Summer Class Speech at Brown University

 Hello fellow anthropologists!

Today is my 17th, Birthday!!!!! For that reason, I wanted to share some of my ideas with you guys.  :)

This past summer I was fortunate to take a pre-college summer course called Nature as Our Teacher at Brown University. It was in this course, that I learned a tremendous amount about the environment and the interdependency between humans and the world around us. Throughout the course, I created an action plan with the goal of bettering aspects of my community that can be improved in order to make positive impacts on the environment. 

I decided to create an action plan that would focus on treating waste productions in my community and school. In my speech, I discuss several topics that range from reducing waste in my community to teaching others the importance of their actions, and how every individual has the power to make change.

I want to focus on implementing my action plan and my ideas in my community, and through this I hope to gain an understanding of the existing perspectives regarding the environment that people have within my community. I hope to apply what I learn to the cultural anthropology perspective that I have, and discover some of the similarities and differences between the cultural practices in my community and other countries. 

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For as long as I can remember, I have always told people that I am Greek and Japanese. 

Being multi racial has always been a big part of my identity, and growing up in an area that lacks diversity I was still taught to embrace who I am. I always gravitate towards talking about my ethnicity and my culture because those two things have shaped my perspectives of the world around me. A couple years ago, I visited Japan with my family for the first time in eleven years or so. It is very difficult to put into words all the emotions that I felt from that trip in 2019. Up until that point, I had only ever imagined what Japan had looked like aside from the pictures. The moment I arrived in Izu Shizuoka, the town where my mother grew up, I was blown away. There was a river the speed and nearly the size of the Delaware river in front of my grandparent’s house and a huge mountain, mount Joyama, behind their house. It was at that place that I truly experienced the beauty of nature. In Japan, recycling and trash days are a serious part of the day. Each day is a different day for a specific type of trash, and the trash must be packaged in a certain way so it can be disposed of. I was blown away by how serious the disposal of trash standards were that I couldn’t help but question why the standards in my hometown weren’t like that. After returning from that trip, I have constantly picked up on the differences between the two countries, and I have come to the conclusion that the difference is caused by the society and the way that people are taught.  The reason I explained that story in such detail was to illustrate where my interest in the topic of my action plan stems from, and why I feel that this aspect of my hometown can be improved. When I walk around my high school in Chester County Pennsylvania, I am disappointed to see trash all over the school cafeteria floor, but I am most disappointed by the way that the students in my school treat their environment. Inspired by that, I chose to focus on the waste productions within my school and community. I would like to try and reduce the amount of waste (whether that be plastic, styrofoam, food, and much more) produced within my school and community by educating and involving others about the importance of waste management. To put it into simple terms, disposing of products incorrectly or producing large amounts of unnecessary waste negatively impacts other people within my community because these actions directly affect the environment. I believe that if we harm the environment around us, which we are a part of, we are directly harming ourselves. However, allowing people in my community to see themselves as a part of nature and their environment is a whole other task in itself. Building off of that, I believe that the root causes for these issues in the first place are because of a lack of education, advertisement for waste management, opportunity to dispose of such waste, and a lack of effort to implement positive changes in our environment. To say that all of these ideas listed are the root problems is not enough. I would like to address these problems individually to truly fix these issues with a long term impact in mind. Efforts in combating waste production have been ongoing for decades, but making an impact to truly address environmental issues takes leadership and other people. To put my plan into action, I would like to see physical changes within my school and community that benefit the environment. This may look like a reduced amount of food on the ground, a greater number of recycling bins directing students how their trash should be disposed of, and so much more. A few additional goals would be seeing an attitude change in the student body, having an increased interest in the environment within the community, starting an organization that focuses on reducing waste and disposing of waste, and lastly inspiring others to notice issues and display leadership by taking action. As for the timeframe of accomplishing such goals, I believe that it will take several months to implement changes within my community and to truly start addressing environmental issues. Keeping the longevity of my project in mind, I hope to continue making a difference and taking action even after those few months. In order to begin educating other people within my school, I believe it is best to work together with other extracurricular clubs, speak with environmentally focused classes, advertise through sporting events, and reach out to pre existing organizations within the area. To physically make a difference my school could focus on learning how to compost, increasing the number of recycling bins, using lower amounts of plastics at lunch, and the list goes on. Within any project there is always a variety of challenges that may be faced, and I do believe that this project is not going to be easy. I already foresee challenges with funding, interest, people, and a lack of space. However, I believe that it is possible to combat these visible challenges by raising money, advertising, researching, and gaining strength in numbers. Throughout implementing this project it will be important for me to keep in mind the success of my actions towards my goals. The idea of success is completely relative, but I guess in this case you can never be too greedy when it comes to making a positive impact on the environment. For my project though, I will assess the effectiveness and the success of my plan when I see positive physical, mental, and behavioral changes within my community. 

I hope to make a positive impact environmentally in my community, and I hope to further my observations of how people of different ethnic identities and cultures treat their environment!