apparently these kinds of leaf blowers are already banned in Washington D.C. The other petition I signed was to get Portland Parks and Rec to plant more trees around Portland. This one is pretty self explanatory. Trees take CO2 out of the atmosphere as well as keep soil from degrading. They also beautify an area while providing natural shade from the sun during the summer. We could always use more trees.

I've been using a Yeti metal tumbler that was given to me from my friend for my birthday. Its about 26 fl oz which I believe the average disposable water bottle is 12 oz  which for clarity's sake we will say I save two bottles per tumbler. I usually drink about two full tumblers a day of water which works our to saving about four plastic bottles a day. Relating to this challenge I think back to the video we watched in class of the man in Dakar, Senegal and all the single use plastic that builds up in other countries, a lot of which is from us. Its good to find alternatives to these single use plastics and hopefully they can be outright banned federally at some point. I noticed Canada is moving forward with a single use plastic ban and hopefully we can follow suit.

Well I went shopping today and I usually use all reusable bags, which I did this time. I am glad that our state has moved towards using reusable bags because plastic is just awful. Also they are more convenient anyways, they hold more.