Change you can your hair color, not your skin;
Change you can your smile and grin: not your eyes;
Change you can your sex partners, not your kin;
Change you can your sinful life: Be soul-wise!
Change you can your friends and foes, not parents;
Change you can your teacher/guide, not your brain;
Change you can your exam-marks, not talents;
Change you can your habits bad and be sane.
Change you can the environment, not the sun;
Change you can the landscape old, not the soil;
Change you can your temperament and not run;
Change you can your heart and mind: you must toil.
Change you can your ambitions but be brave;
Change you can your life-styles much but behave!
This poem is written by John Celes. Its shows that change, is an important part of our lives. We always change the way we look, the clothes we wear, our hairstyles, and even partners. We change our environment and our landscape while barley noticing it. We need to change our lifestyles and ambitions in life, especially towards our environment. This trip, as well as Rachel Carson, changed me to see a new and unique perspective of our environment. Both showed me that preservation is key of future endeavors for generations to come. It’s wonderful to see how much our environment has to offer. I believe it’s our responsibility to take care of our environment and preserve it for our kids as well as theirs. We should not be greedy and take our environment for all of its resources. If we continue to remove these resources from time to time while not replacing it, than civilization as we know it will no longer exist. My mother once told me, “Always leave a home just the way you entered it.” The earth is our home. We all need to leave this world just the way we found it, if not better. It doesn’t take much time and it really does make a difference. You too, can change.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Change
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6 comments:
Dankidy-Dank (nice name) points out a very important part of life, change. It is crucial that we all realize our need to change and evolve, after all, evolution is a basic part of nature. Evolution, though, is usually spoken of in terms of physical changes so that we can adapt as a species in order to cope with the stresses of the world, but I think has we humans become more developed and complex, we must begin to evolve in ways that are not just related to our physicality. Primarily, we must evolve and change at a much deeper level, emotionally and mentally, so that we obtain the ability to reason and remedy the problems which we have created.
The human species has changed over time and evolved to a point in which destructing the environment has become commonplace. I think that it is now time for our mentality to change with our actions. We need to begin to change the way in which we see the world; change our perspectives on our proper place in relation to the Earth as a whole; and change our conceptualization that humans have dominion over everything. As the human form progresses, it seems that human rationality regresses. There has never been a time in which we believe we own everything the world has to offer as much as we do now, and this is simply not true. Many scholars and environmentalists throughout history have discovered our connection with the Earth, and have advocated that we take a more sisterly/brotherly role instead of our well-known master/servant role. It is time for the human mind to evolve with the human body and human action; it is time for a change to occur, and not a natural change, but a forced change.
John Kerry has become synonomous with the term "flip-flopper," and the term has been cast with a negative connotation. However, is it so bad for someone to realize their mistakes and try to fix the problems they have created or aided in creating? I think not, and I think that we all would be much better off if we adopted the ideal of "flip-flopping." Changing our mind is not bad, especially if it saves the world.
Change is the most important concept that is needed concerning the environment. Change is needed to achieve any kind of achievement in this society. We can not continue to ignore what we know will happen in the future to the environment. Change must happen. The alternative fall break was completely around changing your habits that are not environmentally sound. For giving back to the environment instead of hurting it. The alternative break succeeding in helping out and realizing the environment needs to be perserved. Habits need to be changed. By all people not just by a select few.
I like this thread. It points out a very important concept of change, and i believe that at times somet things can never be changed. When i thought about this poem and this thread, i realized that what has been done to the chesapeake watershed has been done and nothing can completly change the act. the change of our actions is a solution to cease the problem from increasing, but to diminish a problem completly is a task that no one will be able to accommplish. I hope that people can realize the concept of change in a far greater view than just a act or a fact of time. Because change to me means evolving, transforming, and recreation of something new. Something that is the way it is now will always be the way it was meant to be, and to create an enviromental change, we must discover new and effective procedures to bring about a transformation, a new creation, and above all a better change.
I think it is also important to remember that change is constantly occuring whether we realize it or not. Unfortunately, I was unable to go on the trip, but I have heard much about it since my classmates got back. There is so much change occurring, and no one will know the result until it is too late. No how much we want to, we can't go back in time.
I agree with Emily S. Change is something our culture does not do until we have been punished enough to become brutally aware of it. With most of the catastrophes that have occurred within our country in the past seven years, we have acted out of hindsight instead of foresight, and this is why those catastrophes occurred. After 9/11, our airport security and access to buildings was greatly enhanced, so that such an attack could not occur again. Of course one will argue that we had no way of knowing that such measures were needed in that case before it happened, and I agree. But once we become aware of the need for change, we must act. We do need change, but our challenge is making people aware of the tragedies that have already occurred in the environment so that they will take measures to prevent it occurring again. Take the polar bear going extinct within our lifetimes. This is a familiar creature to most, and it isn't a long-ago species like the dinosaurs. This is a piece of our world disappearing, and it's too late to do anything. This is our wake up call. And hopefully, people will see it as such and change before we lose much more than the polar bear. Before we lose everything.
I'd like to comment on the last part of the original post about changing to better the environment. For many years I was a Girl Scout, and like dankidy_dank's mother, we were told to leave everywhere we went not as the way we found it, but better than that. We were always cleaning up messes that we didn't make. Looking back on all those years, taking that extra time to do what others were too lazy to do didn't kill me.
Taking a little time here and there could help the environment. It's worth the five extra steps to recycle instead of throwing it in the trash. Although, it seems too late to help, it's never too late. And like Dankidy_Dank said, the little things do add up in no time. The smallest of efforts have the largest impacts. I learned that as a Girl Scout many times, over and over again.
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