It’s already tomorrow in New Zealand

We might be in a boat on a glacial lake in the high Southern Alps, and It's iconic. It's a fabulous experience, but at the same time, they start understanding that this is the water that feeds the river, that powers the hydro station, that is energy that is on the south island, that's shipped to the North Island. And they really begin to see these separate pieces of these separate subjects that we might study as a very important connected system in the country. And it happened there on the lake. It happened on hikes in the high mountains. It happened walking through the city when we had a guided tour, particularly focusing on Maori culture in Christ Church. So over and over, what we saw were different learners would suddenly start making connections between this feature and that feature of the landscape and of the city and of the culture. The impact ranges from seeing how tourism is sustainable across the world and how it could be sustainable back home, environmental practices across the board, from fruit and vegetable farming all the way to livestock. You know, they had this devastating event that caused them to have to rethink a lot of what they're doing here and rebuilding after that. And I think it's going to be important for us in the future rather than, you know, rethinking after a devastating event. Think about it beforehand and what we can do to prepare ourselves to be resilient, especially in the face of natural disasters that we've been facing. What can we do to be resilient now and be prepared rather than having to clean things up afterwards. I'm a systems engineer, and so I think something I'll be taking back is just how things interact with my job and looking at things from a larger perspective and a systems perspective. And I think I would love to take some more specific things like water management and just system dynamics. I really loved that. And so I think I'll be taking that home and using that my job. My favorite thing by far on this trip so far has been going and seeing the glaciers. I feel very, very lucky that we've gotten to go ahead and experience that. Amount of appreciation that New Zealanders have and Maui have for the natural world and what they have, and I think that they realize that they have they live in one of the most beautiful places in the world, and they want to protect it.