Sense of Place

For this interview, I decided to interview an older woman by the name of Teresa. She is originally from Europe and I wanted to get her take on conservation and with the things we do in class. In her opinion, it's important to protect nature. We have to plant trees as much as we can to make up for the deforestation that takes place. She feels that we need to protect the parks too. In addition, she feels that people in our generation, in general, actually DO try to be more clean. She feels they might be saving more for the economy's sake. "They want to save more money. I believe people were wasting more initially because everything was easy, however I do see a trend in your generation of activists who take a stand and try to save. They're not throwing away as much." I asked her about her life growing up and how conservation was. She said that, "Growing up, we were taught to reuse glass bottles. We didn't have so many things so we had to reuse everything." She also feels that there might be a gap in conservation between the two continents, with the U.S. and Europe. "People in the U.S. are more interested in throwing things away and not recycling." She claimed back in her day, there wasn't much building going on over in Europe like in the U.S. where there is a lot of building and new construction and cutting down of trees. When I discussed FGCU with Teresa she mentioned how she, likes the steps that our university is taking to be green. In addition to her thoughts on FGCU, she also talked about the auto industry. "I think it's important for others to explore driving more fuel efficient vehicles as opposed to the gas guzzlers." She also feels that other countries look at innovative cars and fuel efficiency more than the US does. Going back to basics, she feels that we don't need a lot of the things we have and this may attribute to our waste. She feels that, "tv commercials fuel our need for wanting things and being consumed with materialistic things. We don't need to have the stuff we own. The more stuff we own, the less happy we are." Teresa is old fashioned and feels the less she buys, the better. Teresa likes the fact that I'm taking a class, like Colloquium which is introducing me to more environmental ideas that I otherwise wouldn't be introduced to. She thinks some of the trips like canoeing and walking around downtown are good because kids my age hardly go out anymore and enjoy nature like that. She hopes that FGCU keeps up this policy of having its students take the course and would like to see it implemented in other universities as well so that all students may eventually share in our experience and come together so that we can eventually take a stand towards the destruction we've been putting Earth under.