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Human Environment Interaction

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Vance Cook 4/27/2020 Environment and Society In response to the recent national holiday, Earth Day, I have been interested in what ways the Earth, our home, interacts with us humans, and how humans interact with the Earth. This symbolic interaction is quite diverse across the globe, yet people are all interacting, on some level, with their environment around them. People interact with their environment in different ways, and the environment interacts with people in different ways as well. This thought is what influenced me in choosing a topic to talk about for my final blog post. In thinking of the different ways people interact with their environment, some negative interactions come to mind; one thing in particular is the overall human contribution to pollution of the environment. Pollution happens all across the globe, and has been happening for hundreds of years. After long periods of this, I feel that those effects are now coming full circle. Our long term pollution habi
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The Hidden Epidemic

I have just completed watching the film, Understanding the Opioid Epidemic. It is a documentary published by PBS that covers the issue of the opioid epidemic here in the U.S. The documentary covers a growing epidemic in our nation. Opioid prescription is directly linked with several health related issues such as drug use, drug related suicide, and rates of psychological disorders, yet doctors prescribe them so often. I was shocked to find out about this issue because doctor prescribed pain medications are so common in the United States, and to hear that this was contributing to a load of negative consequences in our society was a little baffling. My whole life, it has been a norm for doctors to prescribe pain medications if you have a surgery or painful treatments. The dentist uses laughing gas to numb the pain so children can sit through getting a cavity filling. Because of the norm built around pain medication, its use is so common and many people are becoming addicted to the pain m
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Student Voting at Michigan Technological University

Given that our society operates as a democracy, it is of utmost importance for every member to vote. It is each citizens’ civic duty after all. Based on that principle, I would expect to see numbers supporting the claim that more people vote than those who do not. After looking into the voting rates published by the NSLVE, I was shocked to see that more people are not voting than those who do. The National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement(NSLVE) is an organization that collects data on each college campus regarding its voting participation. Here on my college campus, the rate of students who vote is significantly less than the national average for all institutions. Based on data from 2016, the average voting rate among all institutions was 50.4%; on the campus of Michigan Technological University, around 34.3% are voting. Even more shocking was that the registration rate was 62.3%, meaning that only half of the people who register to vote end up going through with the process
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Religious Outsider

Vance Cook 2-21-20 Growing up attending a public school can teach kids quite a lot regarding how they fit in related to other kids. There are many groups being formed, and kids are figuring out which groups they belong to. Some of the groups that I noticed were the athletic kids, the smart/nerdy kids, the art kids, and the farmer kids. Groups may be different based on where you grew up, and the culture in that area. Religion is another heavy influencer of group dynamics, and one that tends to encourage conformity and discourage outsiders. In this blog posting, I shall talk about my sociological experience growing up as a religious outsider in my community. I grew up in a town outside of Grand Rapids, MI. The town is called Hudsonville, a small town in between Grand Rapids and Holland. Grand Rapids is a medium sized city with close access to Lake Michigan. Early on, Grand Rapids was settled by a lot of dutch Christians, and that influence is still prevalent in the area today
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Activity in high forested areas

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Within my hometown I had noticed that the students who had a forest, near their house tended to be more active, and enjoyed being outside more than the students who lived in the city or in a large subdivision. As a child, I was always outside playing in the woods in my backyard. I feel that growing up playing in the woods has led me to be more active than some of my peers who grew up in city/urban environments. This has led me to hypothesizing that living with easy access to forests will cause the surrounding population to be more active due to increased access to exercise activity.   Lewis County, Washington has an area of 6,309,842,400 feet^2. Of this land area, 51.96% is evergreen forest, 7.59% mixed forests, and 17.86 % is considered shrubs. Overall, this is considered a highly forested area when compared to other counties across America. King County, Washington is a similar size to Lewis County and is made up of 41.79% evergreen forest, 13.42% mixed forest, and 10.75% shr
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