Thursday, February 26, 2009

Reflections: Weeks 5 & 6


Week 5
A had a couple learning experiences in week 5 one was learning about Chapter 15: Feeding the World, which focused on the environment, population and the food supply. They wrote about four stages 1.traditional society 2.the developing stage 3.the-developed society and 4.the mature society. We also did another Eye Opener called CSIP; in my case I chose to go to the Eating Green Calculator which is a website that calculates the effect of your diet on your health and the environment. We also watched a film, "Diet for a New America." This film hit me right between the eyes, as I had no Idea about two problems; one that there was an excess of manure which can contaminate our drinking water with too many nitrates, secondly a majority of our crops go into feeding livestock so we can have our delicious steaks. This film really has made me take a look at my meat intake.


Week 6
This week we had an Eye Opener of an individually assigned reading my reading was on Chapter 19: the lingering effects from acid rain. The effect that acid rain is having on our environment is that although we have done a pretty good job of cutting down on acid rain, which still can be improved on, the soil has been contaminated and the soil doesn't let go of it's contamination all that quickly. This in turn affects the whole circle of life. We spent the next two class periods watching the film "Future of Food", of which I had to write my first review. The movie talks about Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO’s) of which they talk a lot about the big company Monsanto. Read my review to get more information.

Learned a lot this past two weeks, granted that all the information we are taking in is true. Either way these topics are making me more aware of things that I really haven’t thought about before.

4 comments:

  1. Derek,

    It is quite surprising that a lot of our wheat and grain crops are going into feeding the nation's livestock. You think the livestock would just live off the land, and not need to be fed so excessivly. I guess we have bred the livestock to eat big, and get big so we can have those 32 oz. steaks. I too am lookinig at cutting down my meat intake after learning how we are spending a lot of valuable resources on raising livestock.

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  2. Derek,
    I love the picture you posted with this post! I made it my desktop background=) Great reflection, I can't believe how much this class has opened my eyes to all the things I'm doing that aren't environmentally friendly...
    Keep up the good work, and I'll see ya Tuesday=)

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  3. Derek-

    Nice reflection- The picture is amazing! I too think that there was a lot of information that was to be taken in. True or not, it's all interesting and very eye-opening.

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  4. Great reflection, I love the picture! These past two weeks were interesting. They really made me question what our government is all about. I think it's crazy we're starting week 7 already!

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