Pleasantly Surprised

Two weeks ago I had these chance to go to visit my twin sister at Texas A&M University. While participating in the usual college student behavior (specially in a state that can actually make margaritas) I took a side trip to an old family friends ranch to go and look at the oil rigs that they had put in and get a little more familiar with what all goes along with having oil on your property.

When I first arrived I had forgotten just how long it had been since I had been to The Dunn ranch. I used to go all the time when my dad and I would go to Texas A&M football games and we would stay at the ranch and hunt Ferrell hogs at night, so I was of course very familiar with the ranch. When I first drove up to it I almost completely missed the entrance. I was looking for the familiar small entrance that was somewhat covered by trees and had a shabby little gravel road leading the half-mile back to the houses. I was shocked when I arrived to a brand-new gate with a wide fresh gravel road that wound all the way around the ranch. I can only imagine the pretty penny that it cost the family to have that put in in order to allow all of the trucks to be able to drive back and forth and work on the rigs and transport supplies. The extensive work to the ranch didn’t end with the road and new fences though, upon traveling further back into the ranch to get to the main house I saw large clearing of brush and timber that reveled land that a rabbit would be able to run through let alone a chubby German kid like myself.

After exchanging pleasantries with the Dunn family and getting caught up, I asked Mr. Dunn if they had to have all of that work done just so the oil company could come in, dig up all of their land and pump the precious resource right out of the ground. After that he laughed and informed me that he was not about to pay all of that money just so they could get paid to have his land tore up. When the negotiation of the oil deal first started he was informed that his roads were not sufficient to support the big trucks to go to and from the rigs so the oil company paid for his new fence line and all of the new gravel road (which for the area of land that it covered was going to cost the company a pretty penny.) The gravel was special though, in order to be more environmentally friendly and not having to obtain new gravel the oil company partnered with Texas A&M to take the rubble after they demolished their old football stadium to build a new one, they took the rubble and ground it into gravel and used it to build roads on the roads that they were going to be drilling oil on. I was most certainly surprised to find that they were basically recycling old concrete in order to form these roads. On top of the new roads being built they also worked with the Dunn’s on their drainage systems so the roads would not just be washed out in the future. College Station is not far from the coast so they get a lot of rain and the roads down there are constantly having to be maintained since the oil trucks are so hard on the gravel roads (something I have seen on many ranches that deal in oil after it rains.

This still left my question though why they were clearing such thick brush out of the ranch, where they were taking brush from and tilling up the ground it looked like a scene from the Avatar movie when the big trucks were just plowing everything over so they could get the resources that they needed, so I figured that the company was doing the same thing, I was very wrong however. Mr. Dunn informed me that the company had partnered with a grass land rehabilitation program so that they could start reintroducing native grasses into the area that were no longer there. With the grass being put back into the area they were able to open more areas up for cattle grazing and long term pastureland preservation. I had gone into visiting this ranch with the mind set that I was only going to hear about how the company was making it impossible to work with them and were not bringing much to the table, but was shocked to find that they were meeting them half way and also partnering to do native grass land rehabilitation. It is refreshing to see that maybe some of these companies are learning to love their monsters after all.

Opened Eyes

This week for me started off like any other week, woke up late on Monday and debated if math was what I really needed to start my week with, spilt my coffee on the floor of my truck and got to class to find out it had been canceled. The level of irritation I had reached before 8:30am on a Monday was just about enough for me to want to take a jog to get my mind of off things (which for someone like me who probably wouldn’t even run if a bear was chasing them, that’s saying something). Something that I didn’t realize or take a second to think was just how lucky I am that these were the problems that I started my week off with, these small yet easily fixable complications. I did not realize this though until we watched “Gasland” in class.

My whole life I grew up seeing natural gas being pumped and stored all over Texas. I would hear about all of the great advantages that the drilling for gas would provide for communities all over the state like job opportunities, increased income for small towns and money incentives that came along whenever you agreed to allow drilling to take place on your piece of property. It is funny though how all of the negative side effects were forgotten about when trying to convince an area that it would be a wise choice to start drilling in their area. We never heard of the the effects that it could have on a families life. How the drilling could cause ones drinking water to not be safe to be around anymore, how at any given moment an explosion could occur taking everything your family owned and had worked for due to a simple spark. “If a fire starts don’t worry, we have our water to put it out, oh wait that catches fire as well” should not be considered an acceptable statement in anyone’s eyes, especially in the big companies who started these problems in the first place.

Another big problem that we do not here about is the danger workers working to obtain oil and natural gas are put in. After watching Gasland I decided that I wanted to ask a few questions of my own, so I decided to make a few calls. The man that I am named after and his son both work in the oil and natural gas industry. They did not feel comfortable discussing the effects of the drilling on the communities around them but they did give me a few details on what it was like working in the field harvesting these resources. When Nick was younger he was working on laying down pipe for a rig and something came loose and crushed three of his toes causing them to have to be amputated, nothing super traumatizing, but his son on the other hand was not so lucky. One day working on one of the rigs he was assigned to, something happened (he wasn’t to excited to discuss the event so I received a short version) causing him to fall getting has arm caught in part of the rig which resulted in the rig cutting his arm off. He still considers himself to be lucky though because it’s very possible for someone to make a mistake and end of losing their life because of it.

The fact that an industry that promises to be there to help the community and people everywhere by harvesting these precious resources but then turns a blind eye to all the trouble and danger that it causes continues to shock me. I feel that I grew up hearing lie after lie being fed to me in order that I wouldn’t develop a conscience that was capable of recognizing a problem and have the ability to question it. This in itself is something that should be making me mad enough to want to take a jog on a Monday before 8:30, something that puts people in danger, something that is effecting lives all across our country not just in my back yard. I get the luxury of not having to drink flammable water, or have my view from the top of the hill at my farm be obscured and destroyed by a sea of gas wells and tanks, but I can tell you it makes me angry when I think about all the people that are being forced to struggle and deal with a problem that they didn’t cause, but are being forced to have to fix.

Attitudes towards the Anthropocene

The playlist that I decided to create was one that mostly contained songs of a sad, angry and eventually hopeful nature. The dark and sad songs that I included were based off of my initial gut reaction to finding out about the anthropocene and how we had gotten to this point. The angry portion of the songs reflect on my thoughts after finding out that people have been trying to push for so long to slow down and stop the thumbprint that the human race has put onto the environment and how we paved the way for the anthropocene, knowing that we could have slowed it down substantially but instead we decided to ignore it and continue on with our comfortable lifestyles not caring who or what they hurt in the long run. As my playlist comes to an end it still has a bit of a sad tone to it but an idea of hope and comradery. The idea that we will be able to make a change as long as we stand together and hold firm to our beliefs that we can not keep going in the direction that we are heading because it will not only result in our demise, but our planets as well.
For the group effort part of this assignment I decided that I would talk to my friends Austin Ebert and Joahna Roney on our seven hour car ride to Denver over break. We were driving along i70 whenever we passed a big rig truck hauling a load of cattle to the market. After Joahna stated how bad they smelled I decided that this was a perfect opportunity to jump into this assignment. After she stated that about the smell I asked if they knew just how many resources it took to produce a pound of beef. After giving them the details they were shocked and asked how I knew what seemed to be a random bit of information, thats when I told them it was from my class and learning about the anthropocene which of course they had never heard of. I began to tell them that it was earths most recent geological time period that was based on our environment being effected and starting to be shaped by humans influences. After reading them this description Austin chimed in with a comment of “you mean like global warming and that kind of stuff all the democrats are always talking about?” Austin comes from a small farming town in Kansas that depends on the development of farming and cattle to make a living. I told him it was part of it but there was more to it than that. It is how we treat and use the earth, with the amount of water that we use, the trash that we don’t recycle, the garbage and waste that we turn a blind eye to whenever it is being put into the ocean and yes the amount of emissions and we put into the environment and the harm we cause with our simple day to day routines. At this point Joahna had gotten very quiet and I hoped she was thinking about what I was saying, Austin on the other hand wasn’t so sure about the whole thing. He asked me how we were supposed to change all this if what I had told them about it being to late was true to which I responded with the example of Mary Pipher and her coalition. I told him that she had also felt “shell shock” and “despair” when she learned of the terrible path that we had sent our world down. She realized that she couldn’t change the past but she could work to better the future so her and her friend formed the coalition to stop the Keystone XL pipeline from being built. She and her friends worked hard to ensure that the big corporations pushing for this pipeline that obviously only cared about its dollar amount would not succeed in punishing our environment further for something we wanted, and how at the end through many years and many failures they eventually won. After telling them this Austin responded with that they only managed to fix one problem but then that’s when Johana decided to give her mind. She responded with “yeah but they came together and worked towards something they believed in and managed to get it done, that’s something to look at more so than the exact thing that they did.” I was curious where she was going with this so I asked her to go into a bit more detail and she responded with how if we can get people to come together and fight for the environment they will all have their own issues to fight, if each one fights for their issue they will be able to accomplish all sorts of things. Like back at home (she lives in California) all sorts of people have been fighting for water restrictions and laws since we have no water. We would not have a lot of the laws we do now if people hadn’t been so passionate about the subject. After this I couldn’t help but smile that she now felt so passionate about the subject. To get Austin to listen I decided I’d have to choose a source I knew he would have to respect, so I told him about Roy Scranton. How the Iraq veteran recognized that something about the environment needed to change, that what has happened has happened and we need to learn to adjust for the future. That if we get off of our comfortable high horse in our ivory towers we would be able to see the problems ahead an learn to adapt. This was something he was more open to listening to. He was open to the idea that what has happened has happened but we should always prepare for the future. It also helped that I had his girlfriend in the car to yell at him till he was willing to pay attention to what I was telling them.

Playlist:

Song 1: Bad Moon Rising- Mourning Ritual
This song has a real dark sound to it and the lyrics give us an idea that we are doomed for whatever is going to happen with the bad moon that they see rising. It gives me the feeling that we are just heading towards something we can’t come back from much how I first thought when learning about the Anthropocene.

Song 2: Unsteady- X Ambassadors
This song is all about how when we are faced with emotions we feel unsteady and want to run or hide, but if we can all hold on to each other and steady ourselves together we can get through any overwhelming sadness or fear we are facing. When hearing about the Anthropocene for the first time I was overcome with a sad depressed feeling, that we had basically doomed ourselves.

Song 3: Bad Things- Jace Everett
This song talks about always wanting to do bad things with someone else and we don’t really know why or what we are doing, we are just doing bad things for the hell of it. This is how I felt when I realized just how much I myself had contributed to the evolution into the Anthropocene. We all just go out and do whatever we want without ever really thinking what long term effect would be on the environment, we just continued to do the bad things.

Song 4: Miserable at best- Mayday Parade
This song is all about missing something that someone messed up and lost. After they realized they had messed up and lost that one thing they knew they would never get it back and would be miserable from that point on. Much how I realized I would feel once we lost the beauty of the world around of us for good.

Song 5: I’m in a hurry- Alabama
I feel like this song really captures how we go about life. We are always in such a hurry to get on with our lives and for the next thing to happen and honestly we don’t know why we do it. We are given norms we are supposed to assimilate to and we are supposed to get there no matter what the cost to us or what’s around us.

Song 6: Supermoon- Blue Hamilton
This optimistic song talks about how you need to be yourself and do what you believe is the right thing no matter what other people think. The song talks about how we can’t change what we have done but we can learn from it and do something to counteract it. It makes me think about how We can’t erase what we’ve done but we can raise awareness to change the future.

Song 7: Tightrope- Ron Pope
This slow sad song talks about how a guy misses his former lover and what he could have done to get her back and how he’s managing life without her. It makes me think about how we are going to miss the world that we used to have after we completely corrupt it. One part says “should have learned from my mistakes, but I never do”, we have even admitted past mistakes that have lead us to the Anthropocene but we still don’t learn from them.
Song 8: Hard Time- Seinabo Sey
This angry song talks about how someone had the choice to fix their problems they were having but they decided against it. It says it hard to be forgiven and even harder to forget and how all our problems will come back to bite us. If we eventually do have this environmental apocalypse then that’s basically what earth is gonna do, come back to bite us.
Song 9: Migraine- twenty one pilots
Thinking about how to deal with and counteract the Anthropocene I feel like I’m having a battle between changing and wanting to keep my current comfortable lifestyle like I’m sure many people are trying to do. Like the song says “Am I the only one I know, waging my wars behind my face and above my throat… But I know I’ve made it this far kid”. If we start having this mental war about trying to change though we are already that much closer to changing.

Song 10: We are the world 25 For Haiti – Various artist
Listening to this song the other day I realized just how much it related to what we have been talking about in class. It goes in to telling everyone that we should come together and take care of those in need. We will establish a bond and spark a revolution to help fix our problems and by that fix the Anthropocene. We talk about in class if everyone comes together and fights for a common goal we can reach it.

The playlist that I decided to create was one that mostly contained songs of a sad, angry and eventually hopeful nature. The dark and sad songs that I included were based off of my initial gut reaction to finding out about the anthropocene and how we had gotten to this point. The angry portion of the songs reflect on my thoughts after finding out that people have been trying to push for so long to slow down and stop the thumbprint that the human race has put onto the environment and how we paved the way for the anthropocene, knowing that we could have slowed it down substantially but instead we decided to ignore it and continue on with our comfortable lifestyles not caring who or what they hurt in the long run. As my playlist comes to an end it still has a bit of a sad tone to it but an idea of hope and comradery. The idea that we will be able to make a change as long as we stand together and hold firm to our beliefs that we can not keep going in the direction that we are heading because it will not only result in our demise, but our planets as well.
For the group effort part of this assignment I decided that I would talk to my friends Austin Ebert and Joahna Roney on our seven hour car ride to Denver over break. We were driving along i70 whenever we passed a big rig truck hauling a load of cattle to the market. After Joahna stated how bad they smelled I decided that this was a perfect opportunity to jump into this assignment. After she stated that about the smell I asked if they knew just how many resources it took to produce a pound of beef. After giving them the details they were shocked and asked how I knew what seemed to be a random bit of information, thats when I told them it was from my class and learning about the anthropocene which of course they had never heard of. I began to tell them that it was earths most recent geological time period that was based on our environment being effected and starting to be shaped by humans influences. After reading them this description Austin chimed in with a comment of “you mean like global warming and that kind of stuff all the democrats are always talking about?” Austin comes from a small farming town in Kansas that depends on the development of farming and cattle to make a living. I told him it was part of it but there was more to it than that. It is how we treat and use the earth, with the amount of water that we use, the trash that we don’t recycle, the garbage and waste that we turn a blind eye to whenever it is being put into the ocean and yes the amount of emissions and we put into the environment and the harm we cause with our simple day to day routines. At this point Joahna had gotten very quiet and I hoped she was thinking about what I was saying, Austin on the other hand wasn’t so sure about the whole thing. He asked me how we were supposed to change all this if what I had told them about it being to late was true to which I responded with the example of Mary Pipher and her coalition. I told him that she had also felt “shell shock” and “despair” when she learned of the terrible path that we had sent our world down. She realized that she couldn’t change the past but she could work to better the future so her and her friend formed the coalition to stop the Keystone XL pipeline from being built. She and her friends worked hard to ensure that the big corporations pushing for this pipeline that obviously only cared about its dollar amount would not succeed in punishing our environment further for something we wanted, and how at the end through many years and many failures they eventually won. After telling them this Austin responded with that they only managed to fix one problem but then that’s when Johana decided to give her mind. She responded with “yeah but they came together and worked towards something they believed in and managed to get it done, that’s something to look at more so than the exact thing that they did.” I was curious where she was going with this so I asked her to go into a bit more detail and she responded with how if we can get people to come together and fight for the environment they will all have their own issues to fight, if each one fights for their issue they will be able to accomplish all sorts of things. Like back at home (she lives in California) all sorts of people have been fighting for water restrictions and laws since we have no water. We would not have a lot of the laws we do now if people hadn’t been so passionate about the subject. After this I couldn’t help but smile that she now felt so passionate about the subject. To get Austin to listen I decided I’d have to choose a source I knew he would have to respect, so I told him about Roy Scranton. How the Iraq veteran recognized that something about the environment needed to change, that what has happened has happened and we need to learn to adjust for the future. That if we get off of our comfortable high horse in our ivory towers we would be able to see the problems ahead an learn to adapt. This was something he was more open to listening to. He was open to the idea that what has happened has happened but we should always prepare for the future. It also helped that I had his girlfriend in the car to yell at him till he was willing to pay attention to what I was telling them.

Playlist:

Song 1: Bad Moon Rising- Mourning Ritual
This song has a real dark sound to it and the lyrics give us an idea that we are doomed for whatever is going to happen with the bad moon that they see rising. It gives me the feeling that we are just heading towards something we can’t come back from much how I first thought when learning about the Anthropocene.

Song 2: Unsteady- X Ambassadors
This song is all about how when we are faced with emotions we feel unsteady and want to run or hide, but if we can all hold on to each other and steady ourselves together we can get through any overwhelming sadness or fear we are facing. When hearing about the Anthropocene for the first time I was overcome with a sad depressed feeling, that we had basically doomed ourselves.

Song 3: Bad Things- Jace Everett
This song talks about always wanting to do bad things with someone else and we don’t really know why or what we are doing, we are just doing bad things for the hell of it. This is how I felt when I realized just how much I myself had contributed to the evolution into the Anthropocene. We all just go out and do whatever we want without ever really thinking what long term effect would be on the environment, we just continued to do the bad things.

Song 4: Miserable at best- Mayday Parade
This song is all about missing something that someone messed up and lost. After they realized they had messed up and lost that one thing they knew they would never get it back and would be miserable from that point on. Much how I realized I would feel once we lost the beauty of the world around of us for good.

Song 5: I’m in a hurry- Alabama
I feel like this song really captures how we go about life. We are always in such a hurry to get on with our lives and for the next thing to happen and honestly we don’t know why we do it. We are given norms we are supposed to assimilate to and we are supposed to get there no matter what the cost to us or what’s around us.

Song 6: Supermoon- Blue Hamilton
This optimistic song talks about how you need to be yourself and do what you believe is the right thing no matter what other people think. The song talks about how we can’t change what we have done but we can learn from it and do something to counteract it. It makes me think about how We can’t erase what we’ve done but we can raise awareness to change the future.

Song 7: Tightrope- Ron Pope
This slow sad song talks about how a guy misses his former lover and what he could have done to get her back and how he’s managing life without her. It makes me think about how we are going to miss the world that we used to have after we completely corrupt it. One part says “should have learned from my mistakes, but I never do”, we have even admitted past mistakes that have lead us to the Anthropocene but we still don’t learn from them.
Song 8: Hard Time- Seinabo Sey
This angry song talks about how someone had the choice to fix their problems they were having but they decided against it. It says it hard to be forgiven and even harder to forget and how all our problems will come back to bite us. If we eventually do have this environmental apocalypse then that’s basically what earth is gonna do, come back to bite us.
Song 9: Migraine- twenty one pilots
Thinking about how to deal with and counteract the Anthropocene I feel like I’m having a battle between changing and wanting to keep my current comfortable lifestyle like I’m sure many people are trying to do. Like the song says “Am I the only one I know, waging my wars behind my face and above my throat… But I know I’ve made it this far kid”. If we start having this mental war about trying to change though we are already that much closer to changing.

Song 10: We are the world 25 For Haiti – Various artist
Listening to this song the other day I realized just how much it related to what we have been talking about in class. It goes in to telling everyone that we should come together and take care of those in need. We will establish a bond and spark a revolution to help fix our problems and by that fix the Anthropocene. We talk about in class if everyone comes together and fights for a common goal we can reach it.

Recycling our roads

Sustainable energy is something that we have gotten used to hearing with trying to change the world, don’t get me wrong it is something great that we need to pay more attention to, but we could also focus on sustainability in other areas. Something that many people are looking into today are “Sustainable roads”. Last week I blogged about how hard the roads are treated and how how much it cost to keep the roads up with constantly fixing roads or replacing them all the time, but I didn’t necessarily provide any solutions to these problems. After doing some research I found a viable option while researching on national geographic. The solution they have presented us so recycled road materials. They present it with the idea that it will not only save energy, but it will also save money as well.

What many people don’t realize is that asphalt is a petroleum product that when produces and paved into roads releases greenhouse gasses into the environment. With 2.5 million miles of roads in America, 90 percent of them are made with asphalt. Building 2.5 million miles of road and continuing to replace the roads that cars and big trucks continue to ruin adds up to a lot of greenhouse gases that are released into the environment.

A new process for paving roads has come out when dumbed down is basically recycling old road. This new asphalt is called “warm mix asphalt”. When roads are torn up when being renovated or resurfaced, the old aggregate is then taken and crushed and repurposed into new roads. This process saves on energy use that it takes to harvest virgin rock for roads, ship it to centers that are normally hundreds of miles away from where it will be processed and then it will have to be hauled and formed into the new roads. Taking all the travel out of the process not only saves on energy used, it will decrease the use of the “big rig” trucks that have to haul all the Rock and the machinery used to build the roads.

When it comes to the actual production of the roads they have found a more effective to do that as well. Normal asphalt has to be heated up to 350 degrees when being paved into the roads, this new technique of paving has to heated to 250 degrees. When they started using this warm mix asphalt it decreased the carbon emissions by up to 35%. In 2004 the US was producing 100,000 tons of warm mix asphalt but in 2012, the US was producing 47 million tons. With this new means of production, it not only saves on money and resources but it decreases the amounts of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere and it gives a sustainable option to keep roads up and fixing them all over the world.

Unfillable Pothole

Throughout my life I have made the voyage from a small town north of San Antonio down to the great Gulf of Mexico. As a kid all that I payed attention to was how quickly we were getting there and how many times my sister and I decided it was time to have an argument in the car. What seemed to skip my mind as if nothing was wrong was the continuous stops that we had to make that were not due to my sister and I arguing about what movie we were going to watch next. The traffic and road work seemed to hinder us at any given point, we’d finally make it through one stop only to happen upon another about 20 miles or so down the road. This inevitably turned what should have been our three hour trip into at least a 5 hour stop and go game of frogger between our 97′ Chevy Silverado and the continuous stream of workers littering the side of the road as if a bunch of ants continually trying to complete their work. No matter what time of year it was, what the weather condition or how blazing the sweltering heat of the sun was, we were always able to count on the many faces of annoyed road workers that never seemed to be able to catch a break.

Sixteen years ago and even further back we could see how we were using these simple methods to temporarily fix what would eventually become a very big problem. When traveling our we want our memories to be filled with the fun times that we had and the amazing things that we were able to see. Instead we are greeted with miles upon miles of “Road Work Ahead” and “Give Em a Break” signs, all so we can make a quick non-ideal solution so we can get to our money and resources quicker. These quick solutions to roads being built with the idea that only the rural folk that live in the area may have been suitable in the past, but not anymore.

As south Texas has seen a rise in oil production they obviously have needed more ways to get to and from the production sight and to transport the product out. If we were using normal trucks to accomplish this, it wouldn’t be as big of a problem. The average pickup-truck weighs around 6,5000 pounds, not causing very much wear and tear on your average road. Oil tankers and mass transportation vehicles weigh around 60,000 pounds, which when constantly going to and from sights really starts to beat the tar out of the roads so to speak. Normal roads like we used to have in the good ole days simply will not cut it anymore. The public has to come to this understanding and start demanding a more sustainable road be built. It may cost more at the beginning, but if we are able to build nicer and safer roads that do not have to be constantly worked on and widen like to picture that I have included above to continue to allow the mass transportation out of rural areas then we are only throwing money into a pothole that our road workers will never be able to fill.

Roads to nowhere

Since the boom of oil production in the area of south Texas known as the “Eagle Ford Shale” the population and traffic in the area has increased tremendously providing jobs for many unemployed citizens and chances for new business opportunities. Out of all these new opportunities that have arisen there was only one problem, how were people going to be transported to these new places in order to preform the work that needed to be done. To provide ways of passage for these new ventures in the rural areas of south Texas the obvious answer was to build new roads. Too most people that seems like a great and simple fix but many of them did not realize how quickly the demand of this new found oil would come. In order to supply for the demand roads were quickly traversed across previously untouched land with the only objective being the roads needed to be provided in fast, and that is exactly what happened.

Fast forwarding a few months the roads were holding up with little to no maintenance and still not necessarily found by other Texans that were not local to the areas, that is till hurricane season came around. The roads that were hastily built suffered washouts, numerous potholes and tremendous traffic when people decided that it was time to leave the coastal area in case of flooding and others effects caused by hurricanes or other heavy rains that are brought about in that specific time period each year. After a big rain or big traffic rush the roads littered about with detritus from torn up roads. The cities will go about at their own pace and eventually patch the potholes up with uneven asphalt of varying colors. With this quick fix the roads not only become bumpy and uneasy to travel on, they are displeasing to the eye. Through this blog I am hoping that I will be able to draw attention to the flaws in these badly built roads and how it is not suitable for the environment and how it could be an economic downfall for the cities along these roads. Hopefully through the use of this blog and its avenues it opens for its readers and I, we will be able to help come up with better solutions to these problems at hand.

Where are we now? Asking the right questions.

We see the headlines all around. The “Times are changing”, “Heading Nowhere” and “Destroying the Environment”. But after that we do not really stop to think about what that really means, how we are ushering in a new time period marked and caused of the way us humans treat and change the world around us. This new epoch caused by humans is known as the “Anthropocene” . What most people do not understand is that this new epoch is not something that is fast approaching, it is something that is already here. So why instead of looking at the questions of how to save the environment are we not trying to answer the questions of what do we do now. In what ways can we try and make best of the “environmental apocalypse” that we and our ancestors before us have worked so hard to ensure.

With the help of the environmental anthropology class I am currently apart of i’ll be able to gain the information we need through long hours of research, various readings and worldly interactions to answer the daunting question of the Anthropocene. I am optimistic that we will be have our eyes opened to help us ask these questions and maybe with enough thought and perseverance gain insight on just how we can answer these questions. Maybe at the end of all this we will be able to build up enough concern and support that we will be able to answer the question of how will we be able to survive in our Anthropocene?