Personal Environmental History Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 2

Personal Environmental History - Essay Example The first memories I have of being taught about the environment revolve around maintenance of the space around me as a very young child. I was taught not about the huge implications of maintaining our ecology, but of the importance of simply respecting the immediate vicinity of where I lived. The major form this took when I was a small child was educating me about how wrong it is to litter. My mother always informed me that littering was bad for the environment, a message mirrored on the media frequently. When I was a child the television show â€Å"Captain Planet† drove this message about litter home even more, showing images of fish trapped in the webbings that hold pop cans together into six packs, and informing me how important it was for me to clip them and dispose of them safely. The media also told me to go out of my way to recycle, to pick up cans on the side of the road and take them to a processing facility, and to treat my space right. While this was a good groundin g for environmental thought, it was obviously very small scale and I think even at a young age I could have begun to understand the serious challenges facing the environment. As I grew older, the media began taking a larger role in my education on the environment. Some of the things from my late childhood that always struck home was infomercials about animals that were facing extinction because of habitat reduction and other human behaviors. I also knew about global warming and climate change, but the immediate threat to those cute and fuzzy creatures I saw on the television always seemed more important, more pressing than some general idea that the oceans may rise a few inches in my lifetime. Furthermore, these media campaigns usually asked the viewer to give money to save the wildlife they were campaigning for. This gave me the impression as a child that the problems of the environment were created by bad people burning rainforests and cutting down trees,