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Carmen Garcia-Conde

Mrs.Kestenbaum
English HL 1
30 October 2016
Ecocritical Gatsby Reflection
My experience from the Channel Islands field trip and looking at Gatsby through an
ecocritical point of view gave me a chance to model empathy, compassion and respect
towards the environment. During the field trip I was in a group lead by an environmentalist
who explained how the islands ecosystem worked and why specific natural processes
occurred within the island. Listening to the environmentalist made me feel empathy towards
the environment because I learned more about how endangered the environment is. Searching
for the ecocritical value in The Great Gatsby helped me feel compassionate for the
environment because I got to analyze the damage that humans were already causing to the
environment. Thinking that this damage has highly increased over the past 100 years made
me feel overwhelmed at the thought that we are destroying our planet at a very fast rate. It
made me feel more respectful towards the environment and more aware of the damages we
are causing to our planet. Because I am currently enrolled in an environmental class I can
appreciate what the environment does for us and my respect towards it has grown. Seeing
how societys own greed destroys the environment makes me question weather it is worthy to
exploit the planet the way we do. This experience allowed me to become a genuine inquirer
because it helped me generate questions that had to do with helping save the environment. I
began thinking on how a single person can contribute to conserving the environment, on how
communities can help, and on what measures companies can take to reduce their
contamination levels. I feel like so much can be done but so little is accomplished because of
our desire for comfort and money. While working on the activity I had to apply high creative

and critical thinking skills to come up with a good essay. Because The Great Gatsby is not
about ecology, it was hard to develop the ecocentric ideas from the book, and thus had to use
my own creativity to develop further ideas and apply them to the book. The whole experience
challenged me intellectually by making me really think about the book through an ecocritical
perspective. I was also challenged physically by doing the hike in the Channel Islands. By
hard work and determination I got to experience a unique ecosystem and was able to apply
ideas from the islands environmentalists to the final essay. By the end of the hike I was very
tired because I do not usually go hiking but this physical challenge allowed me to have a
unique experience with the environment of the island. Throughout the experience I developed
different elements of the IB learner profile such as being an inquirer, knowledgeable, thinker,
risk taker and open-minded person. Thanks to the activity I was able to formulate questions
about the future of our planet and what we could do to help reduce the pollution levels, I had
to apply concepts I already knew with those taken from the book because we were not
allowed to use external sources, and I got to hear ideas that my group partners developed. My
weakness was not being a good enough communicator with other group members, which is
something I will work on in future projects.

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