social awareness project

#1 media/news immersion

Shell Delays Arctic Oil Drilling Until 2013

I think that this newspaper article is really well written and that it says that the oil drilling will be ended until 2013 makes me feel that maybe global warming with the use of fossil fuels would end and that we people might use more clean-energy things like electric cars and more. We might even become more dependent on the clean-energy and not those things that would harm the environment.

I realized that now that they are stopping oil drilling there might be a chance for us to stop burning fossil fuels and harming the environment.

#2 observe your surroundings

I think its unfair when people litter and think someone else is going to pick up their trash for them. This just makes me feel like I’m living in a world that has people who have no love for their own place that they live and walk on. If this keeps going on I think that the every part of the world might become a dumpster and that there would be no clean spots on earth anymore.

Another thing that I see is that kids are bullying each whether if its in school or after school. I found out that at my old school people actually bullied the kids that they thought they could get away with it but in the end,they would eventually get caught. What I find messed up about this is that if this keeps going on, the perfect community would be ruined.

 

#4 write a reading response on a social issue on a literary work

Our Vanishing Night

Most city skies have become virtually empty of stars.

By Verlyn Klinkenborg

Photograph by Jim Richardson
If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go in darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun's light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don't think of ourselves as diurnal beings any more than we think of ourselves as primates or mammals or Earthlings. Yet it's the only way to explain what we've done to the night: We've engineered it to receive us by filling it with light.
This kind of engineering is no different than damming a river. Its benefits come with consequences—called light pollution—whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky, where it's not wanted, instead of focusing it downward, where it is. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and radically alters the light levels—and light rhythms—to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life—migration, reproduction, feeding—is affected.
For most of human history, the phrase "light pollution" would have made no sense. Imagine walking toward London on a moonlit night around 1800, when it was Earth's most populous city. Nearly a million people lived there, making do, as they always had, with candles and rushlights and torches and lanterns. Only a few houses were lit by gas, and there would be no public gaslights in the streets or squares for another seven years. From a few miles away, you would have been as likely to smell London as to see its dim collective glow.
Now most of humanity lives under intersecting domes of reflected, refracted light, of scattering rays from overlit cities and suburbs, from light-flooded highways and factories. Nearly all of nighttime Europe is a nebula of light, as is most of the United States and all of Japan. In the south Atlantic the glow from a single fishing fleet—squid fishermen luring their prey with metal halide lamps—can be seen from space, burning brighter, in fact, than Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro.












In this article it tells about our inventions with light and how its affecting the sky above us that we can't see the stars as we used to. The Outdoor lighting is used to light roadways, parking lots, yards, sidewalks, public meeting areas, signs, work sites, and buildings. It provides us better visibility and a sense of safeness. Most street lights shine light not only on the nearby ground, where is needed, but also miles away and up. So a large fraction of the light is lost, or may cause ill environmental effects.
The lights that we made to light our dark sidewalks and keep the uneasy feeling of being attacked also affects the sky above us. When most people in the city look up at the stars, they see the stars. However, many people don’t realize what they’re missing. The sky was much more starrier even 10 years ago.


You can use a telescope to see the stars, but even the telescope’s improved views are becoming useless as well. Most stargazers who make a profession of it know about the effects of light pollution on telescopes. It costs millions of dollars to construct each large telescope. Light pollution is now decreasing the effectiveness of Earth surface telescopes. What we used to see in the sky are now rapidly decreasing if not already gone.