9. List all the items you handle in 24 hours and the packages they come in and list all the food you eat in 24 hours and the packages it comes in, and

Simply because it is so fresh in my mind, I am going to use yesterday as my sample for this activity.

Yesterday I woke up and ate a pack of cinnamon sugar pop tarts. It came in a foil type package. I have been eating them for years, and because of this I know that each pop tart is 120 calories, making the package as a whole 240 calories. For lunch I ate 2 banana’s, according to weight loss for all.com each banana has approximately 107 calories, so that would be 214 calories for lunch, bringing my grand total to 454. For dinner I went out to Panera Bread with a friend. According to their website, there are 560 calories in their chicken Caesar salad, which is what I ate. This brings my grand total to 1014 calories. Before I went to bed last night I had a Rice Crispy Treat, which is 90 calories, so when you add that on my total for the day was 1104. I drink water throughout the day, there are no calories in water so that’s why there was not any drinks included. This is a fairly light eating day for me. Normally I have a bigger lunch but yesterday I was swamped with homework so I just decided to grab a couple banana’s from star bucks.

8. Reflect on the field trip to ECHO. In what ways can people change the way they grow and process food in order to be sustainable? What organic foods

The ECHO field trip was really interesting to me. The whole time I was their I just couldn’t understand how they were growing all of these different crops. We would be in a spot where they grew bamboo that was strong enough to use for housing, then right next to us there would be a patch of land where they were growing bananas and tomatoes. That alone made the field trip fun for me. At first I was thinking to myself, well this is nice but how many different plants can you see? The field trip became a lot more interesting to me as we went on. I especially loved the part where they were growing stuff out of tires. That was simply amazing!

We can grow foods organically to make it healthier and more sustainable. I also think it would help us to only produce the amount necessary for us. We are using so many of our resources because the population is increasing so rapidly.

I can find just about any type of organic food at Publix. This stems from organic chicken, milk, cheese, to pasta sauce and potato chips. I wish organic foods were a bit cheaper to buy because I would purchase them instead of the normal groceries. Interesting fact I learned in my Business Strategy class, when you go to the store in Germany, basically everything on the shelves is classified as Organic. If a food is NOT organic then it is considered “different”, my professor is from Germany and he was talking about that yesterday in class so I felt like it went along with this topic.

7. Following the discussion of consumption, take the Ecological Footprint quiz. Go to -- http://www.myfootprint.org/ -- and find out how many earths

According to the website, if everyone on the planet lived my type of lifestyle we would need 5.61 earths! This is very alarming to me. I won’t sit here and lay saying that I am a very environmentally conscious person, but I make an effort to turn off all the lights, save water, recycle, and do the little things to help out. I would be very anxious to hear what some of my friends footprints are that leave lights on all the time and watch TV all hours of the day!

6. Start making it a habit to read the paper daily watching the Discovery Channel, PBS etc., and surfing the web.

I have not necessarily made it a habit to watch the Discovery Channel daily, but I did watch a few episodes of Shark Week online. For whatever reason, I have always been into sharks. This started when I was young and my mom bought me all these shark toys to play with. Now that I have gotten older I am no longer fascinated by the cool toys or Jaw’s movies out there, instead I have become almost a fan of sharks if you will.



I saw two specials on the Discovery Channel. One does not directly relate to any current environmental issues, it was a show called “Air Jaws” and it showed a ton of video footage of these massive great white sharks jumping out of the water. It was amazing to see how agile and athletic these huge mammals are. The sharks swim in the deeper waters and when they see a seal or something they want to eat above them they sneak up on them from underneath and then sky out of the water, grabbing the poor seals in the process. This was interesting and exciting to me simply because I am a big shark fan, but I can see how other people could be bothered by that sight.

The other show I saw had more of a correlation with the environment. It was about these massive fishing boats that go out all over the world. It showed how they use their nets to catch fish, shrimp, crab, or whatever their target is. It illustrated the concept of “bycatch.” I uploaded a picture on the blog that gives you a better idea of what I am talking about. What these fisherman do is throw massive nets out into the water and when they bring them in they take the target catch out of the net, and kill whatever is left. This wouldn’t be as frowned upon if they were actually using the extra catch for something, but they are simply wasting it. Take for instance a shrimp boat goes out in the Atlantic hoping to bring in a ton of shrimp. They cast the nets out and when they bring them in with a few dozen shrimp and a ton of other fish, they take the shrimp and just waste whatever else is left. To me that is pretty disgusting. We are overfishing the oceans already by trying to catch enough fish to meet the increasing demand for seafood. The world is growing so rapidly in population that we are not giving the fish enough time to reproduce. Eventually we will overfish our oceans so much that it will become difficult to find many of the different types of seafood that are readily available to us today.

This was an interesting but sad show, I hope that they will implement some type of laws against bycatch because it seems like such a waste of resources to me!

5. Keep a daily log or chart on the number of minutes each day for seven days that you are in the out-of-doors and what you are doing outside.

For this activity I chose to evaluate my typical week at school. Monday through Wednesday I am on campus most of the day for school. Thursday through Saturday I work at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and Sunday is my chill day.


Monday= A rough estimate for the amount of time I spend outdoors on Mondays is approximately 1 hour. The only time I am honestly outdoors on Mondays is when I am walking to and from my classes and then to and from my car.


Tuesday= For the purpose of this exercise I am going to say that it is a field trip day for class this week. With that being said I would put my outdoor time at approximately 5 hours for Tuesdays. If we are on a field trip from 11 am until 3pm, I would imagine we are outdoors for 3 of those hours. The other two are from playing volleyball at the beach courts on campus, every Tuesday I try to play for at least an hour and a half or so.


Wednesdays= Wednesdays are the same schedule for me as Mondays but on Wednesdays I also play flag football at night. The games take an hour and I am usually out there for at least another hour warming up or hanging out.


Thursday/Friday/Saturday= these are all work days for me. For the most part, I am indoors throughout the day. But I will give myself 1 hour each day for being outdoors. Whether that’s simply walking to and from my car or being outdoors washing cars or putting customers in rent-a-cars.
Sunday= Today is always a wildcard day for me, I try to exercise on Sundays by either going for a run or doing sets of pushups/sit-ups. Again for the sake of this exercise, I will give myself 2 hours of outdoor time.


Total = that puts me at a grand total of 14 hours or 840 minutes. A full week is 168 hours and 10,080 minutes. When you look at things from this perspective it is simply amazing. I would consider myself a fairly active person and I am still only outdoors for approximately 8.3% of the time. I would love to get myself to at least 10 percent, because I am not fully taking advantage of the world around me by being inside all the time!

4. Reflect on the field trip Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary. Describe the values of wetlands in protecting water quality, maintaining biodiversity and pres

Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary was an interesting field trip. It was cool to see the last old growth cypress in all of Southwest Florida. The lady that gave us the tour was extra nice and she taught us a lot about the various forms of wildlife that exist there. It was nice to hear that the National Audubon Society has protected the wading birds nesting there in the swamp since 1912. The only disappointing part of the field trip was that I was hoping to see more alligators.
The wetlands are very important. They manage storm water runoff and help purify the underlying layers of sediment which hold water. The wetlands also serve as habitat for plants and animals, including many endangered or threatened species. They give many of these species a safe haven, this helps maintain our biodiversity.
Overall, it was a nice field trip. That would be a place my dad would love to go check out because he has always been a big fan of places like Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary!

Matthew Albano 3/9/2010