Wills+C's+Page

= **This I Believe...** = **by Wills Christensen**

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We are creating a society of loss, where more goods are made and where more energy is wasted than most people even realize. People in our society need to become more aware about the choices we make everyday. I believe in saving our environment and creating a more sustainable future where people are educated about their energy and make smart decisions that will benefit both them and the environment.

For the majority of my life, I was never incredibly passionate about the environment, and truthfully, I was completely ignorant to the problems that are facing our world or the harm that I bring to it on a daily basis. This ignorance stopped for me about a year ago when I first learned about an organization called CoPIRG (Colorado Public Interest Research Group) where they came to my classroom and spoke about people joining their organization to help stop energy waste in the Boulder community. After learning more, I found that they enlist college students to different programs so that they fight for the cause they believe in. I chose “Energy Service Corps”, where we do several community outreach opportunities around the Boulder area. One opportunity is K-12 educations where I go to speak to children about different habits they can adopt around the house with their parents and also what are all the bad sources of energy we use on a daily basis. This project is possibly the most important job that CoPIRG does because we are trying to change the future, and the kids we educate have the possibility to affect the next generation’s world. The other major project is where people from ESC goes into someone’s home and assesses all the things that are saving energy, all the things that are wasting energy, and then we do a weatherization of the house where we seal up all the major cracks.

All these community outreach projects that I have been doing over the past year have had a major effect in my life. Now I am way more concerned about the environment than I was ever before, and if it’s possible for me to change my energy wasting habits then anyone could do it. I believe in saving the environment, but for our modern society to accomplish this task they need to be well educated and equipped with the right tools to make smart decisions in their daily lives that will create less of a negative impact on the world around them.

At the beginning of the project, I was not worried about learning new technologies because I have had a good amount of audio production while interning for NPR. But what I came to soon realize is that Audacity is nothing I was familiar or comfortable with using. Above all, my computer crashed as I was mixing my original TIB and even through Audacity's "recovery program" it was recovered as a big blob of blue spiked nonsense. So I eventually became used to the program after I had re-recorded my TIB and learned how to normalize all of the spiked vocals and adding in silence to elongate a break or intro/ending. Also if your tracks are placed close to the right spot, you can hit 'quick mix' and the computer will mix them for you despite your own self trimming up here and there. I chose three images from google, where two of the three would show pollution and a need for change in the future while the last one is a sign of hope.