He's a Columnist AND a Turtle

Well, since my camera battery is dead... and have not yet gotten the charger for it, you don't get any pictures of me at school. Instead, I've got some new ones from SLT friends. Me at the turtle store:

Also, I'm writing a colum for the Red & Black Newspaper now. Since you all can't get the printed edition, you can have it on here(mum and dad i am bringing you the print editions if you want to wait). I've written 3 so far. Here's the first:

Elegies of a Quasi-Environmentalist:
Fishsticks and Bottom Trawling
I have never been intensely devoted to either side of any environmental argument. I have littered and I have worn the orange vest on the side of the road. I have knocked over trees just for fun and I have planted them. I even once killed a frog just to see what would happen, and then, a few days later, stopped my car so that the gimpy bird could hop slowly out of the way. While it seems that the majority of my life I may have been subject to a kind of bipolar environmentalist condition, I think I was really just completely ignorant. It seems, now that I am an intelligent college student, I can no longer claim ignorance nor do I want to. The problems concerning the environment are evident, important, and our responsibility; they are not a political, religious, or social agenda, nor are they merely for scientists, vegetarians and “tree-hugging hippies.”
So now, as I sit and begin to ponder environmentalism, my brain instinctively tells me go to the Greenpeace website (www.greenpeace.org). Seeing as I am nearly always a slave to my intellect, I fly to their propaganda-laced page and see what they have to offer my inquiring mind. At the top of the page, the motto stands out: “Greenpeace exists because this fragile Earth deserves a voice. It needs solutions. It needs change. It needs action.” This all sounds nice, peaceful and productive but further down the page I see a group of fishsticks in the shape of a hand flicking me off. The caption for this witty photograph is thus: “This is what bottom trawlers say to protecting ocean life. Let’s give them the (fish) finger.” While Greenpeace is talking about solutions, change and action, they are really being unproductively crass. Granted, bottom trawling may not be good for the environment, but somehow I doubt that they would stop trawling because of these flick-happy fish sticks. No one stops being a bad driver because they get flicked off by whomever they almost hit on the road; it usually just makes them agitated and worsens their driving even more.
This is the kind of problem that exists in much of today’s environmental conversation. While many people could care less about bottom trawling, those who do care seem to be addressing the problem in an entirely unhelpful manner. And so, I am striving to strike the balance, to create a written space where bottom trawlers are not given the finger by a box of frozen cardboard fish and where the actual topic of environmental protection is addressed. The only problem with this is that most people simply do not care. So, friends, I do not ask you to care, just to listen.
To address the topic of bottom trawling, you should know what it is. This is something that Greenpeace does not do. On the website, if you click on the angry fishsticks, it takes you to a page that mentions some bad consequences of bottom trawling and immediately asks you to sign some petition. Bottom trawling is in fact a rather terrible, but effective means of deep sea fishing where large vessels drop extremely heavy nets and literally scrape the oceans floor with them catching everything in their way including endangered species which were not part of the “intended catch” and ruining much of the coral reefs, marine mountains, and ocean habitats.
Essentially, the fishing method is comparable to using dynamite to kill ants: entirely effective, but unnecessarily destructive. Unlike Greenpeace’s attempts to put a stop to it, which are entirely ineffective and unnecessarily destructive. Currently, many scientists, environmentalists groups (including Greenpeace) are working towards a moratorium on all deep sea bottom trawling but have accomplished very little. Essentially, in order to really enact any change, Greenpeace and their constituents will have to convince the European Union other governmental systems with a logical, persuasive argument as to why bottom trawling is truly detrimental and why we should care. This is something that cannot be done with fishsticks, but with real, thoughtful conversation.