Honey bees are an essential part of agriculture and plant life in North America, being a major pollinator of everyday foods such as cranberries, blueberries, tomatoes, apples, and numerous other crops (Schuster). Without bees, we would be left without a key pollinator and without pollination, there would be no more plants, no more animals, and no more man (Latsch)…. Read more »
Water is essential to every living being and water can heal. This is the idea that I have embraced because of how it acts as a means of cleansing our bodies and providing us with clarity. The nature of water is that whether we consume it, swim in it or we bathe in it, we are filled with a sense… Read more »
With all the factors that influence climate change and the perception that individual choices have marginal effect in the grand scheme of things, it’s understandable why the issue of climate change seems to be constantly swept under the rug. In northern regions where contributions to global warming have been significant, the impacts felt thus far have been minimal enabling us… Read more »
Fossil fuels are everywhere, even in our food. As we learned in week 6, oil is used to power the heavy machinery used on industrialized farms, it is in the fertilizer in the form of petroleum, it is in the plastics that are used to neatly package our food, and it is used to power the planes, trains and automobiles… Read more »
I struggle with anxiety and have even had panic attacks before. For me, feeling hungry often induces feelings of anxiety- I start to feel weak and faint, and I worry that I will pass out. I also annoyingly have a fast metabolism in which I get hungry quite often but can only eat rather small amounts of food at a… Read more »
It turns out that soil is way more beautiful than we think and is even linked to issues of veganism. I realized how little I think about soil and what it is composed of- in fact, I didn’t even know exactly what soil is. It was just something that I took for granted. Thus, it was interesting in the lecture… Read more »
After reflecting on my connection and my relation to fossil fuels, I find that I feel like a tiny cog in the massive system that is highly stuck in its ways. Many scientists, engineers, and forward-thinkers have been working on alternative resources in order to slow the use of nonrenewable resources like petroleum. As I look around though it does… Read more »
Industrial farming has had an enormous impact on our environment and the world food system. In Leo Horrigan’s chapter in the May 2002 issue of Environmental Health Perspectives he stated, “Industrial agriculture depends on expensive inputs from off the farm (e.g., pesticides and fertilizer), many of which generate wastes that harm the environment” which reveals the high cost, both financially… Read more »
Few people want to take responsibility for their actions that cause negative consequences and even fewer would want to take responsibility for someone else’s. Hearing that the U.S. alone emits four times the amount of greenhouse gasses compared to other countries is not something new to me and I have recently tried to take responsibility to minimize my impact on… Read more »
Food impacts not just our waistlines but also the environment in many startling ways- such as agriculture’s use of fossil fuels and its overall impact on climate change. In a separate UW course, State-Society Relations in Third World Countries, that has turned out to be surprisingly similar to this one, we’ve learned about petroleum extraction’s devastating effects on building up… Read more »