Something to Think About

Leading into our CV Zine Fest, we are focusing on creating groups to produce zines. This week, each student gave presentations as to what social topic we are advocating for and proposed topics that we want to develop into zines. My proposed topic was urbanization and that can be pretty easy for me to decipher how that has some kind of effect on the environment and how there are specific things within environmental science that has been discovered about urbanizing. For example, some of the negative effects we have seen and will continue to see is the loss of effective farmlands, an increase in the effects of energy demands, continuance of climate change, changes of hydrologic and biogeochemical cycles, breaks down habitats and the reduction of biodiversity. I found this out by doing a lot of research, where “environmental impacts” is practically in every search bar on Google when you start to type in “urbanization”. What I didn’t know was that there were so many other topics where science came into play. I found that most social injustices can be explained (not justified) based on neurological disadvantages and societal expectations. When you put these things together, it creates a ungraspable norm that we, as a society, like to feed off of. In things such as teen depression or anxiety, they are downplayed because of the reputation that teenagers have about be

ing over exaggerators and attention seekers. However, when relating this to things we read in class such as: You have to Grow Up Sometime: The Developing Brain and NYT Op-Ed: Return to the Teenage Brain by Richard A. Friedman, it was easy to see the connection between an undeveloped brain who literally doesn’t have the amount of maturity to think rationally and relies on solely on emotion. Going onto further weeks, I hope to discover more about how there is a science behind what beauty standards are or how genders are explained on a neurological standpoint.