Hi everyone!
My name is Jasmine, and I’m an English Literature & Criticism major at UMass Dartmouth. I’m a fully online student, and I attend UMass from the comfort of my home, surrounded by copious piles of books and two incessantly attention-seeking lovebug cats.
I’ve completed a Creative Writing AA, and I work as a Freelance Writer in my every day, so you’d think blog writing would be natural to me, but this sort of feels like an awkward first date.
And on that note,
Welcome to my Ecofeminism blog for this course!
I’ve chosen the Autostraddle blog to take inspiration from and try to model with my own blog.
I love the way that all of the pieces featured on the Autostraddle site embody an intelligent yet humorous, conversational, and relatable tone. It makes reading their op-eds and other articles feel like you’re sitting on the couch talking to your best friend. I’d like my blog to have that same kind of voice.
Inherently, with a topic like Ecofeminism, not only will I be covering the pivotal hybrid of Environmentalism and Feminism, but these pieces will incorporate conversations of paramount importance, such as oppression, race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and culture. At first glance, this seems really heavy. But in order to dismantle systems of oppression, foremost, we need to get comfortable talking about them, and that’s my goal here. I want this blog to take intimidating yet important topics and make them accessible and digestible.
Autostraddle has a major focus on sex-positive feminism with provocative posts ranging from dating advice to NSFW product reviews. This is an aspect of feminism that won’t really be amplified on my blog. Not because it isn’t a significant facet of freeing oneself from patriarchal oppression, but because I’m pretty shy about that kind of stuff! 😳
————-
Circling back to my introduction, I mentioned that I’m an online student at UMass, and that’s because I live in New Jersey! At the beginning of my relationship with my girlfriend, I moved across the country to her home in Texas. But after a year, we packed up and drove cross-country (again) to settle in the Garden State. She loves it here (thankfully), and I hated it there. Too hot, too many bugs, and way too many dirty looks when I’d hold her hand in the grocery store.
We live on the coast, like a 3-minute drive to the beach, so there are plenty of environmental causes that are prevalent where I live. We have beaches, wooded hiking trails, suburbs, and country (like the Pine Barrens).
We have our issues. You may have heard that NJ stinks… and that’s because we have unhealthy air quality. NJ Spotlight News reported that “New Jersey has never met the federal health-quality standards for ground-level ozone, more commonly known as smog, which envelops parts of the state during hot summer days.” We suffer so much pollution, especially from neighboring states and cities like Philly and NYC.
Also, since almost the entirety of NJ is a suburb of those large cities, we are developing our open spaces and farmland faster than ever. More and more people want to escape congested cities and live “down the shore,” but that’s resulting in deforestation, over-development, and overcrowding.
Conservationists have made headway, and an amendment has been made to our state laws that require money to be put into preservation efforts. Previously, up to $200 million a year was used to buy open space and farmland and develop urban parks. Now, about $80 million a year is dedicated to our Department of Environmental Protection.
We didn’t earn the title The Garden State for nothing. But now, it’s become an environmental conservationist effort to maintain the lush greenery, fields of sweet corn, and rows of vine-ripened tomatoes that we were once known for.