Why Environmental Science?

My family and I travel down the road and I look out the window to see all the construction starting up around us. There was one constant thing that bugs me when I see these construction sites, they use a large orange net with the sign “Tree Protection Area, Do Not Enter”, so to a person that probably means the trees are being protected so don’t touch them. Then why are the construction companies cutting the trees down within that parameter?

My interest in environmental science wasn’t very apparent until we went into the environmental unit in middle school, and we started talking about pollution, and the different factors that are occurring because of climate change. AP Environmental Science grew my interest in this topic even more, as learning about the different layers of the lakes, rivers, and soil, and learning more in-depth about the human impact on the earth around us, grew my interest even more. Going out into the wetland that sat behind the school, and looking for the benthic invertebrates, and other animals that lived and used the same area we are in, started to grab my attention. 

It was apparent that I was interested in the earth, the people who live on it, and how the environment works together to function as a whole when we were asked to create our final app in a DukeTIP course that involved app development and learning ways to code an app from scratch. The idea that I ultimately chose to create the app upon, happened to be water, educating children on how to conserve water, and teaching them about water shortages around the world. It involved creating an app that had a map that when you clicked on one of the pins, there was an image of drought and a description of what the people in that area are having to do since there is a severe water shortage in their homes.

This idea from the app I created further developed into me writing a paper a few years after, after water potability. It involved using machine learning and data science to examine a dataset on water potability and understand the effect of different chemicals on the potability of a sample of water. Environmental science also became a large interest when I began writing another paper the following summer, as I began to write a paper on air quality and the effect of air pollutants on the air, and how the air quality index differs depending on measurements of particles in the air.