Personal Environmental History - Essay Example

The environment has always been something that I had been taught to respect ever since I was a very young child. There were a wide variety of sources that told me how to respect the environment, from the media to my parents and school. I think my relationship with the environment has been mostly a positive one, but that I have room to grow and that the people in my life probably could have done a better job educating me on the importance of environmental thought. I was taught about some important small scale things, but never truly learned how to live in a sustainable way.

The first memories I have of being taught about the environment revolve around maintenance of the space around me as a very young child. I was taught not about the huge implications of maintaining our ecology, but of the importance of simply respecting the immediate vicinity of where I lived. The major form this took when I was a small child was educating me about how wrong it is to litter. My mother always informed me that littering was bad for the environment, a message mirrored on the media frequently.

When I was a child the television show “Captain Planet” drove this message about litter home even more, showing images of fish trapped in the webbings that hold pop cans together into six packs, and informing me how important it was for me to clip them and dispose of them safely. The media also told me to go out of my way to recycle, to pick up cans on the side of the road and take them to a processing facility, and to treat my space right. While this was a good grounding for environmental thought, it was obviously very small scale and I think even at a young age I could have begun to understand the serious challenges facing the environment.

As I grew older, the media began taking a larger role in my education on the environment. Some of the things from my late childhood that always struck home was infomercials about animals that were facing extinction because of habitat reduction and other human behaviors. I also knew about global warming and climate change, but the immediate threat to those cute and fuzzy creatures I saw on the television always seemed more important, more pressing than some general idea that the oceans may rise a few inches in my lifetime.

Furthermore, these media campaigns usually asked the viewer to give money to save the wildlife they were campaigning for. This gave me the impression as a child that the problems of the environment were created by bad people burning rainforests and cutting down trees, and that the solutions lay in giving money to the right people so they could clear everything up and make it all right. Though this all gave me some idea of the importance of the environment, there was one thing that was obviously lacking: the idea that my actions were connected to the environment, and that my lifestyle was connected to the problems I kept on hearing about.

I knew that bad people were cutting down trees and endangering species, but no one ever told me that it was to make pastures to factory farm the beef I was eating at McDonalds. I vaguely knew that global warming was a threat, but few people ever encouraged me to change my lifestyle to limit my ecological footprint. My engagement with the environment was very minimal as a child and growing up, and most of my conception of environmental issues came through the media or filtered down through my relatives.

I am beginning now to see the interconnected nature of the environment, and to connect my own actions to environmental sustainability, but this has been something that only began relatively late in my life, though I hope to continue it forever.