Journal 4: Food Footprint

If everyone lived like me, we'd need 3.8 Earths to sustain us all. Honestly, that surprises me; I originally took the test using what I did at home and took it this second time based on what I do in my dorm room, but I got the same score both times! Considering scores I heard other people get from the test, mine's in the lower range and I feel pretty good about it, but I want to reduce my waste further. My roommates are good about how much they use, recycling stuff, etc., but it's not quite the same at home with my family. To be frank, I live with pigs.

Like this but times five.

A LOT of changes need to be made, especially. For one thing, there's the need to teach my 24-year-old brother how to stop making so much trash and put recyclables where they belong. I'm religious about that and recently stopped buying bottled water to reduce the amount of plastic I waste and save money, but there's still more I can do too. For instance, I know little about how much gas, water, and electricity I use per month, so I want to find out. Money is a good way to motivate me to conserve something; I'm very cost-conscious.

The results seemed pretty spot-on to me. Despite my best efforts to be efficient, there are a lot of wasteful habits I'm just now starting to drop and many more behaviors that need tweaking. I love natural light and use that to light my room instead of electricity when I think about it, but I need to teach myself to use natural light until I can't see anymore!

The variety of ecosystems in one relatively small area was surprising when we went to ECHO. We went on a pretty lengthy tour and saw plants I didn't even think could grow in Florida. How can one space have such a diverse set of plants growing there? The monoculture fields with rows upon rows of the same crop have become so common it's almost a novelty to see biodiversity, and biodiversity on ECHO's scale is almost unheard of in mainstream agriculture. I'd love to learn how they got it all to happen so I could practice it myself.

Then again, I don't have much experience with gardening or growing my own plants. My family grew its own tomatoes for a time when I was a child and farming is in my background with my father, grandfather, etc. but suburban life distanced me from all that. Apart from keeping some gifted aloe plants alive and growing a few pots of flowers for science projects, I'm woefully inexperienced with gardening and distanced from the production of my food.

If I grew my own food, I'm sure I'd appreciate it much more the way my grandfather appreciates what he's able to raise in his fields. Knowing all the work that goes into it and how many factors the farmer has to worry about/plan for would make the fruits of my labor (pun intended) that much sweeter. Finding food wouldn't go so well, I don't think. I'd get pretty thin before I figured out what was and wasn't safe to eat.

Coming from a live of extreme privilege as I have, there hasn't been a time when I fasted or went hungry. If I wanted food, there was plenty in the pantry for me to munch on or some I could go pick up myself at the supermarket. A growling stomach is the worst I've ever had and it was more annoying than anything. That kind of privilege can distance one from all the work that goes into making the food they thoughtlessly consume, making the problem of keeping the entire world fed that much harder to solve.

To be entirely honest, I don't know where my food comes from. Not one bit of it. I can look on the boxes to see, but that doesn't really tell me anything about where the ingredients came from or how far it traveled to reach my pantry shelf. Maybe the chocolate in my brownies came from one of the cocoa farms the news will spotlight on occasion for its use of child labor and slavery? There's really no way for me or many other consumers to know without doing some very heavy research, especially when it's prepared/processed food like the foods that make up most of my diet.

Growing a biodiversity of foods may not have the strength of pesticides that get into our food and almost certainly leave behind residue we consume when we eat our large, waxy apples, but it is a solid form of pest control and needs to be in practice. It gives farmers a greater yield of a larger variety of foods, but it seems to be rejected because the agriculture industry wants massive yields of one crop, not large yields of three. Then they get grown year after year after year and the soil gets depleted even when the farmers are practicing ways to enrich the soil. It's all quite sad. Between history lessons about the evolution in farming that was three-field rotation/crop rotation and Silent Spring, it's all familiar to me.

Plus I have some personal experience with wasteful, lazy farming practices. I see miles and miles of empty cotton fields when I go to Georgia to see family. That land could be used to grow crops that can draw from the nutrients cotton doesn't use, but nope. If cotton isn't growing in the fields, nothing is. After cotton is harvested, the acres remain bare until it's time to plant the cotton again. 

I'm always in class when the food markets on campus happen, so I need to make a commitment to finding the off-campus farmer's markets and buying my produce from there, not the shelves of Target and Publix. My dollars should support the local farmers who (hopefully) use sustainable practices. It's my own laziness and determination to dedicate 100% to school that has me buying what's cheap and easy to find. Laziness doesn't make anyone healthy even when they're buying the healthiest of foods. Time to start looking up good farmer's markets in the area and find out when they happen. That's a good first step for me, along with becoming more aware of how much energy, water, and gas I'm wasting when I want to stay in the shower and sing just one more song.

Journal 3: Natural Areas

Well, these last two field trips for the cypress dome wet walk and Corkscrew Sanctuary Swamp will never be forgotten, that's for sure. I'd been dreading the wet walk all semester and it turned out roughly like I expected: badly. Poor planning on my part + being trapped between two spiders at one point = need of Xanax for emergency anxiety relief. Though I can't appreciate it personally, I do appreciate the value students see in it and how much they care for it.

I emerged from both the wet walk and Corkscrew with very itchy bug bites and stress from close encounters with feared creatures, but the Corkscrew trip is a much more positive memory for me because of how much I enjoyed it. I'm used to the constant noise of campus life, so the white noise of wind in the trees and the occasional movement of water really impacted me. After so long in noisy places, you forget how wonderful quiet is, especially when you find that peace within natural settings. I could practically see and hear everything Marjory Stone Douglas was saying about the Everglades in her piece "The Nature of the Everglades" just looking around and listening to Corkscrew.

Other impactful things include all the spiders and snakes (admittedly negative because I wish it were possible and sustainable to remove them from the entire United States like Ireland removed snakes from its borders) and the vines choking some of the trees at Corkscrew. Looking up at a perfect view of this tall, tall tree being slowly choked was breathtaking. Were my camera/phone working on the trip, I absolutely would have taken a photograph. Technical difficulties explain the complete lack of pictures for this entry.

 For me, a redesign of campus to encourage community engagement and sustainability would boil down to one thing: improved access to the cypress dome and the Food Forest. Both are fairly out of the way; before this class, I had no idea the cypress dome was even here and I've been a student here for over two years now. Now that I do know about it, it's still quite a walk out of the way and only "nature trails" is on the sign leading to it. The Food Forest way out by the Sugden Welcome Center requires students to leave the academic core through the entrance that's busiest of all. Students with no transportation have no chance of getting out to them and discovering their wonders.

Areas like ours put our money where our mouth is, so to speak; we say we're a college with a focus on the environment and spaces that educate our students to be more aware of how much the world around us needs our help prove that pillar of FGCU. Even as we take from the environment to build these places, we give back at the same time. The Food Forest is probably as good for the land as it is for the students.

The story of the plume birds being killed en masse in the name of fashion made me sad, but it didn't surprise me after reading The Orchid Thief. In a way, the plume birds are a lot like the orchids. People valued them for their economic worth over everything else and didn't see how they were impacting the ecosystems with their hunting. Without an environmentalist movement widespread and ready to defend them, the two groups suffered for a long, long time before help came.

Places like Corkscrew are so, so vitally important to the health of Southwest Florida's ecosystems. There are few places like it in the world where so many ecosystems coexist together in such a small area and it's all thanks to Florida's unique low elevation. One or two feet makes a lot of difference here. Because of its diversity of life, the loss of Corkscrew would have a major impact on the all the areas around it and the effects would keep rippling out from there.

CERP strikes me as a great plan that will do more than we could ever imagine to restore the Everglades and the surrounding areas once it really takes effect. It's a smart use of all the rivers and lakes in Florida, but I do wish politics hadn't weakened it. Still, it promises a future for our children where they'll be able to visit the Everglades and learn about its biodiversity hands-on, not read about what once was in textbooks. In an era where one can become cynical of politics' ability to get anything done, CERP remains a sign that Democrats and Republicans can cooperate even if the ones currently holding office in Washington want nothing to do with one another right now.

My favorite part of it all was going on the boardwalk tour in Corkscrew. Though the heat and bu bites were getting to me by the time we were halfway through, I still wish we'd had time to do the whole boardwalk tour and see what else the sanctuary had to offer. I'll never forget the sight of those trees being choked and all the different kinds of ferns you pointed out to us. If only we'd gotten to see an owl. Plus I swore I heard  human scream at one point and even if it wasn't a human scream, it gave me a great idea for a short story I wrote frenziedly the next day.

That we have places like the Food Forest and Corkscrew really doesn't surprise me, especially after being a student here for two years. If a food forest hadn't already been in place when I got here, I'm certain one would have been proposed or put in place while I was. For a campus so concerned with environmental sustainability, it's a natural move to make especially since a class I took last semester took me there too. Florida is a state full of parks dedicated to the near-endless, unique varieties of ecosystems, so that we're (relatively) close to one like Corkscrew isn't anything surprising. It feels like you can drive 30 miles in any direction and run across at least a sign for a state or national park if you haven't already driven into or through one in that time.

I don't know what these particular field trips have changed about me. The "funny" answer is that the wet walk gave me a new setting my brain will soon plug into my nightmares, but that's probably not what you're looking for. Perhaps they've made me more charitable to spiders and snakes? As much as I hate them and would like to see every single species permanently expelled from the country, they are necessary in our ecosystems. Still, I could have gone without being trapped between two large spiders on the wet walk and being in danger of getting a snake to the head at Corkscrew.

Journal 2: Conservation 20/20 Program

Upon approaching Matanzas Pass, I thought more about the familiar buildings on the road and how close we were to the Red Coconut Inn--a campground family friends have stayed at and loved--more than what I expected from the field trip itself. Sleepy, rainy Wednesdays can do that to one's brain. Still, I had no expectations for the field trip and was happy to go with the flow. By the end of the day, I was thoroughly impressed and happy to have gone to the preserve.

Mrs. Hughes' lecture on the history of the area as she experienced it gave me a much better sense of place than reading a history book saying the same things ever could have. Reading someone's personal story or reading about an area's history can sometimes be powerful, but hearing a person's or area's history from the source is so much more immersive. Just knowing they went through what they're describing gives their words so much more power. It's the difference between reading about the Holocaust in a textbook and hearing a speech given by a Holocaust survivor, in a way. Her story about the German soldier who came on shore to see a movie during World War II and left his uniform in the bushes has stuck with me ever since the field trip. It's a scary story even if nothing happened to any of the residents!

Based on her long life on the island, I've got a feeling Mrs. Hughes' sense of place is deeply entrenched in Estero Island. She was born there, she has lived their all her life, and when her time comes, she will probably be laid to rest on her island so she will never have to truly leave it. If there were a graveyard inside the Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park I hold so dear to my heart, I'd want to be buried there too because of how central it is to my sense of place. Her choice to live on such a small area of land for so long makes me think she has a nature-centric economic perspective and doesn't want urban development to take away the beauty of Estero Island. What we saw about development on Estero Island in the past versus the present (photo below) makes me certain of her point of view on the matter. After walking on the boardwalks and hanging out in the pavilion, I understand why she feels that way and gives talks to classes like ours.

So much about the Fort Myers area is still a mystery to me because it's not my native place, so the Conservation 20/20 program is certainly something I didn't know about before we went on our field trip and was the first such preserve I've ever been to. From what I gathered from research, the program acquires environmentally important land, restores it through all sorts of ways like reducing pollution and making sure the food chain is in order to keep the ecosystem going, and turns them into public recreational opportunities while making sure doing so doesn't harm the land. Conservation 20/20 started coming together in the 90s when citizens noticed the rate of urbanization/development in the area and wanted to make sure land was set aside for conservation. Since then, they've acquired dozens of preserves throughout Lee County so we don't get back down to having just 10% of the land set aside for conservation.

Using tax dollars for land preservation is a great idea and is just as much as an investment in the future as tax dollars being used to fund public schools. Public school funding enables our children to become the best and brightest for our future, but funding for land preservation works to make sure those children will have a stable, healthy world to live in while they use their education to change things. If citizens had the choice of picking and choosing what causes their tax dollars went to (it's a good thing we don't sometimes, but this is just a what-if), I'd love to see a good chunk of my taxes go to preserving the environment. I've read enough speculative fiction to have a good picture of what the world could become if we don't take care of the environment by using our money to keep it healthy.

My beloved Suwannee has already been semi-developed to make room for campers of all kinds, music festivals, and general visitors, but even with all the pipes and power lines, it still feels like an untouched place. It's carved out of nature and surrounded by it, not something that bulldozed over nature to make itself a place. Part of why I love it is how I can jump on a small electric golf cart and ride the trails while massive spiderwebs stretch between trees and the owners tell me how so-and-so had to be rushed to the hospital after a rattlesnake bite in the park. It's modern and natural all at once. Seeing every trail be paved over or watching all the trees be cut down for some big urban development would hurt me so much I'd never be able to return.

The Matanzas Pass preserve existing in a place like Fort Myers Beach doesn't surprise me at all. The shops and condos around it are built for the tourists who use them, but places like the preserve are fought for by the people who live there year-round because it's important to them. Since the snowbird, to use the colloquial term, are only here for part of the year, they may not realize how necessary conservation of the area is, Year-round residents who have been living here for years or even decades do know and understand how important it is not to let tourism take over the area. Without preserved areas set aside for plants like the red mangrove trees we saw, we'd have a lot less protection against floods and hurricanes. That's just one of the innumerable benefits of the preserves!

Sure, the city girl in me was horrified by any mention of spiders and got a little creeped out whenever we saw a crab on the mangroves, but I can still recognize the value of the environment for all those creatures is greater than my desire to be rid of them. (Except maybe the spiders. It's hard to appreciate them after I found one in my hair inches from my face.)

Journal 1: The Restorative Environment and My "Place"

Once you go somewhere enough times, you start to refer to it by shorthand out of affection or familiarity. After years of my parents' trips to Las Vegas for business, the city became "Vegas" to my family; "the Fort" is what we call Fort Myers when I'm home. My restorative environment's shorthand is "the Suwannee," better known as the Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park just outside Live Oak, Florida. It's over 500 acres in size and even has a small beach right on the banks of the Suwannee River, providing plenty of space for campers to stay and memories to be made.

We happened upon this massive park completely by chance when I was still a toddler and my family lived in Georgia. My mother won tickets to a country music festival there by calling a radio station and telling them who Reba McEntire's husband was, so we packed up and went down for the weekend in a small-enough-to-touch-feet camper to enjoy our prize. My parents loved it so much they bought a lifetime membership and it became the site of our annual family trips.

When we moved to Florida in 1999 and the four-hour drive there shortened to just an hour and a half, we found ourselves driving there more and more. We upgraded from the small camper to a camper we could live out of and then to a now-well-used RV as our Suwannee trips grew in number. By my estimate, we travel there 8-10 times per year at the very least for festivals, holiday weekends, and any other weekends we feel like leaving the suburbs for this little slice of nature the park owners carved out just enough space inside of to bring in motorhomes, campers, and stages for music festivals.

At first, I didn't care much for the Suwannee. I'd grown up a spoiled girl with arachnophobia and here my parents were, plucking me down in a place with few toys and lots of spiders. Trip after trip after trip went like this until I suddenly realized how much I loved jumping on the golf cart to ride around the grounds and see the sights. Before my anemia made the journey too painful for me, I used to go on two-mile walks on familiar trails just to see all the sights, people, and quirks in nature like trees decorated with underwear and shoes.

The park has Internet and cell phone coverage, so it's not a complete disconnect. However, both are unreliable at the best of times and practically unusable at 25,000-people events like the Wanee music festival, so going to the Suwannee can mean putting away technology for a while for an unintentional tech detox. More often than not, going to the Suwannee means reading a lot of books, be they print books or ebooks. On one particular trip, I read four novels twice each over the course of three days; on another, I read three in a single night. I'm a reader by heart, but this kind of productivity is exclusive to the Suwannee because technology's hold on me is so much weaker.

One of my best memories of the Suwannee happened around a year and a half ago during a weekend getaway for a family friend's wedding in the park. After all the festivities, I "hijacked" our personal golf cart and took it for a ride even though I lacked the driver's license needed to do so. On its charge, I weaved through forest trails thousands of other golf carts had worn down, tried one or two most golf carts would never be powerful enough to traverse, came far too close to the giant webs of many, many spiders, and ended up outside a horse stable that had been abandoned for years. Gnat-like creatures jumped at my ankles from the overgrown grass, but I parked the cart right there and started reading a novel that ended up being one of my favorites.

Now that I'm in college and don't have the time, money, or opportunities to go to the Suwannee as much as I'd like to, it has become even more precious of a place to me. When I go home for quick holidays or the summer, my parents and I always make sure to make a trip out there just to soak up the atmosphere, drive around on the golf cart to see the sights, and simply laze around in a place far more peaceful than our own household.

Leaving is always a sad event, but it has been years since I didn't feel restored upon driving out the gate to start our journey home.