Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Fall 2016 Update

Hello friends and family!

I'm so sorry I've neglected to keep you all updated on my life for the past few months. Usually when I'm traveling, blogging is part of my routine, but when I'm settled into more of a steady job it seems to fall by the wayside. Hence me not writing since I got back from Cuba. So here is a brief overview of the past several months of my life. 

After I got back from traveling, I almost immediately went to Montana to work as a crew leader for the Montana Conservation Corps, which I might have mentioned in my last post. It was similar to the jobs I'd had the previous two years in Vermont and Nevada, except this time the crew I was leading was a specialized invasive weed management crew. Our work all summer involved spraying invasive weeds with backpack sprayers of herbicide, not exactly the type of job I would have necessarily seen myself doing given my love of organic food and aversion to toxic chemicals, but after learning more about the process and the chemicals themselves I felt okay about doing it. Our safety procedures were strict (and I made sure to enforce them) and I trusted the knowledge of the more experienced professionals we worked with who assured us that overall it wasn't detrimental to the environment and that it was the most effective way to protect the biodiversity of the habitats we were maintaining so that the non-native plants didn't crowd out the natives ones.