Education is the Answer.

So you’ve decided to pursue a career in speech therapy?

My name is Tyler and I’m a junior in the Communication Science and Disorders program here at Ohio University. I am writing you this to discuss a topic that is not closely related to the field of speech therapy, but with society getting a little “greener” everyday, the issue of environmental sustainability in the field of speech therapy will be arising in the near future. As the future of our society, it is important for new students like you to be informed and aware of the environment and the effect our daily lives have on it.

Now you might be wondering what exactly environmental sustainability entails, so I’ll give you a basic overview. The environment is a fragile entity that we often take advantage of. Everything we do has an effect of the environment. The cars we drive, our homes, even the foods we eat all contribute to the depletion of the beautiful world around us. Environmental sustainability is the issue of minimizing that exhaustion of our resources to ensure the future of the environment. We use an extraordinary amount energy globally and the world simply cannot keep up, so becoming environmentally sustainable is vital to the future of our planet.

How does the profession of speech therapy and environmental sustainability relate? Well, speech therapists often find jobs in a number of different institutions. Schools, hospitals, nursing homes, and rehabilitation centers are just a few of the many possible places of employment where speech therapists can end up. For this essay though, I’m going to be focusing on schools and what they are doing to become more environmentally friendly.

I recently did some research on a school district just a couple hours up the road from here that is taking steps towards reducing their environmental impact. Newcomerstown Schools in Newcomerstown, Ohio has recently finished a solar project that will greatly improve their energy consumption. The project, which was completely funded by grants not only benefits the school but the entire community as well. Two of Newcomerstown’s school building where equipped with solar panels, which combined produce enough electricity to power roughly 60 homes. The interesting thing about the project is that the power produced doesn’t go directly to the school. The way the project is set up is that all the power goes to the community, and in return the company that installed the panels pays 15% of the schools electricity bill. I think that is a great trade off because everyone benefits from it. Projects like the Newcomerstown School’s solar project give hope to our future. Schools use a tremendous amount of energy and the more effort schools put into becoming environmentally sustainable, the more educated children become on the importance of the issue.

Another great, environmentally friendly project some schools are starting today are student-managed gardens. These gardens give children a chance to get out of the routine classroom setting and learn how to manage a sustainable garden. One middle school in Berkeley, California has a pretty cool system set up. The children not only work in the garden, but they also harvest the crops they have grown and use them to make food. The educational benefits of teaching children how to manage a garden are huge. Those children are learning how to live sustainably, which is something that will only benefit each of them in the future. The Berkeley school is teaching their children a life-long lesson that many people today don’t know the first thing about. In the future when those children have their own homes they will have the skills to start their own garden and live a sustainable and cheaper lifestyle.

So there you have it. Speech therapy might not directly correlate to environmental sustainability, but the places of employment for speech therapists definitely have an impact the environment. As a soon-to-be speech therapist in a school system, I want to see more schools making changes like these to educate children on the importance of environmental sustainability. Children are the future, and if from a young age they are taught to be environmentally aware a greener future is immanent.

Sustainability in...Speech Therapy?

At first thought, speech therapy and environmental sustainability do not seem to have much in common. Speech therapy is a very exclusive profession that focuses mainly on one area: speech. Mostly a speech therapist works at a school, hospital, or a rehabilitation center, where they work with people who have problems with speech. The environment is not something speech therapists deal with on a daily basis. The most a speech therapist thinks about the environment is driving to and from work. So, how can speech therapy and environmental sustainability relate? Well, as mentioned earlier speech therapist often find their jobs at schools. Schools have a huge impact on the environment. All the paper and electricity they consume are just a few of the many resources schools consume on a daily basis. Now the next question is, are schools doing anything to lessen their huge environmental impact?

Newcomerstown Exempted Village Schools is a school district in mid-eastern Ohio that is taking steps to make their environmental impact a little smaller. It’s a fairly small district, with no more than around 100 kids per graduating class. The district is made up of four schools; two elementary schools, a middle school, and a high school. Newcomerstown Schools has started a project to help reduce the amount of energy they consume on a daily basis.

In mid August of 2010 Solar Vision LLC of Columbus began constructing and 800-panel solar array system for the West Elementary and High School. The project was completed in roughly a month with little to no problems. Solar Vision used an energy grant to fund the project completely. Newcomerstown Schools and community have nothing invested in it, but will have so much to gain. The elementary school was equipped with a 68 kilowatt-enough to power 23 typical homes, and a 128 kilowatt system at the high school- enough to power approximately 40 homes (NCT Green Power). Powering 63 homes in a small town like Newcomerstown is quite a big deal. The interesting thing about the project is that the power produced by the panels does not go directly to the schools. Instead, that power goes to the community, and in return Solar Vision pays for 15% of the schools electric bill- or about $25,000 per year. So, not only does the school benefit from the project but the community does as well.

Another similar project the school recently completed was a 100-foot wind turbine at the elementary school. The turbine was funded completely by a grant from The Voinovich School at Ohio University. The Voinovich School received a $100,000 dollar grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission, which in turn granted $45,000 of that to Newcomerstown’s West Elementary for the construction of the wind turbine. The 100-foot tall turbine with 23-foot rotors produces roughly 10 kilowatts of power, which goes directly to the elementary (NCT Green Power). This amounts to about $3,000 on annual electricity savings. The turbine is also equipped with a device that students can use to monitor the energy produced by the turbine. That is great because it gets the students involved with conserving energy at a young age.

Newcomerstown West Elementary has also recently integrated the NEED system of education in its curriculum. NEED is the National Energy Education Development Project. The NEED project began back in 1980 as a one-day celebration of energy education (About NEED). 30 years later the NEED project has branched out to thousands of schools across the country. The project was designed to educate young people about the environment and how to protect it. NEED recently aligned its entire curriculum portfolio to state science standards (About NEED). This meant that now teachers could continue to educate students about the environment, without jeopardizing their state-mandated curriculum. Bringing the NEED project into schools will only help society in the long run. The only way to ensure our future is educate the people who will be running it.

The environmental projects Newcomerstown Schools have begun should be a wake up call to all schools. Newcomerstown Schools project is the largest in a five-state area. That is shocking considering the district is also one of the smallest in the surrounding area. There needs to be more grants like the ones used in the Newcomerstown Schools’ projects. If all schools were given the opportunity to harness solar and wind power and use it to educate students our nation would be better as a whole. Starting the education of environmental sustainability young is key in that students will be brought up caring, and being educated about the environment.

Food Inc.

I found Food Inc. to be rather disturbing. I had no clue what our food industry has become. The fact that only four companies control where we get our meat from is ridiculous. I had never watched the film before, so I didn't really know what to expect. I knew a little about what it was about, but had no clue what was in store for me.

It upsets me the way the used for this industry are treated. Standing in their own feces their whole lives in over-crowded pins. It's ridiculous that animals can be treated so inhumanely. My grandpa owns a 500 acre farm, so I have grown up with animals. My grandpa's animals have always roamed his land. They keep his land healthy. They keep the grass from getting overgrown and they keep it fertilized.

The big business attitude and farming don't mix. The food industries need an overhaul. They can't keep doing what they are doing. It's not just the inhumane treatment of animals, but the way they treat their customers. They don't care if we get sick from the contaminated meat they give us, as long as they get that paycheck. It's disgusting. We as a nation need to stand up and fight back. When I buy meat I expect it to be meat. Is that too much to ask for?

Incomplete Draft

Leopold vs. Owens

The works of Aldo Leopold and Louis Owens have influenced our culture for years, and will certainly do the same for years to come. Owens’ The American Indian Wilderness and Leopold’s Thinking Like a Mountain are two pieces that show the writers deep love and respect for the environment they were devoted to protect. In both pieces the men write about a life-changing experience that transformed their views and understanding of the world around them. Leopold’s senseless killing, and Owens’s destruction result in each of the writer’s epiphany of the “true” meaning of wilderness.

Leopold, considered “the father of wildlife ecology” (naturenet), devoted his life to the conservation of the environment. He saw the land as a living thing, and strived to show this to others. In his essay Thinking Like a Mountain, Leopold tells about the day he saw a wolf die. Leopold and some friends were out eating lunch when a pack of wolves appeared just below where they were sitting. Without hesitation the group began “pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy” (89). The end result being the oldest, motherly wolf dying as the men watch. Leopold writes about “watching a fierce green fire dying in her eyes” (89), and how he realized then that wolf was more than just a wolf. It was at that moment that Leopold came to the realization of his, and everyone’s misguided view of the wild. Before watching that helpless wolf die in front of his eyes Leopold was a trigger-happy hunter like most of his comrades. Out killing for pleasure and the thrill of the hunt. “fewer wolves meant more deer” (89), Leopold writes. Not taking into consideration the importance of those wolves to the environment. Leopold talked about watching the senseless eradication of wolves all over the country, and detrimental affect of the predator-ridden deer on their environment.

The dramatic death of the wolf opened Leopold’s eyes to how interconnected the living world really is. Early in the piece Leopold writes “Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf” (88). This statement has a huge underlying message. Leopold is starting to explain his point that nature is one entity, and changing one thing can affect the entire ecosystem. He explains this when he writes about the damage deer will do to an environment if their natural predator, the wolf is eradicated. Leopold talks about seeing a mountain look as if “someone had given God a new pair of pruning sheers” (89), because of deer populations getting out of control. Leopold explains, “just as deer live in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer” (89). A mountain run ramped with deer cannot survive. The wolf is needed to keep the system balanced.

Owens wrote of a similar experience in his piece The American Indian Wilderness. Owens’s experience did not involve the killing wildlife, but the simple destruction of an old rickety shelter. While working as ranger in Washington, Owens was given the task of tearing down an old shack in an area known as “White Pass” (69). He trekked the eleven miles to the shelter, where he began the task of dismantling and burning it to the ground. Owens writes about feeling “smug” that he had returned the area to its “original state” (69). His smug attitude quickly changes on his journey back down the mountain. Shortly after beginning his journey back, Owens crosses paths with two elderly women. The two, rather happy women tell him how they have been venturing up to White Pass every year to remember their father, who had built that now nonexistent shack a century ago. The two women are from Indian dissent, and talk about how the land used to be “all our land” (70). Leopold, having Indian blood as well, of course feels terrible and confesses his actions. He expects the two women to be heartbroken and angered by the news, but the smiles never left their faces. “They forgave me without saying it-my ignorance and my part in the long pattern of loss which they knew so well” (70).

Both Leopold and Owens share a similar experience. In both cases it takes the destruction of something for both men to realize the errors of their ways. For Leopold his realization comes from witnessing the death of a wolf. Watching the life leave her eyes made him realize how connected everything in the world truly is. He writes about the affect of the over populated deer on the mountain, and how important the wolf is to controlling this. He says that if the wolf isn’t there to control the deer they will ravage the mountain and ruin it’s natural beauty. Owens experience is very similar. After destroying the shack that was thought to be worthless, the two elderly women teach him the true connection that everyone has with nature. Finding out that the shack their father had built with his bear hands had been destroyed should have infuriated the two women. The fact that they were oddly unaffected by it is probably what hurt Owens the most. Through talking to the two women he realizes his view of nature was all wrong. He realizes that the wilderness he had come to know was wrong. Owens writes “Before the European invasion, there was no wilderness in North America; there was only the fertile continent where people lived in a hard-learned balance with the natural world.”

Work Cited

Leopold, Aldo. "Thinking Like a Mountain." Saving Place. Ed. Sidney Dorbin. New York: McGraw Hill, 2005. 89-89. Print.

Owens, Louis. "The American Indian Wilderness." Saving Place. Ed. Sidney Dorbin. New York: McGraw Hill, 2005. 68-71. Print.