Prisons and the Environment

We had a guest lecture a week ago, guess I forgot to post this up. I could of sworn I did it, must of been too tired or something. Last week wasn't the best weeks, and these up coming weeks aren't gonna be much better, I think. In any case, we had another two guest lecturers last week. Henry Curtis, Executive Director of Life of the Land, and Kat Brady, Assistant Executive Director of Life of the Land.

Both people weren't bad speakers, interesting enough and held our attentions. Although much of what Henry said seemed to be a bit pessimistic towards the environment. Sure we all have some kinds of bumps in the road, but like always, let's try not to let it drag us down. I was interested when he asked the class what the leading city in terms of population was. His answer was Seoul, South Korea.

I was skeptical at first, then tried to rationalize it in my mind. Okay, Seoul, S.K. has many people, most of which don't usually leave. Later on in the week, as I was doing my history homework I had to search the internet for the leading city in population, then cite it. As much as I wanted to say it was Seoul, S.K. , there wasn't any articles on any website leading to that conclusion. Of course I cited Mr. Curtis in my post for class, but I'd like to believe that the leading city population wise is Beijing, China, home of the Forbidden City. To me, it makes sense because it's the oldest capital that's been around for well over 1000 years. That and China has a fairly large population.

Anyways, I'm getting off track. Mr. Curtis liked to talk about the problems we have in Hawaii and the world. The issues of fossil fuel addiction, greenhouse gases, oil spills, agriculture, rain forests, etc. Essentially, all the big problems we have with the environment today. As much as I liked talking about these subjects, it was a bit depressing. I understand the history of these subjects, but we shouldn't wallow in them for a long time, lest we get depress and stop functioning. I would of rather talked more on a possible solution to these topics, but then again, no one really said anything.

Next person was Kat Brady. She talked about the environments in a prison. Which like any environmental issue (although specialized to prisons), have some controversy over what we should do about them. Should we let those who did wrong doings rot in prison, or should we rehabilitate them into the correct path and reintroduce them back to the real world. Sure there were some statistics here and there generally about (corrupt) prisons, but there are some sights to that. I was thinking, if people are so happy in prison doing dangerous things, why not leave them there? Isn't it better to contain the virus than let it spread? Although, yes, dealing with corrupt officials is troublesome, essentially everything is corrupt and everything runs on businesses. But that is neither here nor there and in the end, we can do nothing about it. Instead, there should be a select group of people, who are inspected themselves every six months for corruption, who go and inspect (potentially remove) the corruption from every prison and containment facility. Just anything like this would be a great help in the prison systems.

In the end, both speakers ran long, and we were all excited to leave. Though none more so than the girl who sat behind me. She was so excited the last 40 ish minutes of class that she was all packed and was literally like jumping out of her seat to leave. I didn't think that she should of done that. If the teacher or a guest speaker saw, they'd be pretty pissed. The girl did say that she didn't want to leave because it would have been rude to walk away in the middle of the discussion, but I thought that it was rude to look like you want to escape anyways. Whatever, what's done is done and hopefully we don't have anymore guest speakers for a while. I'd rather talk and hear opinions than hear other people's experiences. I can listen to my grandparents on my own time.