Introduction: Wesley Phipps

Hey everyone, my name is Wesley Phipps and I live on West Foster Avenue, and I grew up in Grove City Pennsylvania a small town about 20 minutes from the Ohio border and right in the middle of Pittsburgh and Erie.  I am currently set to graduate this spring with a degree in criminology and a minor in Business.  I’m taking this class because one I just needed some credits to graduate, and two I took an EGEE class online a few semesters ago that dealt with humans consumption of energy and found it useful in my everyday life and so I thought I may like this class too.  I’m currently a member of the varsity wrestling team here at Penn State, and i will be attending grad school next year at Slippery Rock University and playing football.

The issue I am concerned with is the massive amount of deforestation in the world.  Just the other week I believe it was on twitter that I saw someone posting a time lapse photo of earth from the international space station and the amount of earth that turned from green to brown  was just staggering.  I think deforestation is a topic that sometimes gets overlooked by the general population because one we don’t travel to where this is happening so we don’t see the destruction first hand, and two tress are not a fossil fuel so we don’t place as much importance on conserving them as other resources.  So I think in general we as humans struggle to really grasp certain scales like really small scales or really big scales lie the global issue of deforestation.

One thought on “Introduction: Wesley Phipps

  1. Hi Wesley!

    I’m Teresa, a Junior at the World Campus location (more about me here: https://wp.me/p3RCAy-aWg). I agree with you whole-heartedly on your view of deforestation. A lot of people seem to have an “out of sight, out of mind” type of view about it simply because it is not in their backyard, so to speak. Even with all of the social media out there it is still being ignored. Perhaps the first step in shining the light on issues such as these would be a small-scale movement and let it gain momentum naturally from there? On the other hand, one could MAKE people care about these issues by connecting it to something personal that the people care about (a connection that hits close to home, if you will). If they have enough reason to care, then maybe they would act on it as well.

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