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<\/p>\nHi! My name is Kiara Ganther. I am a third-year student at Dickinson College studying Environmental Science. I am from Los Angeles, California and have lived there my whole life until I left home for college. Being at Dickinson has been such a wonderful journey for me! I have had the best experiences and opportunities. Recently, I just came back from studying abroad in Turks and Caicos studying Marine Biology. I spent a lot of time snorkeling, identifying organisms, swimming, and studying. I love the outdoors and traveling to new places that push me out of my comfort zone. In the past I had the opportunity to go camping in Alabama for a week for a class trip and I enjoyed every second of it. Although I love being outside and doing outdoor activities, in my heart I love city life.<\/p>\n
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Due to my countless memories and the fact that my family and friends remain there, I consider Los Angeles (LA) to be my home. The immense amount of culture and diversity found in Los Angeles have greatly impacted my own values and culture. My home is located in a smaller part of LA in a neighborhood called Glassell Park. It is a historically Latino community but many people of different backgrounds including myself reside there. The neighborhood is packed with houses and apartments. My family and a lot of my neighbors have lived there for generations.<\/p>\n
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I was never fully aware on how to be sustainable until I moved to Pennsylvania for college and had the opportunity to learn more about it. Sustainability has not been a big part of my home culture. A lot of the ways we were sustainable in my home was because we were trying to limit the cost of bills. It was never fully acknowledged in my home or school that our daily activities should be altered to protect the environment. But, today my family and I try to limit consumption, use LED lights, go on more walks, etc.<\/p>\n
As a city, many elected officials have become more aware and are trying to become more sustainable but Los Angeles has so many societal issues to solve that sustainability is often overlooked. I have learned in order to make a change regarding sustainability in my city, I had to start at a personal scale. I decided to reach out to a non-profit organization called Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR) about becoming more involved with restoration of the Los Angeles River. The next summer I was able to intern with FoLAR for a couple of months and worked on creating awareness about preserving the Los Angeles River in my neighborhood through weekly cleanups.<\/p>\n
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Los Angeles will forever be my home<3<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hi! My name is Kiara Ganther. I am a third-year student at Dickinson College studying Environmental Science. I am from Los Angeles, California and have lived there my whole life until I left home for college. Being at Dickinson has been such a wonderful journey for me! I have had the best experiences and opportunities. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5079,"featured_media":86,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5079"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}