The Inner Workings of Lizzy Justesen

Article and AP Tip

1) Article title, publication and date.

"CNN Crew detained amid Chinese Tibet crackdown" CNN.com, Monday Jan.30, 2012

2) Summary

CNN crew was traveling to Tibetan autonomous zone to report on Tibetan oppression by Chinese authorities. They are followed, being watched, and travel is limited.

3) Reasons for picking this article

I have always been interested in the Chinese/Tibetan conflict. Nowadays, you never hear much about it. Although it is still a terrible situation in which many people are being hurt, and the Dalai Lama is still unable to live in his home country. I also like the suspense created within the article, the word choice, and the delayed lead.

4) Great quote from the article and why.

"There are claims and counter-claims in this dark conflict. All of it being played out behind a veil of secrecy in the mountains of Western China." I am intrigued by this quote due to it's ominous tone, the powerful imagery and wise word choice.

5) AP Tip

Each quoted person should have its' own paragraph.

Wolfer’s Call to the Wild

It’s 4 a.m. in Alaska, and the sun illuminates the sky like it does a beach on the fourth of July. Grabbing for her shirt, her sleeping bag, a spare towel, she searches for something to block the light. The air is thick with the fragrance of violet and sweat inside the tent as she tosses and turns, praying for slumber. Julie Wolfer is 9,000 feet above sea level and just north of the Arctic Circle, trying to rest after her second day in the Land of the Midnight Sun.

30 years later, Wolfer describes her time in Alaska as being the catalyst that launched her into a lifelong career in Environmental Science.

“It changed me. There was nothing like it, there still has been nothing like it” says Wolfer.

Wolfer was 21 years old when she decided to embark on a course with the National Outdoor Leadership School.  After spending her childhood and adolescence in the small town of Monroe, Conn. and then eventually pursuing a degree in business at the University of Connecticut, Wolfer wanted to see the world.

“I grew tired of reading books by Thoreau and Leopold, I wanted to get out there. I was done with slideshows of glaciers and moose. I made the money, enrolled and never looked back” says Wolfer.

Working two jobs as a waitress and a caretaker for the elderly – it took almost eight months for Wolfer to make the $7,000 required for the adventure.  Never losing sight of her goals, Wolfer was assured she was making the right decision despite the objections of loved ones.

“I remember my dad turning to me and saying “you don’t need to go to Alaska for nature, go in our backyard!”  That was pretty much the attitude of everyone I told about my trip. Genuine confusion” reminisces Wolfer.

Wolfer explained that the moment she touched down in Fairbanks, Alaska she knew she had made the right decision. The next 90 days were filled with sheep, moose, caribou, grizzly bears and revelations at the end of each sun filled night.

“There was one day towards the end of the trip, where everything was going wrong. My feet hurt, I missed my family, I had just dropped my pack in a cold stream, and all I wanted was a cold beer” laughs Wolfer.

At the end of the journey, Wolfer debated staying in Alaska. She explained that it was “one of the hardest decisions to make. I felt at home there.”

Despite lingering desires to continue her life in Alaska, on Aug .16, 1982 Wolfer boarded the plane back to the familiar landscape of the LaGuardia airport in New York, N.Y. She left behind the vast wilderness of Alaska to greet her family and friends at home.

“When I got back to Connecticut, I knew I had to change my life. I had to protect the land that I fell in love with” said Wolfer.

The trip to Alaska not only changed her physically, leaving her fifteen pounds lighter and considerably stronger, but emotionally as well. Wolfer had a profound connection to the land, and went back to school at the University of Connecticut to, as she put it, “do what I knew I wanted to do.”

She deemed her business degree as “existentially useless” as she started all over again, opting to study environmental science with a concentration in geology.

“After leaving Alaska and getting back to school, I always second guessed myself. I thought I was this wild woman who needed to be out in nature constantly.”

Finding solace in neighboring woods and streams, Wolfer began to take weekend backpacking trips and now, at 51 years old, has hiked the entire Appalachian Trail over the span of the last 15 years.

Once Wolfer found the balance between the “civilized” life in a classroom and the seemingly wild life of the outdoors, her passion for learning about the natural world soared.  She fostered an interest for environmental conservation, which guided her to the next stage of her life – working in an occupation to educate others.

After securing a job at Fairfield High School in Fairfield, Conn. in 1990, Wolfer implemented and designed an entire curriculum dedicated to environmental science. Prior to the creation of this class, only biology and chemistry existed in terms of natural science education at a high school level.

“I knew that this was the future. This is what people were going to need to know about in 5, 10, 15 years” said Wolfer.

Wolfer also worked with another teacher at Fairfield High, David Nolf, in an effort to design a backpacking trip that coincided with the reading of Jack Londons’ “Call of the Wild.” Students would take a semester long class that shared the title of Londons’ book, and then culminated at the end with a three-day long expedition into the woods of N.Y. state.

“I saw that these kids were having the same problem I was. You can read about this stuff, but it doesn’t click for you until you live it. Until your cold in your tent, or your legs feel like they are going to burn off – you don’t give a damn about Jack Londons’ novel” remarks Wolfer.

Wolfer co-led these twenty mile backpacking trips for over 15 years. Remarking that she was “getting too old to keep up” she passed the torch over to another environmental enthusiast. Nowadays, the Call of the Wild field trip is a Fairfield High School tradition that students are eagerly applying for.

Getting ready to retire, Julie Wolfer is ready to “enjoy the finer things in life” as she put it. Her and her partner are planning a cruise to Alaska for the summer of 2012.

“I want to take my kids out there. I want them to see it. Even if I can’t camp and hike anymore, I want to see it with them” said Wolfer.

In regards to her last year at Fairfield High School, Julie Wolfer almost dances around the classroom with a contagious passion for her words. The walls are adorned with posters of quotes from Jimi Hendrix to Gandhi, bumper stickers and nameless landscapes. As the bell rings, Wolfer ends every class with the same encouraging sentiment,

“All right, go live a little!” 

Pesticide and Fertilizer Use Linked to Cancer, Birth Defects, and Human Laziness

 With Levent Erhan

Recreational and commercial farms in Western Mass are being affected
by past and ongoing use of herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers, which contain various toxic chemicals that affect the environment in a complexity of ways.

According to both local and national research, integrity of the soil, the groundwater, and the food we grow and eat is being compromised.

A citizen need not be a seasoned scientist to understand the
connection between chemicals in the soil and the effects they can have
on our land and our bodies. It’s comparable to that old saying, “you are what you eat.”

Pesticides, in low doses, may cause acute effects that appear instantly such as irritation to the skin or eyes. If one is exposed to pesticides over a long period of time, the toxins can bio-accumulate and eventually mimic hormones that can cause reproductive problems,
and even cancer. Excessive exposure to pesticides have been linked to neurological disorders and birth defects.

From an environmental standpoint, pesticide use causes water pollution, contaminates the soil, reduces biodiversity and can threaten entire species of animals, the most common victims being birds.

Joanna Campe, the executive director at Remineralize the Earth, a non-governmental organization rooted in Northampton, Mass. believes that soil and what we put into it, is immensely important.

“What had previously been “dirt” under my feet became for me a vast  micro-universe that is the basis of all life” said Campe. “I gained an appreciation, but the more I learned about our current methods of growing food and the use of chemicals, my appreciation turned to dismay.”

Campe specializes in working to regenerate soils and forests using natural minerals, in a process she calls “soil mineralization.” This process of using excess minerals found in mountains and hilltops and transferring them to infertile soils helps to improve soil quality
without the use of fertilizers and pesticides.

In Florence, Mass., Campe began a remineralization project to sustainably revamp the local gardens. The community gardens have just received 80,000 pounds of finely ground rock dust, revitalizing previously compromised soil to create 100 new garden plots for citizens.

Adding the rock dust which came from a quarry in Westfield, Mass. is just one of the many sustainable solutions to the common problem of unusable soil.

“It causes a phenomenal growth of the microorganisms in the soil and increases the nutrient intake of plants. Making the use of fertilizers virtually unnecessary” said Campe.

Abandoning the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides entirely would also lower water pollution rates. When these harmful chemicals are in the soil, they leech into the groundwater and excess nutrients and toxins accumulate.

The threat of farming related methods that use chemicals have already been linked to adverse effects in the Amherst area. According to a number of studies conducted around Amherst, there have been trace levels of xenoestrogenic pesticides found in the water. According to studies done at Amherst College, there is a link between these pesticides and a “possible causative role in breast cancer.”

For one Hadley farmer and business manager, the best solution to avoid
harmful chemicals found in fertilizers and pesticides is simply being
aware of their effects and working to change ones’ food preferences, as he has seen through his business over the past twenty years.

Steve Ozcelik, owner of Maple Farm Foods in Hadley, Mass. said, “sustainable farming and people’s sensitivity to how their food is grown is much more popular now. Ten, twenty years ago, people didn’t even know what “organic” was.”

As a farmer and a store-owner, Steve attested that the consumer market and culture for food was changing, with demand for organic, local and sustainable foods growing.

 “I know a lot of my business comes from customers who shop here because of our competitive pricing. But I also have customers who only buy organic, and many of them are more than willing to pay the difference” said Ozcelik.

The dining commons at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have also demonstrated a commitment to making a transition towards more ecologically conscious agriculture, with its business model of  "Sustainable UMass." In 2008, 23% of produce was purchased locally, including local farms like Joe Czajkowski’s, which is quite literally, in the Dining Service's own backyard.

John Gerber, a sustainable agriculture professor at UMASS believes that the solution can be as simple as the wooden clothes-pin he hands out to his students.

Gerber believes that by making small lifestyle choices like letting your clothes dry in the sun as opposed to a dryer, or buying locally from a farm-individuals can make a difference.

“Although there are shifts towards more ecologically conscious farming
practices, only 1% of the United States population buys directly from
farms”, said Gerber.

The good news is that 8% of the population in Massachusetts buys directly from farms. In the pioneer valley, only 10% buys local.

“The fact that 90% of people in the pioneer valley do not buy directly from farms, with the amount of exposure we have to local farms, is pathetic” said Gerber.

Gerber, who grows his own food, runs his house on solar power, and has a chicken coop in his backyard shifted to a more sustainable lifestyle around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970. This was also the time that the infamous Rachel Carson novel, “Silent Spring” that revealed the evils of the pesticide DDT became known.

Despite the fact that harmful effects from chemicals found in fertilizers and pesticides have been known and documented for over the past thirty years, humans still use them and buy food that has been grown in soil infused with them for a variety of reasons.

“Price is still important to a lot of people. Plain and simple, organic food is more expensive” said Steve of Maple Food Farms.

Gerber blames the comfort of the patterns of human consumption, “our lifestyle prevents us from making changes. We’re either too lazy, or just not mindful enough to make smallchanges that can make big differences.”

Steele Dispells Welcomed Wisdom

Brian Steele, an Easthampton native makes his own rules when it comes to journalism. He spoke with Mary Careys’ journalism class on March 28^th, 2012 for approximately one hour about the trials and tribulations of working as a journalist in modern America.

“By nature, it’s not a very good idea to tell me what to do, because then I probably wouldn’t do it” said Steele.

Graduating high school with a  2.37 GPA and a rather high score of 1210 on his SATs’, Steele did not always know he wanted to be a journalist. Instead, it was his highly opinionated nature that led him to join the newspaper staff during his sophomore year of college. Proclaiming that he had “a lot of opinions, and no one to tell them too”, Steele found an outlet to the world through being an opinion columnist.

After earning his masters degree in journalism, he got into Emerson University with a merit-based scholarship. After graduating and writing a grueling thesis, which took months, Steele was hired by The Republican, and now is working at Channel 22 news.

Steele was drawn to channel 22 because “it is the most responsible station in the area, most heavy with important information.”

Finding a station that was journalistically moral is an important value for Steele.

“This is one of the worst times, atleast, in the history of American journalism” said Steele.

The problem that Steele has specifically with the media is the relationship between a reporter and their boss.  The decision between whether to pursue a story that he felt needed to be shared, or to follow the instruction of his editor is a constant battle.

“You need to know whether you want your bills paid or whether you want to sleep at night” said Steele.

Although, offering advice to a class of about 12 young journalists Steele said, “sometimes it is safe, reasonably safe to go against your bosses.”

Steele is constantly straddling the line between moral and immoral, and is trying to fulfill his needs as a journalist and as a person.

“In the journalism industry, try to remember, you’re not an artist and you don’t have the authority to do whatever you want to do. Your editors are going to tell you to do things that you think are immoral” said Steele.

UMASS Grad Bends Reality to Create Fiction

Ana Reyes, a graduate from the University of Massachussetts Amherst has spent many tedious hours sifting through scripts looking for the next big thing while working in Los Angeles, California.

Reyes left her job on the west coast, the pursue her masters of fine arts while actively following her natural tuition as a writer. 

“I try to write 500 words a day, I had a teacher who told me that, I found that very, very helpful” said Reyes.

Working on her own fiction novel, and in a partnership with her boyfriend to create a screenplay, Reyes is a depiction of the modern writer trying to make herself known.

“You have to be able to walk into a room and sell yourself, not just the story” said Reyes.

Part of her craft is to “make a big effort to pay attention to those little things.” Reyes believes that by paying close attention to ones’ surroundings, they are able to find a story quite easily. It is by examining the possibilities of reality that ideas are born.

“Things that make good fiction, at least a certain kind of fiction, is heightened reality. It’s real, but kind of weird and noteworthy” said Reyes.

Lizzy Justesen

Journ-300

Study Abroad Students Find Home Away From Home

In college, there are many experiences that a student may come to anticipate. That dreaded eight a.m. class, the Animal House-like fraternity parties that may leave a pupil scratching their head the next morning, the hoped for success of their football team, and now, their study abroad experience.

Across college campuses around the nation, university level youth are leaving the confines of their beloved institutions to pack their lives into air friendly sized luggage and embark on the trip of a lifetime.

The inspiration for the pilgrimage to anywhere from Hong Kong to Chile by students from ages 18-22 differs from person to person. Likewise, the quality of experience is also subjective. Some find themselves right at home, while others are left longing for the comfort of their native country.

Cassandra Baxter, a 20 year-old sophomore at Northeastern University in Boston, Mass. has been living in Barcelona, Spain since Jan. 6, 2012.

“I speak fluent Spanish, so Spain was the obvious choice” said Baxter.

 Spending the majority of her free time aimlessly wandering the wide avenues of the city, embellished with the world famous architecture of Antoni Gaudi, Baxter feels at home. She has become a seasoned local, mastering the metro like a professional, and giving detailed directions to transient tourists.

“It was not an easy transition. I would wake up and forget where I was. Lots of panic attacks” said Baxter.

Baxter also experienced most study abroad students worst fear while she was taking a weekend trip in Paris, France. As she was leaving the clubs at approximately 5 a.m., she was mugged on the metro. A man who she referred to as “a complete psycho” stole her jewelry and money, leaving her with a black eye and a longing for home.

For some students, the semester abroad goes flawlessly, devoid of any horrific experiences like that of which Baxter endured. This was the case for 20 year-old University of Connecticut junior, Michael McGillicuddy.

McGillicuddy, a business major, described his semester in Hong Kong, China as a “dream. I loved that city.  I learned so much.”

Having never left the country prior to his move to China in spring of 2011, McGillicuddy had very little trouble adjusting to his new life in a city where the population is over seven million. McGillicuddy was comfortable rushing to make his morning classes in the organized chaos of such a populated city.

“You just have to take it all in, you know? Go do everything there is to do and tell me then if you’re homesick. This city is alive,” said McGillicuddy.

McGillicuddy was so entranced by his stay in Hong Kong he decided to do a second semester there the summer of 2012.

“I could definitely see myself living there as a professional in the future” said McGillicuddy.

McGillicuddy had an exemplary experience in Hong Kong, which he has admitted has changed him forever. The path that he was going on prior to this experience, never accounted for how much he would love his home away from home. Experiences like these are part of the advertised magic of a study abroad experience.

McGillicudy said, “you don’t know who you are until you are taken that far out of your comfort zone. Out of your country, away from your friends, your family. Not even speaking the same language.”

For other students, it is not the prospect of a life changing experience that drives them to live thousands of miles away from their home, rather social pressure.

 For 21-year-old Claire Howard, a junior at the University of California at Santa Barbara, she felt that going abroad was “something you had to do to complete the college experience.”

Howard, who is finishing up her semester abroad in Paris, France said, “I’m happy that I went, but I definitely went for the wrong reasons, and to the wrong place.”

Choosing Paris due to her love of art and fashion, Howard soon realized that there were many elements she did not consider prior to enrollment. One major factor that caused her grief was the cost of living in such a prestigious European city.

“Education is much cheaper here, but everything else makes up for it. Eating out, and buying groceries, just normal day-to-day things. I am almost completely out of money,” said Howard.

Spending her idle time riverside at the Seine with an easel and her palette, Howards’ favorite thing about living in Europe is “the pace of life here. I could sit here for hours and never feel guilty. That is something I’ll take back to America with me.”

It has been warned that one of the most challenging aspects of studying abroad in a foreign country is maintaining the balance between work and play. With the allure of new places, new faces and in most cases, no drinking age – students have to constantly practice the art of self control in order to still maintain a passing grade whilst afar.

Baxter, was continuously drawn to the free bottle of Dom Perignon and Absolut given to her by promoters, which led to many nights out and many missed classes.

Haley Horgan, a junior at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has dealt with many of the same appetizing temptations. Although she is presently living in a more rural area in Norwich, England, the “European lifestyle” as she put it, can be troublesome even when one is far from a big city.

“I thought drinking a beer after class at UMASS was bad, here, we start the day with one” said Horgan.

Horgan believes it is the self-discipline one learns on a trip like this that contributes to its’ entire purpose.

“You can only learn to pace yourself when you slept through that class you really couldn’t miss” said Horgan.

There is also value in the formation of new relationships with the peers in which you are studying abroad with. For some students, they embark on the adventure entirely alone, not knowing a single soul that is coming along from their university or college.

“The people I’ve met out here, they are family now. I wouldn’t do a single thing different. Best time of my life” said McGillicuddy.