Environment ramblings

Hello, my name is Sam. I am writing this blog for a multitude of seemingly unconnected reasons. First of all I feel a need to get good at writing. This is one of the several career ideas I am thinking about (along with Ethno botany , Ecological Preservation stuff, and psycochemistry type stuff). It is also related somehow to the fact that I want to become an environmental activist and I figured through some astounding leap of logic that having a blog would help this. Yet another reason is because I figure writing a page a day cant hurt anybody. I am writing this for myself and don’t expect to have any readers. Im not sure whether readers would be awesome or really creepy.
You (being nobody) may be wondering why I have such an interest in the environment and saving it. My reasons are generic hippie reasons. I love nature and love this world and cant stand watching it get destroyed. I live in Ithaca that is a crazy environmental, intellectual hippie college town. I really got my start in activism in 7th grade where I was involved in a tree sit to save a 14-acre forest from becoming a parking lot. All I did was sit around and think about how cool all these college students who were they’re doing it were. But anyways, it gave me an opportunity to meet some people and to really hear people actively trying to save the environment.
At this tree sit were several hardcore earth first types and they were really inspiring even though they might not have been as intellectual as the college students there. One of them (whose forest name was muddy) had been doing treesits for years and had taken part in the treesits in the redwoods where a logger had killed an activist. This whole experience was amazing and even though it eventually failed (police arrested all the protesters at 1 in the morning, typical pussy move) it opened my eyes and showed me that there were ways of resisting that were more effective than writing a letter or sending a yearly check to some organization that spends more money on fundraising than it does on actual saving of the environment.
For the next few years I stayed politically interested attending the occasional protest and following the news (both mainstream and not). I attended grassroots and really enjoyed myself when I was around hippies. In the fall of this year I watched fight club which had a strong nihilistic anti-materialistic message. That movie inspired me to try to reduce my impact on the world but like all attempts it was short-lived (hopefully this attempt wont be). The only truly solid thing that came of it was a decision to only buy clothes at the Salvation Army but that didn’t go perfectly although I still try to shop only there.
This all brings me to yesterday when a group called rising tide came and visited our class. One of the members was from redbud woods and they all were pretty seasoned activists. The goal of their group was to confront the root causes of climate chaos (aka global warming or whatever other happy euphemisms we have). Their visit awakened the dormant activist in me and was really inspiring. I am hoping to start a student chapter of Rising Tide. Ideally this would be a STUDENT run group that would meet without a faculty advisor to hinder us. I talked to Evan Greer who was one of the members of rising tide who came and visited us and he mentioned that someone was as inspired as I was, was starting a chapter in Ithaca. Hopefully I will be able to contact this person and get that started over the summer and into next year. I have been playing around with the idea of a group of students who got together and were actively activists and I believe that this provides the best format. Anyways, that is a short piece about how I am interested in the environment and what I am doing now. Right now I am reading A Good Forest to Die In that is about the Activist who got killed by the logger who I mentioned earlier and I am also rereading The Botany of Desire. (okay you caught me I am really only reading the cannabis section) So long for now and peace and love and all that good stuff.