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My Time Spent in Nature

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    A few weeks ago, I  went home to Connecticut for a few days and was able to spend some time outside in nature. My friend and I went for a walk down to the Connecticut River on a rare warm day. We went there because it was a place us and our other friends would go when we were in high school. To get to the side of the river there is about a 5–10-minute walk through the woods. On this walk i noticed a turkey out there and I'm not sure why. I have taken this walk probably a hundred times in my life before and have never seen a turkey. Mostly we would just see the usual, squirrels, birds, etc. But for some reason there was a turkey there that day. I was also surprised to see that not all the trees and bushes and leaves had started to change colors yet. Most of them already had changed to the orange and brown colors of fall, but there were a few small areas that were still mostly green. I was curious to see how the water looked during the fall since I would ...
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Richard Nixon's Environmental Importance

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    Section 1:    Richard Nixon (1913-1994) was the 37th President of The United States of America. He served for more than five and a half years as president before resigning due to the Watergate Scandal. Although he is remembered strict conservative of the Republican party, Nixon surprisingly made many environmental impacts for our country. The Nixon administration was the first to bring up the environment as a real issue. In his State of the Union address in 1970, Nixon says "It is essential that we take steps to prevent chemical substances from becoming environmental hazards. Unless we develop better methods to assure adequate testing of chemicals, we will be inviting the environmental crisis of the future." - Richard Nixon.  (quotefancy.com)  President Nixon then drew up a 37-point message on the American environment that included goals ranging from monitoring motor vehicle emissions standards, to halting all dumping in the Great Lakes. Also in 1970, N...
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Pearl Harbor Legacy

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      The article "Stories Have Teeth" by Laurel is about the connection the native people of Hawaii had with the ocean and the animals living within it. The article focuses on a shark that was believed to be the protector of Pearl Harbor. The shark, Ka'ahupahau, was a bit of an urban legend in the waters. Children from Pearl Harbor were told that the shark would scare off foreign sharks or kill them, and that that was the reason there were no man-eating sharks in their waters. Ka'ahupahau and the people lived in harmony with an understanding that the shark would keep dangerous sharks out, and the people would respect his water. The article then goes into how the U.S. Military took over the land and waters and caused many different problems. Especially after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1937, the problems only got worse and eventually turned the area into a constant war-zone.      Reading this article really opened my eyes to look at Pearl Harbor fro...
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My Tree

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      My tree is located outside my living room window. I chose this tree because I see it all the time when I'm sitting on the couch and look out the window. My tree looks like a Christmas tree but I know it's not that. It is much more narrow than a regular Christmas tree. The pines on it are also not nearly as long as a Christmas trees pines. There are many more tiny pines on it than there are on a Christmas tree. I just started really looking closely at it today but I think it's looked the same all semester. I haven't noticed any changes to it. Unlike the other trees around it that have been losing its leaves with the changing weather, my trees still has all of its pines. It might start to "fall" and the pines and branches will start to spread out. The pines have been a constant green color all semester and have not and will not change. I'm not sure what type of tree it is, when I look up the characteristics of it I get a lot of results for Christma...
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Protecting the Tricarinate Hill Turtle

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    Section 1 - The Endangered Species   The Tricarinate Hill Turtle is an endangered species found mostly in Northeastern India, Bangladesh, and Nepal. It is a turtle with a dark brown/maroon shell with a yellowish orange stripe down the middle with a lifespan of about 15 years. Its main diet in the wild is fruit and its fruit of choice is from the downy jasmine plant. In captivity however it is known to eat vegetables and sometimes fish. In terms of the food web, this turtle is a consumer and in the middle of the food chain. It mostly eats the producers from it's biome, and is prey for the larger animals. The population of this species is rapidly decreasing and considered endangered.  Melanochelys tricarinata (Tricarinate Hill Turtle) (iucnredlist.org)  It's unknown how many are left due to the fact that many are captured and sold into illegal trade, (an estimated 2,000). The females give birth to between 1-6 eggs at a time. Nesting occurs during the...
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Impact of Modern Consumption on the Environment

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 Section 1. Environmental Health Impacts     Jonathon Foley studies complex environmental systems and their affects on society. He had been studying the impact that agriculture has been having on our planet and presented his findings at a  Ted Talk . He found that agriculture has been draining the earth's natural resources, but no one seems to know about it. Over consumption and the world's growing population has both impacted humanity's role in draining the earth's natural resources and greenhouse gas emissions. The reason this Ted Talk is called "The other Inconvenient Truth" is because people always only seem to think about climate change and energy when they think of the environment and greenhouse gasses. People seem to forget, or not know, that agriculture also plays a huge factor in this. Agriculture is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gasses. Carbon dioxide from burning tropical rainforests, methane from cows and rice, nitrous oxid...
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Favorite Place in Nature

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 My favorite place in nature would have to be a little hidden away spot on the edge of the Connecticut River. In high school my friends would I would go to this spot and bring some chairs, food, and drinks and just hangout. There was a tree at this spot with a rope swing attached to it that we could climb up and swing off of. There was nothing fancy about it, just a nice quiet spot in the shade right on the edge of the water.    Connecticut River Photo by Jeff Holcombe                                                                                                                              Connecticut River               ...
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