I created my image by going to a local park with some of my clothing items and placing them in piles on the ground. I then photoshopped children playing on the slides. I did this because I wanted to bring the environment we place upon developing countries in our own space. The United States often ships away clothing to developing countries, leaving it to pile up around the city, beaches, and living spaces. Not only are these dumps taking up space, they also release toxic fumes into the air. This is a growing problem around the world as fast fashion remains popular as ever. It is crucial that we begin to take responsibility for the problems we create, and put in place better methods and regulations for second hand donating and for fast fashion companies. A simple way to do your part is to avoid buying from fast fashion companies and make an effort to buy from second hand stores such as uptown cheapskate. While even these stores have their faults it lessens the amount of product being tossed into a dump. By addressing this issue we can hopefully beautify the areas we’ve already destroyed, significantly lessen the toxic fumes being released into the air, save wildlife from ingesting it, and so much more.

Where Will We Draw The Line?

I created this image by using a printed out picture of the land before the houses were built and photographed it with the neighborhood in the background. The props include my hand holding a printed picture of the land before a neighborhood. This picture shows the neighborhoods of Norman, Oklahoma off of Rock Creek Road. On the right side of the image, there is a row of houses alongside the woods on the left. My image shows the effects of overpopulation on the environment. In order to accommodate a fast growing population, forests need to be destroyed for new homes to be built. Deforestation forces many animals out of their habitat causing them to potentially die. A smaller amount of trees and plants decreases the amount of carbon dioxide being changed into oxygen. Overpopulation also negatively affects air pollution, plastic pollution, and water pollution. In order to protect the environment, we can preserve larger amounts of land and wildlife in the United States. If we can protect more land, deforestation will be reduced allowing for gas exchange and preservation of wildlife. Preserving land would not be easy since many people want to expand cities in order to make profit. If the population continues to grow, we would run out of room for people to live. If we don’t make a change to preserve land, our air quality will worsen and the wildlife we love will die. We need to change to protect future generations of living things. Where will you draw the line?

Lawns are a part of American life that we take for granted and don't really think about much. One study shows that 40-50 million acres of the USA are covered by lawns. However, lawns have been described as "ecological disasters" and have a huge impact on biodiversity. To create lawns, we have removed native grasslands made up of multiple plants, full of diversity, and replaced them with 1 non-native species which greatly reduces biodiversity. My image is of a neighborhood that I walk through to get to school every day. I made the image black and white and cropped it so I could highlight the lawns in a bright, almost toxic green. I added fertilizer as this galactic paint to demonstrate how unnatural it is. If fertilizer has been added before rain, it goes into the street and into our waterways, which is one of the major threats to freshwater. I also represented sprinkler systems as black holes to represent how much water is used for watering lawns. Adding a pollination garden or native flowers in your lawn can help increase biodiversity. Not watering your lawn can help conserve water and being careful about when you apply fertilizer can protect our rivers and streams.

My photo represents the environmental issue of deforestation from greenhouse gasses caused by carbon emissions. The black and white of the photo represents the depletion of air quality with the cars in the background being the source of the destruction. The green of the plant represents the means of restoring the environment through plants and the necessity it is to plant more trees and increase the air quality.

The Lorax Foreshadowing Deforestation

My image is a picture I took of my boyfriend (who is an arborist) after cutting down a big tree in Tuttle Oklahoma. I went to work with him a couple weeks ago to watch the process. I then took pictures of my brothers watching the Lorax over Thanksgiving break. I used snapchat and a filter app to edit my photo. I wanted it to look like my brothers were watching "The Lorax" on the entertainment center in the middle of the tree branches and stumps. I also added Mr O'hare's

blimp into the sky to show what could happen to humans if we were to cut down the rest of our trees. I also wanted to show that humans were the problem by having the picture of my boyfriend smiling after cutting one down. I used a darker and warmer filter to make it seem eerie or depressing. In the movie "The Lorax," a man cut down all of the trees and caused a huge inconvenience to people who breath air. Mr O'hare is selling air because the trees are not making oxygen for the people. There are a variety of issues that people have in this movie, some turn green and some are sad because they've never seen a tree. Their town is surrounded by nothingness. This is a very good example of foreshadowing because if we were to cut all trees down, oxygen would go down and carbon would go up. This is not good for us because it will heat up the earth, mess up the carbon cycle and ultimately take away a lot of our oxygen and food sources. Everybody needs to start thinking about what is more important for

the human race, properties/farmland or preservation/planting trees to start to fix the amount of deforestation worldwide.

This picture was created by painting a silhouette of an elephant. I started by making sure that the elephant was dark enough to create the feeling of doom and despair. I put the elephant in an environment with dead trees and leaves in order to represent the loss of life after the loss of a species. I used the painting as a prop and a styrofoam horn used as a broken piece of ivory. I used real trees and leaves that represented the loss of environment because of the loss of elephants. I took these photos along the walking trail in Chisholm Trail park in Yukon, Oklahoma. I also took these photos around 3:30 in the afternoon, so the lighting for the photo is natural. This photo represents the post-apocalyptic environment without elephants. Elephants are essential to their environment for many different reasons. According to Save The Elephants Foundation, they provide many different services to the savannah ecosystem and the cultures of the people who live there. Elephants are an old and intelligent species and this has created respect for the majestic animals by the local societies living around them. Elephants use their tusks to dig for water during droughts, which not only helps them but other species survive. Elephants also eat a lot of vegetation, which allows for more growth of other plants. They also leave their dung around the savannah, which is one of the biggest ways that plants disperse their seeds and reproduce. However, elephants have been subject to poaching and hunting due to the high demand of ivory. Elephants have been the victims of poachers who go to strike big in the ivory trade. The image I created shows a world without elephants, which is possible with overhunting for ivory. The red hand on the tusk and reaching up for the tusk shows that people are the cause of this and no matter how many humans hunt, they still want more and become more greedy. Without elephants, other species would not be able to make it through harsh years without water or would have to leave the habitat. Plants would not be as abundant. Elephants also impact humans as well. The societies around these areas rely on elephants. Elephants can find water which allows humans to as well. Elephants can clear fields by eating the vegetation, which allows for crops to be grown. My image shows a dead world without elephants. One way to stop this from happening is for people to be aware of the situation and to start taking action. We all see the commercials about the elephants but have we stopped to wonder what they mean? There needs to be more information about how elephants are impactful and what we could lose without them. More education leads to more action. More action means that there are more people going against the ivory markets and putting bigger punishments on poachers for killing elephants. Action must be taken in order for change to happen. Watching a commercial is not going to help if people do not take action to stop what is happening. By addressing this issue, societies around the savannah would be able to live their lives without worrying about losing a reliable resource that has served them for centuries. Animals would not have to worry about going thirsty in the summer time. Plants would be able to reproduce in abundance. However, in many countries, the ivory trade brings in a lot of money for developing countries. According to The Impact of the Ivory Trade, sales of ivory grew exponentially. In 1970, a pound cost $3.40, now ivory could cost upwards of $15,000 per pound. This has caused many issues with economies on the moral aspect of the issue. However, countries such as the United States and their allies have a ban on the sale or purchase of ivory items, which lessens the amount of people willing to buy ivory. Overall, elephants are endangered due to overhunting for the price that ivory can give them. Amazing what lengths people will go to for money.

Two – Thirds to go. I created this image with a neural style transfer, which is a neural network coded in python that takes the style of one picture and applies it to another. I took the famous Scream painting and merged its style with my own photograph that I took in Tonkawa, Oklahoma. The actual picture of the ponds and ducks weren’t photoshopped or props, they were just going about their natural day, and I just decided to take a photo of that. Alan Watts famously said that “The Road To Hell is Paved with Good Intentions.” I think my picture captures some of that sentiment as if you look at the photo, one-third of the picture, the sky and the road, are in the harsh red brushstrokes as the other 2-thirds have yet to catch this. And to me this symbolizes the Amazon forest and the deforestation issues that it carries as it will obviously affect the animals, nature, as well as bring harm to humans and people as there are less oxygen producing organisms thus polluting the sky. We can start to address this issue by first thinking about the future. Exploration and innovations are two amazing things that gets us up every morning, but I would like to think that it could be also the thing that could stop us from wanting to wake up every morning. That is because I think that we are not really thinking about how actions are currently going to affect our future and other groups like, the environment and animals, so I think that is something that we could push more for: to take a step back to think about what it is that we are doing. The animal agriculture industry brings in so much money for the economy, so if that industry was to completely halt, the USA would be put in pandemonium, so I rather than aggressively addressing as an issue to fix this very second, I think it should be addressed to start to slowly deviate from animal agriculture, so in that case the USA would not be put in a complete stop.

To create this image, I downloaded an app called ArtLeap . The environmental issue that is displayed in my image is the overpopulation of cattle for use in the meat industry. This pollutes our atmosphere as high levels of methane gas are released from cows throughout their lifespan. This in turn allows heat radiation from the sun to be trapped within the Earth's atmosphere. My image displays how humans and their civilization have been reduced significantly only leaving behind the methane machines. This obviously isn't accurate to real science because if humans could not survive in this environment, cows probably would not either, but it shows where we are headed and how we are doing it. I believe that these high methane emissions come from major corporations, so I think government intervention on the industry could benefit greatly. If we also pushed the importance for keeping cattle populations stable, a social following can then occur which can then result in action. This image was taken in Norman, OK in an apartment complex called The Ave.

To draw attention to the problem of plastic pollution, I walked along Norman’s Legacy Trail between Duffy and Acres streets one morning. I photographed every piece of plastic trash I encountered along the trail, digitally removed the background of each photo, and arranged the pieces into the word LEGACY. This word represents not only the name of the trail but also the legacy of plastic pollution that our generation has left for the future to deal with. I also fashioned a plastic six-pack yoke into an infinity symbol to emphasize the point. The image background is a picture of a painted culvert along the Legacy Trail. It says “Only Rain Down the Drain,” to warn people that what goes into storm drains – including plastic trash – eventually ends up in our drinking water.

To create my image, I used a reusable water cup that I filled with soil and dirty water and placed it in a “creek” running through a Norman neighborhood. My topic was water pollution, and I believe I captured this topic in a few ways. First off, I used a common cup to represent that the water being polluted is the same water that we rely on to drink and fuel ourselves as humans. Secondly, the cup has fish on it which shows that polluted water also has a negative impact on

the organisms living within it. Lasty, I chose the location in a neighborhood to show that this environmental problem is taking place right here in front of us and change must be made. An easy way to begin addressing this problem is to encourage citizens to only throw trash in places where it belongs. Littering is a huge contribution to our polluted water and can be such an easy

step towards change. On a larger scale, it’s important that the government looks into monitoring what kind of toxins and chemicals are being poured into our water supply. Yes, it is possible that

making change could hurt the economy in some aspects, but the positive societal impact it will

have is well worth it.

This is a picture that I took at the beach over the summer while I was on vacation in Galveston, Texas. Almost anytime I am at the beach, there are always a few pieces of trash floating in the water. These few pieces of trash that I see at the shore are just the start of the millions of pounds of plastic in the ocean. With the issue of plastic pollution I wanted to edit the image in a way to convey the audience of the terrible effects of plastic pollution. In order to I used clipart to add plastic waste to the image in a dramatic way and by having the children playing in the foreground I am able to show the audience that plastic pollution is not just a future problem it is a right now problem. The issue of plastic pollution is one that I care a lot about and try to do my best to limit my use of single-use plastics and there are many ways for people to limit their use of single-use plastics like using reusable grocery bags, not using plastic water bottles, and so much more. By limiting the use of single-use plastics people are helping keep the habitats of marine life clean and are helping keep the environment more beautiful.

My environmental issue is the increase in wildfires due to global warming and humans. We see this frequently in wildfires in Northern California. Global warming is not only causing temperatures to rise in California, but it is also creating much drier conditions. The main catalyst of these wildfires is lightning. If lightning strikes a tree or the super dry ground, then a wildfire will form. This is why there have been so many wildfires in California over the last decade. Of course, the cause of these fires can also be caused by humans. In my photo, you can see that there is a huge wildfire going on, killing lots of different species, both plants and animals. Then, towards the front right corner, there is a “Smokey the Bear” poster. “Smokey the

Bear” is a cartoon bear that is advertised across the US to prevent wildfires. These ads are typically seen in between kids shows, educating kids (and even adults) to not play with matches or making sure to put out campfires properly in order to

prevent wildfires. We see this sign in my photo with an ironic background. I put the “Smokey the Bear” ad in my picture to demonstrate the ignorance of humans when it comes to this issue. Ignorance towards how global warming causes these fires, as well as, ignorance towards playing with matches/not tending campfires properly and creating a wildfire.

Once I selected my topic of natural resource depletion, I went on a search around Norman for scenery that would encapsulate my issue and landed in an area around some suburbs in Cleveland Country, close to where I live. In states close to the west coast, such as California and New Mexico, wasting water contributes to the extreme 7 months of drought they’ve been having. These droughts come with many side-effects that include decreasing agricultural production, increasing rates of forest fires and hospitalizations for dehydration and heat strokes. My photograph is meant to represent how wasting land and water unnecessarily contribute to drought; just as the unnecessarily placed fire hydrant juxtaposes the dry and exposed surrounding topsoil. When water shortages start to become more common, it won’t just be nature that suffers.

More and more agricultural areas will begin to look very similar to my image and, perhaps further into the future, the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s. There’s still time before we reach that point. One thing we can all do to help prevent droughts and water shortages is by reducing our everyday usage. This means turning off the faucet when brushing your teeth and taking timed showers with reduced-output shower heads. There are dozens of ways to decrease how much water we use that have minimal functional impact on our lives. Working towards a more environmentally stable routine now will help to mitigate future consequences to our climate and help prevent our state from falling into the same fate that others are already suffering.

The image I created is related to urbanization and its effect on biodiversity within the local ecosystems of Oklahoma. The photo was taken at Sutton Nature Park, and the prop used is a wire sculpture of a longhorn skull. I chose Sutton Nature Park because it is an area where a slice of Oklahoma’s natural prairie landscapes are still intact. I used the wire skull because it represents the wildlife that would once graze here before a rise in urbanization reduced allocated natural lands. The fact that the sculpture is metal highlights how the natural world around us can only survive to the extent that the human industrialized system will allow. The image is heavily filtered in order to incorporate darkened hues with a strong presence of red. The purpose of this was to create a post-apocalyptic feeling, which I feel is warranted given the grim demise of many ecosystems due to urbanization. A lack in biodiversity does not leave humanity unaffected either, as without it, food supplies are more vulnerable to pests and disease. One drastic way to combat this issue would be to slow the rate of urbanization and focus on reallocating land towards natural habitats. This may not seem very realistic given the expansionist nature of humanity, but a coordinated effort and legislative change could have profound effects on our local ecosystems and lasting benefits for humanity and wildlife. Additionally, within our existing agricultural landscape, working to diversify the range of vegetation would benefit the environment's resistance to different stimuli.

Taken from video/audio description.

"My image was taken in my hometown of Blanchard Oklahoma, about a mile down the road from my house. It shows a fracking wall situated in a neighborhood just feet from homes. I actually went to a town hall meeting to give voice to the neighborhood and the oil company was lawyered up so heavily that they said if we voted to keep the fracking well more than 300 feet from houses, they would just sue the city until they were able to frack there. The entire area is barricaded, and I had to get past a wall and a cattle guard just to take the photo. The red tendrils going up into the sky represent the emissions into the atmosphere that heat the planet. The green tendrils coming up from the ground represent the toxins that are pumped back into the ground after they frack. The seep directly into the neighborhood’s water supply. The green hue to the entire image represents the sickness oozing from the entire area. If the oil company would just clean the water before they pump it into the ground it would not be such a problem to public health." - Ana Spradley

This image was created by taking pictures of community pools and empty chip bags and overlaying them in Photoshop. The environmental issue that I chose to represent is the issue of water pollution because of plastic. Water pollution affects people and nature because the majority of it is not biodegradable. This affects nature because the plastic litter destroys sea life and underwater ecosystems. Humans can address this issue by living more sustainably, for example, using plastic products that you can use multiple times and that are biodegradable when thrown away.

I took this picture on a farm in Wynnewood, Oklahoma. I used the cattle guard fence as a prop for a prison cell. The picture is edited to be green to play on the phrase "the grass is always greener on the other side." In climate discussions people often leave out that the whole farm is behind bars, not just the cows. Farmers are also exploited and trapped in the same system that determines how much product to produce, what season to produce it in, and how much they will get paid. A lot of farmers do not own their farms and equipment anymore, and instead are in debt to large companies that can demand whatever they want. Yes, cattle are bad for the environment, but we should be actively looking to more legislation that prevents the exploitation of workers and their animals as opposed to blaming the issue on individual farmers. It is a corporation issue that the market is not going to self regulate.

For this picture, all items I used were paper or wood. Therefore, my topic for the environmental issue is deforestation. People cut trees and use them to do many things, such as building houses, making boats, making papers, or burning for fire. However, trees cannot grow as fast as people use, so deforestation influences the environment. Deforestation will weaken and degrade the soil, which could cause land desertification and sandstorm.

I took this photo at home and used the yellow light to make the background looks a little bit yellow, which is the color when a sandstorm comes. I used the Ferris wheel as the background, which indicates that people usually cut trees for themselves. In the front, there is a ship on many pieces of the puzzle. Those puzzle pieces do not only indicate the river for the boat. These blue pieces are "water," and brown pieces are "sands." Without many trees to hold the land and control the soil, sands go everywhere through the sandstorm, including going into the river, going to the city (Ferris wheel), and going into humans' bodies. Humans notice the problem of the sandstorm and find a way to protect themselves, which is to wear masks. However, this could only help themselves but could not help the planet.

In order to solve this problem, the government does not only need to protect the forest which exists but also needs to plant more trees. Rather than throw papers away, people should remember to throw them into the recycle bin so that the government can recycle them to reduce the cutting of trees.

What effects do climate change and anthropogenic pollutants have on freshwater ecosystems? Neotropical weakly electric fish use self-generated electric fields for sensory processes such as navigation and communication. Water conductivity in some Neotropical habitats varies rapidly and unnaturally in response to pollution, such as agricultural runoff and industrial waste disposal. Increased water conductivity alters how far the fish’s electric field extends in the water, compromising sensory performance. When weakly electric fish experience loss in sensory performance, it leaves these fish vulnerable to predation and unable to effectively communicate with one another. Additionally, Dams disrupt hydroconnectivity, and along with deforestation, impedes the water cycle and impacts seasonal rainfall. Seasonal rainfall is important for keeping water conductivity regulated and triggering spawning behaviors in some species of weakly electric fish. I took two pictures of a fish tank filled with different amounts of water and in different lighting, photoshopped with two together with a dam in the middle and use a tablet to draw the rest onto the picture. The left and right sides represent their ecosystems with and without anthropogenic influences, respectively. The fish's electric sensory range is larger for the fish on the left than it is on the right To represent the effects of anthropocene on the fish, the fish's electric sensory range is drawn larger for the fish on the left than it is for the ones on the right