Hello and welcome to my website. My name is and I am 20 year old Canadian citizen currently attending school at the University of Calgary. Before coming to the UofC, I took a 2 year diploma program in instrumentation engineering technology so, this is my first year of university. So far, I have really enjoyed my time in university and I feel that I have learned a lot. My plan is to graduate in 3 years, with a degree in computer science. Science has always been the subject I found to be the most interesting; however, this year I had the opportunity to take classes in many different subject areas and one of the most unique classes I got to be a part of this year, was a class called global inquires and challenges. The main focus of this class was to look at the global challenge of feeding 9 billion people by 2050 and to try and find a solution for it. At first this seemed to be a fairly straightforward question and I came into the class with some pretty strong opinions about what should be done. But, as the class progressed, I began to understand just how complicated this problem really was. That to even consider a problem of this magnitude requires a unique set of thinking skills and understanding. Things like being able to consider and evaluate various perspectives and being able to adapt to new ideas and solutions. But mostly, just being able to understand the immense amount of differences that exist among the billions of people that live on this planet. Everything from what they believe to how the feed themselves everyday and, somehow, we have to find a way to include every one of these people in a problem that concerns all of us.

While you are reading through this webpage, the purpose of which is to showcase the things I’ve learned in the global challenges and inquires class, including all the assignments I’ve done, individual research I’ve conducted, and my personal reflection on the  problem of feeding 9 billion people, you will get see how my opinions changed over the duration of the course. Starting with the very first assignment I did for this class, reflective assignment 1, which gives my original opinions on the challenge of feeding 9 billion people and then, finishing with my last assignment, reflective assignment 2, which shows the opinion I had on feeding 9 billion people after completing this course. What you’ll see is that as I began to put more thought into this issue and, as I started to use the skills I learned in this class to help me to evaluate this problem, my opinions changed a great deal and, I’m sure they will continue to change long after this class is over,

Enjoy.

Side note: be sure to read the comment section because I wrote a  narrative reflection for each of the assignments I did and, I explain the evidence I found,  in my own words.

What does is mean to feed 9 billion people? The simplest answer to this question is that feeding 9 billion people means that nobody ever dies from starvation. Not only is this the simplest meaning in my mind this is the only possible answer for what it means to feed 9 billion people. I really don’t think a question like this needs to be open ended or open to various interpretations. What it means to feed 9 billion people, is simply that nobody every perishes from lack of nutrition. I think its very important that we have a clear and concise answer for what it means to feed 9 billion before we attempt to address this problem, and here’s an example why. Let’s say somebody’s answer to the question how do we feed 9 billion people is that we would produce enough food to feed everyone. At first examination, this might seem like an admirable and proper solution, but now let’s look at the fact that in America right now they already produce enough food to feed everyone but people still die from lack of nutrition. Why is this? The reason is that much of the food in America is either wasted or unfairly distributed. So, you see its not enough to just grow enough food for everyone we must also make sure we are responsible when managing and distributing it as well. On the other hand, someone may look at my answer to the question how do you feed 9 billion people and say, well just because someone’s not dying from lack of nutrition doesn’t mean that they are eating enough to be considered healthy or even fed. My response would be that the primary concern should be to make sure people aren’t dying first and then the secondary concern would be to make sure everyone was eating what would be eating enough to be considered a sufficiently healthy diet. Its also worth mentioning that a large portion of the developed world already don’t have healthy diets and this is largely through choice. Anyways, now that we have established what it means to feed 9 billion people we should now look at some of the challenges and barriers to accomplishing this goal, because there are certainly many of them such as food waste, lack of cooperation between people and between nations, land management, resource management, climate change, animal welfare, dietary preference, corporate interest and many more. Out of all these challenges though I believe one stands out as the most problematic and that is the corporate involvement in food production and the idea that the rights to human life can be owned and distributed. Due to the nature of economics and supply and demand I strongly believe that any effort to feed 9 billion people that is driven by profit is doomed to fail. The reason being is that profit relies on scarcity. If food were suddenly to become abundant in nature it would put nearly every grocery store and food production company out of business overnight. This is why I feel so strongly about the fact that the goal to feed 9 billion should never be allowed to be overseen by anyone who stands to profit from it. Instead the goal of feeding 9 billion people would have to be a collective and conscious effort of a very large number of people working together for the sole purpose of wanting to help one another. This leads me in to my next point which is a controversial topic but extremely relevant, and that is the issue of veganism or animal consumption. I remember reading not to long ago that if every person on the planet ate as much meat as the average North American, we would have to use every single piece of land on the planet to raise livestock and it still wouldn’t be enough. Another shocking fact around the same lines as the last is that we have enough food to feed 70 billion livestock every year but not enough to feed every person.  If these claims are scientifically valid, which in my opinion they are. The only logical conclusion to be drawn from this is that the greatest challenge to feeding 9 billion people, without a doubt, is animal agriculture. What this means is that the earth could easily support 9 billion vegans but it wouldn’t even be close to being able to support 7 billion North Americans. During this weeks class when the presenter came in to talk about the children being born with small heads in Tanzania, somebody asked a question about birth control. This brings me to my next and final point is that a child born to a woman in Santa Cruz will use 800-1000 times more resources than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh. Where do we preach birth control? Bangladesh. My point is that western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of the planet and the only way to save it and to feed everyone is if we take a seriously look at our lifestyle and realize the destructive effect we are having on the world and the people living in it. So, then what feeding 9 billion people really means to me is the death of the westernized American as we now know him/her.

The question that my group decided to discuss for our structured controversy assignment was that be it resolved world leaders should be able to decide what is best for their citizens. This was an interesting question to research, and find perspectives for, because it is so broad.  Not only is it broad but this is a question that has been debated for hundreds of years. That’s why it was very interesting for me to discuss this issue with my group and, I learned a lot . But,  before we get into that, I just want to  outline the two most important perspectives on this issue, which would be, world leaders and the people who are affected by the decisions of world leaders, the citizens. But, what exactly is a world leader? In most cases a world leader would be defined as the leader or representative of a nation or, the heads of government. However, I would like to offer an alternative definition of a world leader, one that I think proves to be more accurate in today’s world and, that is, a world leader is someone who has the power to influence the lives of a very large number of people. So then, who else has the power to make significant changes to the affairs of human beings on a global scale, other than government officials? And the answer is, corporations or people who have a lot of money. We all know the power of money but waht you might be surprised to learn, is that there are several American companies and other companies around the world who have a yearly net profit significantly larger than the GDP of many underdeveloped countries. That is why, I think it’s very important to include these companies in our definition of world leaders because they undoubtedly have the power to influence world affairs and, I can think of many such examples .

The first example is an event that took place in America and Canada during the last decade and  it’s something I find quite interesting because I remember seeing the commercials all the time as a kid. What I’m talking about, is something that’s been getting a lot of attention in the media lately, the” Got Milk?” campaign ( I’m sure you remember the commercial’s to) has been outed as a fraud. The news that’s coming out now, which is backed by substantial scientific evidence, is that milk is not nearly as good for you as the commercials led us to believe. In fact, the truth is: the human body has a hard time digesting pasteurized milk. When milk is pasteurized, its protein molecules – the casein – are changed. This strains the pancreas, forcing it to produce its own digestive enzymes to break the molecules down. This helps explain why many people develop milk allergies. Like any enzyme-void food, pasteurized milk puts an enormous strain on the body’s digestive function. Those with milk intolerance, a leaky gut, or poor digestion, pass the casein through the intestinal walls and into the blood stream. This excites many allergies, including autoimmune disorders. The lost enzymes in milk, heated and destroyed through the pasteurization process, were designed to help the body break down nutrients like calcium. Without essential enzymes, calcium cannot be utilized; thus, the calcium passes out the body, unused. .

The milk industry grew out of the need to feed a hungry, growing nation and as a result, became one of the wealthiest industries in America. They then used this money to pay for their ad campaign  and, they also used it to lobby the American government. This resulted in them receiving a large amount of support from the US government, in the form of subsidies. The dairy industry spends a significant amount or money on lobbying. By infiltrating schools with their products and “educational materials,” using medical professionals to advocate for them, running manipulative  advertising campaigns that play on our fears, and influencing the government’s dietary guidelines, the dairy industry is shaping our food environment and the messages we receive about cow’s milk, which certainly influences our food choices.

So, we know that milk is bad for you, and we know that the milk industry used their wealth to get people to drink more milk but, did they know that milk was bad for people?  The answer is unfortunately yes, they did. The activities of the milk industry and their infamous “Got Milk?” campaign were so blatantly fraudulent that it is actually used as a way to figure out if someone is committing fraud. “An easy way to determine if you have a case that meets the criteria for fraud is to think of the milk campaign, Got Milk?”. Which also  spawned this acronym for MILK.

M –         Material misrepresentation

I –           Intent to deceive

L –           Loss – a loss or damages occurred as a result of the fraudulent activity

K –          Knowledge.  The subject had knowledge that their statements or actions

What we see here is that an extremely powerful company, the North American dairy industry, with the help of the American government, was able to use their money and influence to impact the lives of millions of people. They were able to convince much of the North American population that dairy products were good for them and even a necessary part of their diet. When in reality, dairy is neither necessary, more than 75% of the world’s population doesn’t consume dairy, or good for you, a 2014 study conducted in Sweden found that people who eat a lot of dairy products had much higher mortality rates then people who did not. I think this gives us a pretty clear example of why we shouldn’t trust world leaders to decide what’s best for us because they have the power and the willingness to intentionally mislead consumers and citizens, at the expense of the consumer of citizen, in order to remain powerful and profitable.

Sources:

www.notmilk.com

http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/lobbying.php?ind=A04

What I learned while gathering evidence for this assignment, is that the ethical issue of letting world leaders decide what is best for their citizen’s is a very important  issue which has very serious consequences for the citizens of the world, especially with regards to food. When discussing this issue with my group members and examining the evidence they collected, I realized that they did not share my definition for world leader. They used the classic and, perhaps more rational definition of a world leader which is, a national representative or leader. This lead to some confusion initially; however, what I did find out is that they both shared my concern for unethical behavior in  business  and they were in favor of world leaders being able to decide what’s best for their citizen’s in order to regulate the activities of business’s. But, as we saw in my example, governments or world leaders themselves are in no way immune to corruption. In conclusion this assignment left me with an important realization and an important question. The realization was, that systems of power, no matter how they are organized, will always attract the temptations of corruption. The question it left me with, is something  extremely important to the issue of feeding 9 billion people and that is, how do we ensure that the world leaders who play an essential  role in the challenge of feeding  9 billion people will act ethically and not abuse their power for personal gain?

One of the assignments I did for this class involved working in a group with 4 of my classmates to come up with a idea or innovation for how to feed 9 billion people. During the initial stage of this project, our group worked together to pick a topic and then, we came up with a question that would be the driving force for our idea or innovation .The question we came up with was “how do we provide fresh produce for people living in communities with limited growing seasons?”. During the beginning phases of this project, we all picked what aspects of the challenge of feeding 9 billion people that we thought were the most influential or important and, one of the aspects that everyone in my group picked, was technology. So, the idea we picked to solve the question we came up with, dealt heavily with technology and that was, indoor or vertical farming. Our plan was to built indoor/vertical farms in remote communities in Canada who would normally have to fly in fresh produce. This way we would save the communities a lot of money in the long run and, we would reduce the carbon emissions produced by the planes. We came to this decision fairly unanimously and there was very little disagreement among the member’s of our group. After we had our question and solution established, we started working on the bulk of the project, which was to come up with a pitch for our idea that we would present to the other students in our class and other people who were involved with the class.

So, to prepare our idea for our final pitch presentation, we had to figure out: who this idea would effect and why it would be valuable, what we need to know and the resources we would need , a description of our idea and, a timeline and action plan for when and how we were going to implement this idea. Doing this took the majority of the time we had for the project and again, I think we worked fairly well together and each member of the group contributed to coming up with an answer for each of the questions above. That being said, working in a group was definitely one of the more interesting things about this assignment. I never really did any group work in SAIT, or in high school for that matter, so I think this might have been the first group project I’ve done since junior high. What I discovered was that each group member had their own unique talents and strengths, for instance: Alex was a great public speaker, McKenzie was good communicator and group manager, Dallen did good research, Kainan was a strong writer and, I was good with numbers.

When it came time to present our pitch idea, we all met at the school with the other groups and people who were involved with the class and, the first thing that I’m going to say is, I was extremely nervous and I could tell my group members were as well. One thing that I don’t think any of us were expecting, or at least I wasn’t, was the cameraman who was going to be filming the whole thing. We were the first group to present and overall, I think our presentation went well. After we finished presenting, we received a lot of questions from members of the other groups and something that I realized while listening to the questions the other groups had, was that while our groups idea was really ambitious and innovative, we were somewhat lacking in being able to, as one of our instructors Jay pointed out, being able to quantify our ideas and solutions. Things like not knowing exactly how much energy we needed and the price of the electricity.

Now, my role in the project was to find out what we needed to know to move ahead with this project and, I labelled myself as the “numbers guy”. So, I feel that I let me group down in this matter and it’s something I feel bad about. That being said, I was aware of the fact that there were some logistical issues with this project before we presented and, I should have included these numbers. I didn’t, and that’s why I feel that I am at fault for not making our presentation as strong as it could have been because, I actually did know how much electricity we needed and how much it would cost, I just forgot to put it in my script and I was too nervous to try and answer the question when it came up. Although there were some weaknesses with our presentation, we definitely had our strengths to. I think that our idea was very innovative, served a real need, and even though I think the technology we required was a little underdeveloped still, I would not be surprised at all if we saw an idea like this actually implemented in Canada. This is something that I mentioned during our presentation and, its that these farms become more viable every year and with each new development in renewable energy and lighting technology.

After we finished presenting, I got to watch the other groups present. and , I really enjoyed watching the other groups presentations and there were some really good ideas; however, one groups idea really stood out and I was really impressed by their presentation. Their idea was similar to ours, in that it also included vertical farming and indoor farming but unlike our idea, there solution involved using indoor and vertical farming as a way to feed people on a global scale. It also included a really revolutionary idea that I found to be very interesting and that was, incorporating insects into vertical farms and indoor farms as an additional food source.

Overall, this assignment taught me a lot about working with a group, narrowing down ideas, presenting ideas, evaluating ideas and,  taking an idea from the stage where it’s just an idea and making into something that has real world values and applications. These are definitely important skills to have when trying to solve global problems like, feeding 9 billion people.

In a Resource Based Economy all goods and services are available to all people without the need for means of exchange such as money, credits, barter or any other means. For this to be achieved all resources must be declared as the common heritage of all Earth’s inhabitants. Equipped with the latest scientific and technological marvels mankind could reach extremely high productivity levels and create abundance of resources.

Resource Based Economy concerns itself with three main factors, namely Environmental, Technological and Human. We invite you to investigate further into these factors and discover more about The Venus Project and Resource Based Economy.

A Global Holistic Solution: Resource Based Economy

It’s clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it’s not easy. ―Terence McKenna 1995

Food productivity of farmland is gradually falling behind population growth. When Paul Ehrlich warned three decades ago that “hundreds of millions” of people would starve, he turned out to have overstated the case—for now. (Only tens of millions starved.) The green revolution, an infusion of fertilizers and mass-production techniques, increased crop yields and bought us time. That, combined with more complete utilization of arable land through intensified irrigation and fertilization, enabled us to more or less keep pace with population growth for another generation. A little additional gain—but only a little—may come from genetic engineering. Short of stabilizing population (which will take another halfcentury), only one major option remains: to cut back sharply on meat consumption, because conversion of grazing land to food crops will increase the amount of food produced. (Some argue that grazing can use land that is useless for crops, and in these areas live- stock may continue to have a role, but large areas of arable land are now given to cattle to roam and ruin.)

Let’s say we have 20,000 kcal [kilocalories] of corn. Assume that we feed it to cattle (as we do with about 70 percent of the grain produced in the U.S.)…. The cow will produce about 2,000 kcal of usable energy from that 20,000 kcal of corn (assuming 10 percent efficiency; the efficiency is actually somewhat higher than that, but 10 percent is easy to work with and illustrates the point reasonably). That 2,000 kcal of beef would support one person for a day, assuming a 2,000 kcal per day diet, which is common in the U.S. If instead people ate the 20,000 kcal of corn directly, instead of passing it through the cow, we would be able to support more people for that given unit of land being farmed; not necessarily 10 times more, because people are not as efficient as cattle at using corn energy, but considerably more than the one that could be supported if the corn were passed through the cow first!
[So], we could support more people on Earth for a given area of land farmed if we ate lower on the food chain—if we ate primary producers instead of eating herbivores (corn instead of beef). Or, we could support the same number of people as at present, but with less land degradation because we wouldn’t need to have so much land in production….
—Patricia Muir, Oregon State University

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/549

When I first thought about the problem how to feed 9 billion people, I believed that the most important thing we should do would be to stop raising animals for food.  I am not a vegetarian but I think there are several reasons why eating meat could create serious problems for our society, including making it difficult for us to feed 9 billion people. Whether you are raising animals indoors or in out in the field, raising animals requires a very large amount of land and because there is only so much land that can be used to produce food, we need to be very careful in how manage it. We need to be sure we are getting the most nutrition we can out of the land we have available. I am not an expert when it comes to nutrition or growing food but, my understanding is that you can feed a lot more people using land to grow grains, fruits, and vegetables then you can by using it to raise animals. That being said, I learned a lot of things in this class this year that both challenged and supported this point of view.

A couple of things I learned this year about the issue of land use came from a classmate of mine who grew up on a farm. He told me that the majority of the land in Canada is not suitable for growing food and that most of the work related to farming, like seeding and harvesting, is done by automated machinery. I found this information to be rather surprising. I knew you couldn’t just grow food anywhere but what I didn’t realize is just how small the amount of land that can be used for growing food really is. Also, I thought that there was still a lot of manual labor involved in farming. Taking this information into consideration really strengthened by belief that we should stop practicing animal agriculture. It showed me that land is actually a more valuable resource then I originally thought and, it made me realize that if we were to use the land primarily for growing plant based food products most of the work could be done without the need for human labor.

While I did learn a lot of stuff this year that supported the beliefs I had coming into the class, there were also things I learned that made me question and revaluate my ideas. One of the most important examples I can think of is when a presenter came into our class to talk about the Maasai. The Maasai are a group of people who live in Eastern African and struggle every day to get enough food. They rely almost entirely on cattle for nutrition, and even sometimes resort to drinking the blood of cows to sustain themselves. The Maasai live in an area of the world where growing edible vegetation is extremely difficult; therefore, they must rely on cattle to extract whatever nutrients are available from the land and to convert them into a more concentrated source of energy and nutrition. Learning this really made me question the idea that we could live off of an exclusively vegan diet.  It made me realize that not every place in the world has land that is suitable for growing plant based food and even if you could grow food in other places and ship it to people like the Maasai, it would be too expensive. There are too many communities like the Maasai, and these communities are far too remote and isolated for shipping food to be a considered a realistic solution. Instead, these people must be supported in producing food using the land that is local to them, and they must do this by using any means necessary.

I could keep talking about land use, animal consumption, and what I learned in the University 201 for quite a while but unfortunately it would take too long. So, I’ll just finish by saying this. After thinking about the problem of how to feed 9 billion for roughly 4 months, I have made significant changes to the answer I would give. At first, I said that growing only plant based food products would be the best way to feed 9 billion people, but now what I would say is that I don’t know. I don’t know how to feed 9 billion people. If this class has taught me anything, it’s that global issues are far too complicated to be solved by any single answer. They require an incredible amount of cooperative planning, sharing of ideas and perspectives, ingenuity, and adaptive solutions in order solve them. But most importantly, they require a lot of compassion, and understanding that we are all have a role to play in solving them.

After completing this class, I will say that I learned a lot and had some fun to! I especially enjoyed putting together this eportfolio and getting to include some of my own ideas and evidence in this website.

I have been thinking about the problem of feeding 9 billion people for a long time now and thinking about a problem this important and this prevalent has really changed my perspective on a lot of things. The biggest realization I had while thinking about the problem of feeding 9 billion people, was something that hit me really hard and, that was the realization that it’s my generation, and my classmates generation, and everyone at this schools generation who is going to be responsible for solving this problem. Not only are we going to be responsible for solving this problem but, we are going to have to solve a lot of other global issues as well, such as, the environment, war, energy, clean water, health issues, population and resources, education and many, many more. This made me understand that the whole university experience really does go beyond just getting a good paying, white collar job. Its about becoming an educated citizen of the world, who posses the skills that are necessary to deal with complex issues like these and, in that respect, there is not a class that is more important than this one.

That being said, I plan to keep learning as much as I can about this issue because like I said in my final reflective statement, the problem of feeding 9 billion people is very complex and requires very informed and carefully evaluated decisions to be made. I also plan to apply the skills I learned in this class to other classes and areas I’m interested in learning about but, most  importantly, I hope to take these skills and use them to make a meaningful difference in the world.