Lovers Key State Park

On Thursday we went to Lovers Key State Park for another field trip. I have never been there before, but I really liked it and would like to go again sometime when there is a little more sunshine.

We walked the beach and contemplated the benefits that such an estuary might have as well as things that could threaten its existence like construction and hurricanes. 

ECHO

This is my first blog post of many to come over the next several weeks. It will be a journal kept specifically for my environmental Colloquium class that I am taking over the summer at Florida Gulf Coast University. I have decided that this morning's field trip to ECHO was a good place to start. ECHO stand for Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization. It is located in Fort Myers and is currently one of only a few in the world, but this organization is growing rapidly and they have recently opened up a few in countries such as East Africa and Thailand. Basically, this is a Christian organization aimed at equipping individuals with the skills to grow their own food with the ultimate goal of reducing world hunger and improving the lives of the less fortunate.

Anyhow, today we took a field trip to ECHO and we were taken on a tour of the place by an older woman. Essentially, the whole thing is one giant garden run by a hundred staff members and as many as five hundred volunteers. Unfortunately, today was extremely hot and humid despite the clouds, but at least it was not raining. We learned about a lot of what the organization does and were taught about the different plants they grow such as banana trees and rice as well as how they develop equipment from ordinary objects or even the very same plants that they grow such as bamboo. Below is one of our tour guider's favorite proverbs.

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
-- Chinese Proverb