This assignment involved "Ethics and Social Responsibility" because our group researched and learned about the importance of education in our society and specifically, we learned of the issues that education currently faces in Portland. Education is so crucial to a functional community because having educated citizens should help our nation make better decisions and learn from mistakes. Problems with education are nation-wide due to economic instability and financial pressures. Most importantly, our group learned how ordinary citizens can help better schools through donation, voting on legislative that supports education, volunteer work, and many other options. Through my interviews, I also saw two unique perspectives on the issue within the schools from people who have specialized their careers in the field.

         Another assignment that involved "Ethics and Social Responsibility" was the Eco-footprint project of Winter term. For this project, each person in our class was required to choose and read two readings on the global resource/energy depletion crisis. After, we went online during class one day and took a special test to see an estimate of how much energy we use. The end results displayed how many planets we would need to have if everyone on Earth used the same amount as us. This humbling exercise was designed to wake people up that America is the most consumptive country in the World and that we cannot go on living extravagant lifestyles if we want to keep our future bright. To further learn of our habits, we were then asked to track our water and fuel consumption for one week (168 hours). This meant monitoring the gallons of water used in everything from drinking water to flushing toilets and the weekly gallons of fuel we used with driving. We wrote a paper from our results to show our tracking journey and explaining what we had learned about our personal consumption. To back up our conclusions, the paper included several statistical images displaying and comparing our fuel versus water consumption results. Most students in my class, including myself, found that we were more wasteful than we realized, and used this assignment as a motivation to start the change to less consumptive habits. After we had completed the project, our professor, Leslie Batchelder, showed us several practical ways and useful tools to help us change our habits to benefit the community as a whole. She was even able to give us "shower timers" to cut back our times used in the shower to save more water because most of our class found that showers were the easiest water-wasters.

         This project displayed "Ethics and Social Responsibility" because I learned about my own consumption of Earth' resources and how they are far from finite. Depleting our resources will one day adversely effect all of us, even if it is not noticeable now. Each person on this planet has a social responsibility to take charge of their own actions on how many resources they use, so we are all responsible for fixing this problem before it gets any worse than it already is. Through my resource audit, I learned that my older apartment has many higher-flow water features that make it especially easy to be wasteful. I am now much more aware of the length of my showers, am cautious of over-using the faucets, and try to combine my laundry into bigger loads when I do the wash. I realize that it can be challenging to comprehend conserving water so intensively in Portland because of our frequent rain and lucky abundance in good fresh water, but after learning about droughts throughout the world, country, and even other parts of Oregon, it is not fair for me to act like this temporary water haven will not change. There are many people in the world who do not even have access to safe drinking water, so there needs to be some small changes made to the luxurious and wasteful lifestyles for the greater good.