1.This was the first assignment I did for this class and looking back at it really makes me laugh, and cringe a little. Let me explain. The first part of this essay involves me trying to define the problem of feeding 9 billion people. Something that I believe to be very important when addressing any problem; however, reading this again, I think I might have gotten a little carried away in trying to clarify something that was probably pretty clear to being with. Now I would just say that feeding 9 billion people just means that every person receives enough nutrition to be a productive and healthy member of society. The next part of the essay involves me trying to explain what I believed to be two of the most significant barriers to feeding 9 billion people and, that was capitalism and eating animals. The reason I believed this to be true has a lot to do with the type of content I used to listen to when I was 18/19. I listened to a lot of lectures by a man named Terrence McKenna, who was a humanitarian and a political activist that cared a great deal about the fate of this planet and, who would often point out some of the many faults of western society. One of the things he used to say, that really affected me was “there isn’t enough heavy metals, plastic, or petroleum on this planet for everyone to live like a middle class Californian”. Was he right? I don’t know, but given a quote like this you can see where I got my “western civilization is a loaded handgun pointed at the head of the planet” attitude from and, why I decided to label capitalism and eating meat as the biggest obstacles to feeding 9 billion people. Because I believe that western behaviors, like eating meat and capitalism, contribute a great deal to the misuse and waste of the earths natural resources. That’s why the two pieces of evidence I found for this class, (which can be found on this website, near the end) are used to support my opinions against eating meat and capitalism (one for each).
On a related note, the issue of capitalism is actually something I brought up in one of our class discussions, when a woman who worked for co-op came in to talk to our class. She said that co-op was making an effort to have their unsold food donated to a food bank. Then she said that their competitors, Safeway, did not want to initiate a similar program. I suggested that maybe the reason that they didn’t want to create such a program is because it would be bad for business. I don’t remember exactly what she said but I think she agreed that it was possible one of the reasons Safeway didn’t want to donate their unsold food was because they would risk losing money. That being said, some of the things I learned this semester that contributed to the way I view capitalism came from doing a structured controversy assignment with two business students. So, if you scroll down to the next post, you can read about what I learned during that assignment. Then, in the comment section of that post, I will continue to explain my opinion about capitalism and its role in feeding 9 billion people. Other than that, the second part of my original opinion about how to feed 9 billion people, the part about eating meat, will be explained in greater detail in some of the evidence I found this semester. Which as I mentioned earlier, is also posted to this website.
Doing this assignment allowed me establish a clear opinion on the issue of feeding 9 billion people. I could then go back to this assignment and look at my original opinion and see how much its changed since the start of the year. I believe this was useful because it allowed me to see how my ideas changed since the start of the year and to identify the factors that might have influenced these changes like, new information I learned that related to the original opinions I had and, the skills I learned for evaluating and discussing evidence. I definitely think that writing about my ideas on how to feed 9 billion people early on in the class helped me to monitor my learning and the development of my ideas and, this is something I would definitely consider doing in other inquiry based learning classes or simply, just to help me learn about any other complicated issue I might be interested in exploring.
2. This is the second assignment I did for this class. The purpose of this assignment, was to work in a group of 2-3 people and pick a topic that was related to the issue of feeding 9 billion people. After we picked our topic, we were supposed to come up with a be it resolved statement about or topic, which is basically, a controversial statement. The reasoning behind this assignment, is to prepare you for an issue that comes up a a lot when dealing with the global challenge of feeding 9 billion people. That issue is, trying to determine what to do or what to decide when you have a unclear or unsubstantiated claim about how to feed 9 billion which, includes multiple perspectives.That’s why being able to find and evaluate evidence is so important. I began to understand this a lot better the longer I spent thinking about the problem of feeding 9 billion people. I realized that the potential solutions for this problem are never perfect and, they contain many positive and negative consequences that vary dramatically between different groups of people and people with different perspectives. The unpleasant reality of dealing with a problem like feeding 9 billion people is, that we are going to have to make some very, very tough decisions, that will undoubtedly be controversial. That’s why it’s vital that we, as a global community, go into these debates with as much relevant information as we possible can, in the hopes that through the process of debate, the best solution will reveal itself. Looking back, I appreciate the value of being part of an activity like this and although I didn’t realize it at the time, I understand now why it’s so important to the issue of feeding 9 billion people. That being said, I did not have the same understanding when I first did this assignment and that’s why, this is the revised edition. When I first did this assignment, the evidence and arguments I made were only very loosely related to the issue of feeding 9 billion people, something that was pointed out to me by my instructor. So, when I went back to do this assignment again, I made sure that the evidence I used was relevant to the issue of feeding 9 billion people.
So now, let me just briefly discuss evidence provided in this assignment and how it relates to my original opinion on feeding 9 billion people. First off, I thought that this would be a really good argument for this assignment because it has a lot to do with the issue of ethics and its something I feel personally affected by. I did a fair amount of research before I made this argument and, I was pretty shocked by some of the things I learned. That being said, I’m probably not going to be drinking as much milk in the future but, if you don’t believe me, or the sources I quoted in my assignment, I would highly recommend looking it up for yourself. Anyways, the thing that really bothers me the most about this, is being lied to. I remember seeing those milk commercials on TV all the time, they would play them on almost every station and honestly, I’ve probably seen them over a thousand times. So that’s why, for most of my life, I really thought milk was good for you. I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s something about growing up and realizing how many lies you’ve been told that really makes you start to distrust and question the society you live in. I know I’m young, and I still have a lot to learn about the way the world works but, I genuinely believe that capitalism is doing serious harm to our society and is also one of the biggest barriers to feeding 9 billion people. Look what happened right here in North America. A wealthy food production company was able to convince us, and our government, that their product was not only safe but, an essential part of a healthy diet and, as a result, almost everybody in Canada and the US drinks milk and have been for decades. Think of what our society would look like if we would have invested all that advertising money in healthier and more sustainable ways of producing foods with vitamin d and calcium and, there are definitely ways of doing this, I found that out while doing research on why milk is bad. I guess the point I’m trying to make is, that people who have powerful roles in society, such as producing food for a large number of people, are usually more concerned with protecting and sustaining their positions of power then they are about the well being of the people they are providing a service for. That’s why for me, one of the biggest concerns with the issue of feeding 9 billion people still is, how do we ensure the people who are entrusted with important roles in providing food for people will act ethically and in the best interest of the people?
In one of the pieces of evidence I collected for this class, I provide an alternative model for modern day capitalism, called the Venus project. The Venus project was founded by a man named Jacques Fresco,who introduced the idea of a resource based economy and, I’ll talk about this more in the comment section of that post.
| 3. Ok, so first off, the reason I chose to use this piece of evidence is because it provides support for the idea I mentioned in my first reflective assignment, and my structured controversy assignment and that idea was, that the capitalist system creates a lot of problems for the goal of feeding 9 billion people but, instead of just complaining about capitalism and pointing out what’s wrong with it, in this post I provide an alternative to capitalism, the resource based economy. So then, what is a resource based economy? Why is it important? And how is it going to help us feed 9 billion people?
A resource based a economy is a socio-economic system where every person is equally responsible for and entitled to the planets natural resources. This is very different then the current capitalist system we have where some members of society are more entitled to the earths natural resources then others. It also addresses a big problem with our society, that’s getting worse, and that is the problem of wealth inequality. The last time I checked I’m pretty sure that the 50 richest people on the planet have more money then half of the world or, 3.5 billion people. Another really important thing that this video addresses, which is something that some people might find shocking, is that money isn’t real. Money is nothing more than a promise written on a piece of paper, it has no intrinsic value. This results in a ton of problems, one of the biggest ones being that we DO have the technology and the capability to as Terrence said, to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry. What we don’t have, is the money to do this, or in other words, we lack the cooperative skills to do this. What a resource based economy does, is it lets us deal with things that are REAL. Instead of dealing with promises, and loans, and budgets, and interest rates,national debt, federal reserves, and billionaires. What we need to do as a society, is say that, this is what we have, and this is what we can do with it. WE NEED TO WORK TOGETHER…. I cant stress this enough, because the current system is heartbreaking. We have kids on the other side of the world living off a a bowl of porridge a day, dropping out of school in the 3rd grade because their parents cant afford it. There are Einsteins and Tesla’s all over the world right now who are toiling away as agricultural laborers, struggling just to get enough food to eat everyday when, they could be accomplishing great things. We have he capability to give everyone on this planet the freedom and support they need to live up to their full potential but we need to work together in order to do this. We cant have a system where one person has 1000000 times the net worth of another person or where some countries hoard all the resources through the use of manipulative economic tactics. ” Rich governments like to say that they’re helping poor countries develop, but who is developing who here? Each year poor countries pay about $600 billion in debt service to rich countries on loans that have already been paid off many times over” – TheRulesOrg,”Global Wealth Equality” documentary. We need to work together if we want to solve this problem and what capitalism does, is it enables selfish, shortsighted decisions to be made by people with a lot of money, at the expense of the rest of the population. The future I imagine, the future Jacque Fresco imagines, supporters of the Venus project imagine and, anyone else who is dissatisfied with this current society imagines. Is a future where, through the intelligent and humane application of science and technology, we can ALL enjoy a very high standard of living with all of the amenities that a prosperous civilization can provide and, to the people who say that a resource based economy will never work, my response is that it better work otherwise, under the current system, we are surely headed for disaster. “The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.” -Terrence McKenna Ok, so here we have the second part of my original opinion about the biggest barriers to feeding 9 billion people, the part about eating meat. I tried to avoid talking about this for as long as possible because I understand what a touchy issue this is and, I myself still eat meat. I’m going to be honest here though and say that given the research I have done in the past and, recently, I have to say that there is no possible way we can keep eating meat at the rate we are and hope to feed 9 billion people. What is explained here are some basic scientific facts about why eating meat is not sustainable and what it comes down to basically, is the processes of energy transfer and conversion that take place on a biological level. To explain it simply, plants take in energy from the sun and convert it into an edible source of energy, cows then eat the plants and convert them into energy that they use to grow and do things, we then eat the cows and convert them into energy that we use to grow and do things but, what happens during every step of this process,is that energy is lost. first off, we don’t eat all of the cow, we only eat a portion of it, that means that all the energy it took to build the parts of the cow that we didn’t eat, is essentially wasted. Secondly, cows expend energy every second they are alive, doing everything from breathing, moving, and using their heart to pump blood through their body and, this way, more energy is wasted. That’s my understanding anyways but you could probably find a better explanation elsewhere. The point is, which is sated pretty clearly in this post, is that we could feed a lot more people if we used our arable land to grow plants instead of raising cattle. This might be unpleasant news for some people, including myself. I definitely enjoy eating hamburgers, steak, pork chops and all the rest of it but, given evidence like this, I think its apparent why it would not be possible to have everyone eat meat. There’s not much more I can say here, these are some pretty solid facts and, that is what’s so great about science, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for debate. If we want to feed 9 billion people, one of the best things we can do, is to the use the arable land we have available to produce food as efficiently as possible and that means, using it grow plant based food products instead of cattle and, an easy way anybody can help make this solution a reality is, to stop eating meat. Ill just add one more thing here, and this related to the group assignment project I did. As I mentioned in that post, there was a group who had a really interesting idea for how to feed 9 billion people.The problem that this group was addressing, is the same problem I brought up in this post which is, we simply do not have enough arable land to raise cattle as source of protein for everyone. Their solution, which really was brilliant, was to use vertical and indoor farms to raise insects as a substitute for animal agriculture. Because, not only do insects use a lot less land then cattle do and, can be raised in an environment like an indoor farm, they are also much more efficient at turning vegetation into an edible source of protein then farm animals are |