Field Trip at Santa Monica Beach

Your assignment is to take a "field trip": a nature walk, a tour around your neighborhood, a bicycle ride, a trip to the city, or any kind of journey by any mode of transportation, that gets you out into your environment. Observe your surroundings, make of note things, situations, and people's behavior from the new lens the course has given you to see things from the perspective of environmental ethics. There are a number of ways of approaching this assignment. You might have a particular place in mind that is environmentally sensitive or that has been designated as susceptible to environmental pollution. You might want to visit the local dump, a recycling center, or a wastewater treatment plant. You could take a trip to the beach, to a waterway or river area, take a walk on a wilderness trail, or drive out to the desert areas where people recreate on weekends and vacations to see if these areas are being abused or suffer from littering and pollution. You could visit the zoo or animal park, or even go to a farm or food-processing plant.
The idea is to apply what is really going on in the world-your lifeworld, as the phenomenologists call it. This everyday world is our true environs, or surrounding world. This assignment is an attempt to return to the place where, in a certain sense, you already are--as part of the world, as part of nature--you are investigating a more significant part of your self-identity. Observe carefully what you see, hear, smell, and feel. Try to take things in from the perspective of an environmental ethic, as you consider the various concepts of nature, land, and our world overall as an ecologically interdependent system.
Your assignment is to write a report that details your experience with as much specificity as possible. Here are some questions to think about as you write your report.
What were you expecting to encounter?
What, precisely, did you observe?
How did you decide where to go or what to look for?
Did anything you studied cause you to see things differently than you have in the past?
How did adopting the phenomenological approach (seeing the world from the standpoint of pure subjective experience) affect your relationship to the environment during the field trip?
Did you make any critical discoveries or notice anything interesting or surprising (or shocking!) about the environment or area you visited?
Which ecophenomenological philosopher impacted your thinking most when writing this report?
Assess anything you may find in terms of environmental and ecological sustainability issues and, if possible, come up with a recommendation for a possible solution or way to improve the situation, should you find a problem or environmentally sensitive situation. If you find no problems, perhaps you have not traveled far enough; or perhaps you live in an area that is well attuned to environmental conservation issues and engages in sustainability practices. If that is the case, explain what is being done right.
try adopting the "phenomenological attitude" (this is what Husserl calls the "phenomenological reduction") as you take a fresh look at your environment. See if you can "bracket out" your habitual thought patterns and preconceived ideas about what you are seeing and experiencing--try looking at the world with the "fresh" eyes of the phenomenologist.
Please include images, maps, charts, diagrams, or even links to video clips in your Essay.