I attended the Fellow Interview with Todd Bittner and Andrew Zepp where they talked about natural areas that people have been increasingly visiting since the start of COVID. I’ve never visited the Cornell Botanic Gardens even though I’m in my third year so I really want to make a point of it one of these days before classes end in May. Something that was discussed was if people would continue visiting parks once the pandemic is completely over. I definitely think that people in general will have a new appreciation for the outdoors once it’s safe to travel again. Overall, I think that since people will be free to do other things, the amount of people visiting parks will be less than pandemic times, but more than pre-pandemic times. Hopefully due to this, people will start taking better care of the Earth, as a lot of environmental issues are still on the rise.

I recently saw this video in one of my engineering ethics classes about how a Senator brought snow into a meeting and used it as evidence that global warming was a hoax as it was “clearly cold outside”. I thought this ridiculous and reminded me of the people who believe COVID is a hoax. This is sort of unrelated to the fellow interview, but either way, I feel that in general people who think COVID is fake are the same kinds of people who think global warming is fake and don’t protect our natural parks.