ChangeIsReel group encourages sustainable lifestyle

News
 

Natalie Lavery | contributing writer | The Breeze

ChangeIsREEL is an interactive website created in September by the National Science Foundation Collective. The NSF Collective is a group of eight JMU employees who work under integrated science and technology professor Eric Pappas. This group of social activists works on many different projects annually, including ChangeIsREEL.

The NSF Collective creates weekly videos on different aspects of sustainability and how to better balance daily living.

Lauren Wheeler, a junior geographic sciences major and a video producer for the ChangeIsREEL website, describes sustainability as taking thoughts and aligning them with actions.

“These thoughts must be your own and not what society is telling you to be; you are your own person and you need to stand up for that,” Wheeler said.

Not only does this website allow individuals to find themselves, it enforces the idea that success must come from the individual level.

“The only way to take control of your life and reach that sustainable personality is to look inside and start coming to terms with yourself,” Pappas said. “Everyone looks for answers on the outside when actually you have to look to yourself.”

Despite the inevitability of change starting with the individual, the NSF Collective wants the viewers to actually learn from its site. 

“We want them to be interested and actually want them to work on themselves,” Wheeler said. The videos do not have a real purpose if you are not in a place of accepting the inevitability of change.” 

 For example, its video on internal vs. external locus of control stated that everyone is a victim of their environments, and that regaining a sense of internal locus of control is the only way to regain control of one’s personal life.

The five areas of sustainability that ChangeIsREEL focuses on are physical sustainability, intellectual sustainability, emotional sustainability, social sustainability and philosophical sustainability. The members of the NSF collective made it clear that not one of these aspects can be sustained by itself; they are all interconnected.

One of the top videos posted to the website clearly demonstrates this idea. At first glance, the video is about how to make a pizza. After viewing this video, the audience quickly learns that not only did the video teach them about pizza, its message also mainly revolved around relationships. The NSF collective used the idea of making pizza to subtly show the audience how to maintain their relationships, connecting the two aspects of sustainabilityRead more in the JMU Breeze

Back to Top

Published: Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Last Updated: Thursday, November 2, 2023

Related Articles