Happy Earth Day! This year’s theme is A Billion Acts of Green.You didn’t know it was Earth Day? You didn’t know Earth Day had themes? Don’t worry, that’s what I’m here for. To help our school become more environmentally aware here’s a tutorial to APES:

APES 101. Let me guess, your first question is “What is APES?” Freshmen, APES is the acronym for AP Environmental Science. I hope you don’t need anymore explanation than that, if you do…. you are beyond my help.

For the rest of the population that still has a chance, tune in for the wonderful world of the environment. Don’t forget to buy goodies at the concession stands. There are two types of people when it comes to the environment. The first kind say that global climate change is a myth thus there is no such thing, and the second kind believe that if we don’t change the way we live, we won’t be living for much longer.

Astronomically speaking we have billions of years left until the sun powers out; environmentally speaking we have hundreds maybe thousands of years left before we use off of our resources. Which one is right?

To me both are, in a way, true. We do have time in both scenarios we just don’t have time to wait for the sun to be done.

70% of the Earth is water and only 3% of that is viable. In America, we use up the most amount of water. We also use up the most amount of everything. That’s us: ambitious. It’s not some secret that we Americans tend to use every ounce resource we can until it’s sucked so dry the cracks are cracking.

But in APES you dig and go out in the prairie and learn about the way the world works. Every year we go on a field trip, canoeing-n-poo. No, we don’t canoe in the poo; we go canoeing in the North Shore Channel, and THEN we go to a waste factory.

If you’ve ever been canoeing then you know that it’s a huge workout for your arms. Say your thumb is in blinding pain and all you can think about is how much it hurts, but all of the sudden you just cut your whole hand off, so you could think about something other than that pain. That was exactly, verbatim, how I felt. I was in that much pain. But I canoed, and that’s a lot more than what a lot of people in the world can say.

Let me take you to the river and tell you our story as if you were really there. When we arrive, you see a very woodsy area. It’s not a forest; once you look past the trees, you can see buildings and roads but closer you have the river and the trees and the canoes…. and people… and animals.

While on the excursion, each class was divided into groups and assigned a certain task. My group, with the diligent senior Jovy Max and smarticle senior Emily Iverson, was supposed to look at our surroundings and capture a few pictures. It was by far the easiest thing that any group had to do–we saw everyone else doing test-measure water quality before, during and after the trip, all the while we only had to upload pictures. Of course, as my APES teacher reads this, she doesn’t want to hear how easy it was; so, Mrs. Schram, it was practically impossible to do this assignment. But we did discover that we humans are pigs. We saw so many littered plastic bags and other used plastics–and graffiti.

Here’s what every other sucker had to test: D.O.  (dissolved oxygen), B.O.D. (Biological oxygen demand), fecal coliform bacteria, nitrate phosphate, pH, temperature, turbidity, and benthic invertebrates. If you’re wondering what all of those tests do, I have no idea; what you really need to know is our tests were to figure out the quality of the water.

After our field trip to the Northshore Channel here’s more of what we learned:

Don’t go swimming in this water anytime soon. The real funny part is that of all the other channels of the Chicago River, Northshore channel is one of the cleanest. Sad, right? To make it cleaner is common sense. Don’t go dumping undesirables in our river. Dispose of your garbage in the appropriate areas i.e trash bins or recycle bins. I don’t know how much more Layman I can get with that. It might sound mean, but this is the sad reality of our environment. We are leaving it hanging on a thread. How are you going to make it better?