An Inconvenient Conversation

I have to be honest, I was not looking forward to having this conversation with my mother. To put it easiest, we do not see eye to eye on many political or sociological happenings. I was also not sure what we would be able to discuss without getting into an argument, we both happen to be very passionate about what we believe. So from the list of prompts we both decided to discuss prompt three. This prompt was “How can we provide the energy we need while maintaining ecological balance?”.

For my view point on this subject, it has been one that has changed little in the last couple of years. Energy sources should try and be as ecologically safe as possible. The reason behind this is that we can always develop new energy sources, but we cannot redevelop what is destroyed by current energy sources due to negligence. My examples a definitely not few and far between, they range from the Alaskan Oil line failure, to just a couple of years ago the Deep Water Horizon Oil Spill. My mother believe that on those standpoint our country needs the energy created by deep sea drilling and that although she would like it to be monitored more closely, to avoid spills that it is a good ecological source of energy. I am whole heartily against deep sea drilling until regulations are completely remade to be stricter and more in debt.

My moms view point on this question is that it all revolves around economics, to make the energy source cheaply so that everyone has access to it. I responded with the question that what if energy can be created cheaply but cause an ecological disaster. Her response was that we have to start up the economy first before we can create new sources. Also that the energy needs to be able to be recycled, such as being able to bring water through a hydro dam multiple time, or making a fountain a source of energy. Trying to look at things we use every day, such as plastics, that could be transformed into clean and green energy. I listened to these things and I do agree, but there is still a part of me that holds back. While I agree in what my mother says I do not agree with how she wants to get there. To be able to have the type of economy that would be able to sustain this type of energy research, firstly you would have to continue the energy sources that are already going which are not ecological. This means that more damage will be done to the environment than is being done now.

Day without Technology

I was not sure which day would be best or to put it bluntly easiest for me to go a day without technology I had no clue what day to pick. It wasn’t until we headed up on the train ride for Santa Barbra that Brynn suggested we should do a day on the bike trip. I thought that this idea was brilliant for a number of reasons. So for my day without technology I actually did not notice that much of a change. This was probably due to which day I chose to complete this assignment. The day I chose was the third day of my bike trip. The best part about this was, even though automobiles were around before 1984, I didn’t even use one all day. I was for the most part on a bicycle, or walking on my legs.

Communication led, for the most part ok for the whole day. This was the one day although, that I was not able to contact my parents which was slightly frustrating. Other than contacting my parents communication was not a problem. This had to be the most frustrating part of the day. Not having my phone, which for the most part is my lifeline to the world, was difficult. This little gadget has my link to friends, news, family, entertainment, everything that I could think of is held in my phone. Not being able to use it as a flash light to read my book before bed was the most troubling because I had to then borrow a flashlight.

I was with all of my friends on the trip to begin with and any that were home were either in another country (Thailand) or in school still. Another great thing was that we didn’t have any gaming systems with us, no Play stations, Wii’s, or GameCube’s. In fact, the only ‘gaming’ system, if you would like to call it that, was a deck of cards. So that night we played a couple of different games, BS a classic, psidos which was new to me, and of course go fish! We kept each other entertained with stories about the day and things that have happened before we had all met. This was neat because I learned more about the people I had been biking with for the past three days.

Most of the day was spent biking, and considering that I do not listen to music when I bike, technology free. Once we are at camp, we have to lock the bikes, set up tents, and get bags out of the van, again no real technology. We eat dinner late at a restaurant that we biked to, and then biked back to camp. And sadly to say I ended up turning in early almost every night from the amount of biking we had done. So my technology free day was not that difficult to complete and really fun.