Something I really enjoy about my sit spot community is the feeling of it being a separated group all attaining one common goal: to take space from the daily stressors of life. I’ll explain what I mean by separated group. Many people that pass through the park or come and sit for a silent moment are alone; listening to music, or enjoying their lunch or even just taking a minute to breathe in the freshly cut grass scented air. There are a few groups of people (mostly students) enjoying the hours after class together, conversing and laughing, but not many. Outside of the people roaming the park, there are a large amount of pigeons scavenging for food scraps left by toddlers and other careless visitors. A couple of sparrows can be spotted as well, but the biodiversity is best defined by the trees, bushes, and flowers specifically curated by the park’s gardeners. I haven’t been able to identify many of the different plants I’ve seen, apart from a few different species of palm trees. Nothing has appeared from below ground apart from the ants crawling on my shoes. A bee also flew onto my friends can of juice and started to drink from the top with its small tongue. It was a very cute moment.

I took the carbon footprint test for my flight and discovered that my trip from NYC to Auckland (with a layover in Honolulu) released 8.482 tons of CO2e into the atmosphere, which is really insane to think about. Something I really like about the website though, is that they give you ways to offset the footprint through donations for big environmental projects all over the world. However, as a broke college student, it’s probably more affordable to work on offsetting my footprint by doing simple things like walking to my destinations every day instead of taking a car or public transportation, continuing to use reusable items like water bottles, and reducing my plastic waste. I’ve also been doing research on the different conservation groups in Auckland and have begun to reach out to them so I can be more involved in keeping Auckland green and healthy.