The project that we just finished was about how people and nature affect each other. More specifically the driving question was “how do people and the environment affect each other?” and I think that they affect each other in a lot of different ways. I feel like most people would say that people affect the environment more than they do us but I think it is about 50/50. The environment affects us in mostly positive ways making our clean air and the sun is two things that I enjoy. But when people affect them in negative ways they affect us back in negative ways. By us contributing to global warming, the ice caps melt and flood a lot of towns near oceans. Also when the ozone layer starts getting warmer it causes forest fires. So now it is like a back and forth between us doing something bad then nature coming back with something worse or the same depending on where you live. Meaning if you live in a prime flooding area your point of view on if what nature is doing is worse or the same as if you live here in British Columbia. Kind of like this photo here.
At the beginning of this project our teachers told us that the project was made by commonlit, a website I didn’t really like last year but I didn’t think it would change my perspective on the subject of this project which I liked (the driving question that I said before). She also told us that the final product would be a letter that we can send to whoever we want but they have to be someone that can make a change (etc. Someone in parliament, the mayor, owners of polluting companies). Right when she said that I knew I wanted to write to the honourable John Horgan because he is someone that can make a change in our province. I just needed a topic and then I thought about when I went to Penticton over the summer and the air quality was horrible on the way up and even when we were there it was pretty bad causing the sun and moon to be very orange. Then and there I knew that I should write about forest fires in the lake Okanagan area.
Throughout the whole project, we did multiple reading activities on commonlit where we would read the text then answer some questions and they would all be about different topics that people in our class ended up choosing but the two that I found were good were called “Quiet Town” and “The sea also rises”. These were the two that connected to my letter the most because they were about how floods force people out of their homes and my letter was about how forest fires were forcing people out of their homes. In my opinion, those were the two best readings we did in class but “the sea also rises” was the best because it wasn’t made up, it was a true story. Around the end of our project, we had to come into class and write a three-paragraph essay about that very topic I was just talking about, what commonlit readings connect to our letter. During this project, we also had a couple of writing activities, two of which were vocab quizzes where we had to define a couple of words and if we used those words in our letter we would get “extra points”.
At one point we also had two people come in to answer some of our questions about their perspectives on different topics. One of the people that came in was Denis Thomas, an elected councillor from the Tsleil-Waututh Nation and the owner of a tour company in my area. The other is Megan Curren, the ex-owner of multiple small businesses in deep cove and a supported environmental activist that banned plastic straws in deep cove. They both had some very nice opinions.
We did a lot of things during this project but my favourite has to be writing the letter, making the envelope and putting it in the mailbox. I found it to be a very good idea that my teachers made us all walk together to the mailbox. It was a great end to the project. Oh and you are probably curious about what my letter looks like, well here it is.
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