The Lifestyle of being Green

Recently, I represented our school in a television reality show called Green School Challenge, from which I gained a lot of priceless experience and learnt lessons that turns my life upside down, I can say. The reality show, Green School Challenge, is a game show, in which schools compete against each other by creating a greener school campus. It is actually extremely challenging as a team would be eliminated at the end of each challenge, that means we would have to do well in every challenge in order strive for victory. Firstly, we would receive a challenge, a goal that we would have to reach within a week, making a greener campus step-by-step. At the end of the week, environmentalist and professors would come to our school to do investigations, and we would do presentations about the act we had done to create a greener environment, after which they would give scores according to the aspect of efficiency, cost, creativity and presentation skills. The most unforgettable week is the last week, in which our school competed against ABC College, which is famous and renowned for the effort they put in to make the campus more environmentally friendly. Our task was to reduce the carbon released to 50%, which is a mission impossible! After receiving the task, a huge group of teachers and students including myself started to make plans to reduce the electricity used and the energy wasted. Then we started to hold billions of meetings and put them into practice. The division of labor was efficient and the method of calculating the energy usage worked, thus succeeded in reaching the goal. Even though we only finished being the first-runner-up at the end of this competition, I think that we had done a fabulous job in testing the limits, and breaking through. What matters is not victory or defeat; it is not up to us to decide but the effort we put in and the lessons we learnt on the long way to be in the finals. How can we expect to win if we dont even try? Therefore we do researches and made investigations and experiments to make measures that helped reaching our goals. From these, we got many things that are not engraved in the textbooks. First of all, I learnt many means to be greener. Via researches, we found out that the energy shortage is caused mainly by the waste and overconsumption of energy, instead of the overpopulation, as we expected. The energy we waste by not switching off the appliances not in use can be saved to power up New York City, the very-developed metropolis. We are wasting such a shocking amount of energy while many less-fortunate are living in slums, in poverty, with no electricity, with no dignity. Do you think that ruining what we have is what we should do? Are we taking them for granted? This issue brought me a lot of self-reflection and doubts, whether what I did is in words or in action. I have been trying to live a greener life for years, and have been satisfied with that. However, what I did is not enough as I had never been aware of the wastage. We take private vehicles, we order more than necessity, and we thus leave them as garbage, as leftovers. We are not fair to those who lack daily necessity, are we? These questions really stirred my life up. Now its a new millennium, and it is time for us to decide the path we are on, and will be on, along with the way to void or to reserve. So we should start nurturing a greener lifestyle, for ourselves, our sons, our grandsons and many many generations ahead.