Reflections: Week 5 and 6

Picture taken by: Me!

Let me start by saying, I cannot believe that week 6 is over and only can I not believe that it is already over, I can't believe we're all still living! I want to throw out a congrats to the class and say how well everyone is handling everything right now!

Week 5

We had a plethora of activities going on in week five including our 2nd eye opener, a reading review, and a documentary viewing! The 2nd eye opener was called CSPI aka Center for Science in the Public Interest. We had to take a few quizzes on our eating habits, and see just what impact our food habits had on the environment. Just when we thought we were maybe doing better with our environmentally friendly habits, boom.... we're not! I was flabbergasted by my results after reading how much manure I'm making and how many acres of land I'm using up. There was a pretty neat pledge that we could take, saying that we'd make a conscience effort to eat less animal products that I took because I thought it was important to try to do my part. Our reading for week 5 was titled Feeding The World. This article however short it may be had a lot of really great information and brought up a lot of great points I really liked the part about the four transitional stages and where we thought the U.S was. I think the US has a long ways to go.The documentary that we watched this week was, Diet for a New America by John Robbins. After we were all thoroughly disgusted in the first 5 minutes by the fat being pulled out of the artery, this movie was great! This movie really just kind of amazed me, with the main point of the documentary saying to stop eating meat, and eat more natural foods,because not only is it good for the environment, it's much better for ourselves. If you would like to read a full review on it, I had to do one so here is a link to another review. Throughout this week, we also of course blogged, blogged, blogged. Its really getting easier to blog and remember to blog throughout this week.

Week 6

In week 6, we had a lot of commenting on other peoples blogs to do, did another eye opener, and watched another documentary. The 3rd eye opener that we did, was each person in the class got a different reading in the book and reviewed it. I got number 36: Economic Growth and the Envirornment: Alternatives to the Limits Paradigm. This article took me quite awhile to read but after I finally got through it, it posted a lot of interesting thoughts. At first I thought it was kind of silly, and didn't like it because the author was kind of challenging what everyone else says about the population and resources... but then it kind of made sense to me. There was a really great analogy of the little boy who cried wolf. It was saying how we keep saying and saying that this is going to happen, and it hasn't fully happened yet, so when it does, it asked if people are goign to truly believe it this time. I did a full review on this reading here. It was fun to read everyone else's reviews and discuss the questions that they posed. The documentary that we watched this week was entitiled Future of Food. Btw, they have a very nice website which you will directed to if you click on the title of the documentary. This movie kind of blew my mind. It talked a lot about if you should be able to put a patent on the environment. I could hardly believe that farmers were getting sued for having something on their farm that they didn't even put there, and it just got blown there because that's what the earth does! I find that absolutely ridiculous. Also,the fact that some people even think that we should have a patent on humans I think is ridiculous. I guess really this video made me think a lot because I haven't thought a lot about genetically engineered food until watching this! And of course, last but not least... we did a lot of blogging this week. A lot of commenting on group members blogs (which are looking great). So many people have found so many amazing Share and Voice's that it's just really neat to look at! Blogging is literally consuming my life these days, which I can't say I mind anymore!

What did I learn this week?

This week, I decided to buckle down and finally use my google reader! I'm mad at myself for not using this earlier, because not only is it a much more efficient way to see my group members posts, but I'm finding that I have time to look at the rest of the classes as well, and it's great to see what everyone is coming up with!

Good luck on the next two weeks everyone!!