Passion Project Topic- Ocean Pollution

For my passion project, I am going to focus on the issue of pollution, specifically plastic, in our oceans. Instead of starting my own organization or trying to pass a law, I will (hopefully) be collaborating with an organization called 5GYRES that has been working towards eliminating plastic pollution in our oceans. My goal is to be the voice of the organization in North Carolina. Because 5GYRES is based out of California, I think using this blog and social media will play a big part in my project and will allow me to stay connected to the efforts on the other side of the country. I'm still not entirely sure what my actual "goal" is, but I do know I want to help 5GYRES expand by introducing the organization to our community. I chose this organization to try to collaborate with because they have been researching the subtropical gyres for years by launching 16 research expeditions. They have also accomplished a lot in the effort to end plastic pollution, including passing the first ever state microbead legislation and pressured 16 major cosmetic companies, including Johnson & Johnson, to stop using microbeads in their products.    

HeartBreak Mapping

Yesterday in our DigCit class, we started brainstorming ideas for our passion projects through a process called Heartbreak Mapping. The idea belongs to Angela Maiers, who believes in order to find your passion, you must surrender to heartbreak. We began creating our heartbreak maps by drawing a heart and putting the things we love inside of that heart. We then drew another heart around the first and listed the things we hate/what breaks our heart about the things we love. Around that heart, we put possible solutions to the things we hate. To do this, we used a list of questions provided by Maiers on her website. These questions include: what makes us happy, what things do we love to do, what is our favorite memory, and what things in our heart make us sad. Her approach to finding your true passion is different than most people's, and in my opinion, it's also more effective. By listing the things we love AND the things we would change about those things, we really get to visualize what makes us "tick". You get both the good and the bad. On my heartbreak map, I listed that I love wildlife (nature), people, and my family. The conservation of our ecosystems is something I feel very strongly about and I see a lot of problems with how we, as a society, treat the environment around us, so listing what I hate was very easy. However, I had a hard time coming up with a solution to "money ruling everything" or, "money over morals" because you can't make someone change what they believe. You can only hope that you can provide a good enough argument to persuade them to think another way. Another thing I feel very strongly about is people. Generally, I believe the majority of our society is exposed to constant stress and/or criticism. I find it almost shocking that people are surprised by the amount of people that live with mental illnesses like anxiety and depression. I believe that the best solution to this problem is to educate kids, and people of all ages, on what mental illness is and to encourage them to be nice, compassionate people. By starting this at an early age, the chance of them carrying it with them through their teenage years and to adulthood is much higher.