PRHS’ Global Environmental Options class pursues their annual lifestyle challenge of working on reducing their carbon footprint for ten days.
Paso Robles High School's Global Environmental Options class has finished their ten day trek of tracing, reducing, and calculating for their hands-on final which granted students the opportunity to create challenges for themselves in order to lower their ecological footprint.
The carbon footprint that is highly well known is encompassed in this “ecological footprint,” which encompasses more information about the resources it takes to sustain a lifestyle. GEO students are required to take baseline data before they start the project (how much waste did they produce? How much water/land was needed to produce their food? Where did their food come from? What was their electricity usage?). They then compare this data before and during their ten day challenge. For these ten days, participants are monitoring their progress on social media platforms like Instagram and Tiktok with the hashtag #GEOlifestyleproject. Having their first post on their “lifestyle” accounts be the plan they have laid out for each day of the challenge, viewers can see how as time progresses, they are continuously making bigger changes to their everyday lives.
The purpose of this project is for students to ‘try out’ different changes they can make in their lives to decrease the amount of waste we produce, energy we consume, and resources needed to sustain our daily lives."
"The project is not about being extreme, but more looking at one's own daily life and seeing what adjustments can be made," said GEO teacher Gaylene Ewing.
With the United States having the second largest ecological footprint and an ecological deficit of -3,435.65, the average US footprint is about 50% larger than the average person in most European countries. Experimenting, expanding, and exploring lifestyles for just ten days gives first hand experience to students who, from a small town, can still make big changes.
"I learned how easy it was to make a difference. I reduced a lot of waste that I would normally produce just by thinking before I did something,” said PRHS senior Jason Scruggs whose group primarily focused on reducing trash from their food.
Putting it into practice, Holiday and her partner for the challenge, Jessica Maguire, took their school work to the bustling local farmers market and made use of the homemade tote bags that Holiday made with her sewing machine at home.
For her ten day challenge, Holiday, who has gone vegetarian for a little over a year, took her meals to the next level by seeing what it was like to have a vegan diet while also managing to cut down on plastic use.
“Going dairy-free was the most exciting one for me. I chose the plastic one because this year i started really realizing all of the single-use plastic that we use and i want to do what i can to reduce my plastic use,” said Holiday.
Ewing, who is in her third year of teaching GEO, adapted and morphed this annual project that was originally given by Mark DiMaggio, now retired GEO teacher. Starting in their demography unit, GEO has been studying factors that go into human population growth as well as concepts like the carrying capacity for humans on planet Earth. Learning about consumption issues and how to change those habits in order to lessen our environmental impact, these students conclude their challenge journey with a class presentation of their collected data and personal experiences.
While this project only “lasts” ten days, “I am definitely going to try to reduce my plastic use as much as possible, I will be trying to eat more locally (like shopping at the farmer’s market), and I'm hoping to go vegan or close to it once I live on my own,” proclaimed Holiday.
“If we all just made a conscious effort to change we could reduce a lot of the waste we create,” stated Scruggs after reflecting on his project.
Credits:
Photos by Cheyenne Holiday and Gaylene Ewing