Hello Class! My name is Alicia Janocsko and I am a senior here at Penn State Main Campus studying Supply Chain Management. I enjoy doing puzzles, bowling, being adventurous (when the weather is nice), and learning new things. I live just south of Pittsburgh and have lived there my whole life, but for the past 4 years of college I have made State College my new home. When I graduate I am moving to NorthWest Arkansas to pursue a career with Walmart doing their inventory replenishment. I was first introduced to the idea of environmental issues my junior year of high school and that’s where my interest grew. Coming into college I did a summer program where we went to Jamaica and studied if a sustainable agriculture and lifestyle was suitable for developing countries. After that opportunity I have continued to look for classes that will build my knowledge of geography and environmental issues. My hopes for this class is that I leave the semester feeling confident in holding a conversation about these rising issues.

The very first thing that I learned from this lesson was that geography was the umbrella term for all these topics that I have been fascinated by for many years such as sustainability and the human-environment interactions. The part of geography that has always been the most interesting to me is sustainability. I find it interesting because as humans interacting with the earth, it seems as though we only think about our needs. We over produce and over consumer and until the last few decades no one stopped to think what that was doing to our environment. Just this year it is becoming more clear to society that Global Warming may in fact be a real issue; it took 60 degree weather in December to make people stop and think that something wasn’t right. That scares me. Whats tough about these global issues is that the individual consumer doesn’t think they have an impact, so most people still don’t feel the need to go green or take individual steps to cut down on consumption. A lot of blame is put on large industrial factories for their green house gas emissions and so forth, but in reality we all play a part in what is being done to our environment. It will be interesting to see what the future has in store for us and if there will be new environmental policies put in place.