Reflection: Weeks 3 and 4!

Hey!

So can you believe it? It's the end of the 4th week. Wow! Time is flying by and it seems like we have leaped  from one level of awareness to another. Here is a review of weeks 3 and 4 of class:

Week 3:

1st of all, everyone is doing great with their blogs! Looks like we are becoming blog experts! (Maybe?) lol. Anyways, there were some reading reviews done by the groups that were assigned and I feel like we learned and were impacted by the two reading assignments! Reading 1 was about "The Challenges We Face". The problems addressed in the reading were about population and health, food, water, energy and climate, and biodiversity. There were some alarming facts that I will always remember. One fact was that 2 billion people lack reliable access to safe food and 300 million children are chronically malnourished. The other reading was Reading 27: Seeing Green: Knowing and Saving the Environment on Film. This was interesting because we never know what goes on behind the scenes of our favorite animal and nature shows/documentaries! We spent class time discussing these readings. I am glad we have an environment in our class for open discussion. I love to hear what you all have to say! 

Week 4:

The majority of this week was spent watching Al Gore's documentary called "An Inconvenient Truth".

I have heard many things about this documentary and I had always wanted to watch it but when I went to Target and saw the price...I thought "maybe later". But I was very happy to see that we were going to watching this video in our Environmental Health class. Saying that this video was an eye-opener is an understatement. I think we all looked at our lives, behaviors, and attitudes about global warming in a new way! Al Gore really did a good job at getting the sensitive side of us and talking about his family and almost losing his son. He stated that when his son was in the hospital, it seemed like someone turned his world upside down and shook everything out of it. I think watching this documentary somewhat turned my world upside down and put me in a new perspective. I think that he did a great job with his presentation with presenting the facts. The graphs and charts were really eye-catching and towards the end of the graphs we had the most CO2 emissions. Our world really is being impacted by us and I think it was insane that with all of the scientific proof, people were saying global warming is a "fraud to man-kind". I never really realized that politics really had an impact on how much we didn't know about what we were doing to our planet. I cannot believe that the U.S. and Australia is the only countries in the WORLD who didn't sign the Keyoto Protocol! AND the U.S. is 30% responsible for the global warming. We are having the most effect on our world warming. That is more than South America and Africa and other places combined! I like to think of the Earth as a house and our country is the messy roommate to all the other countries. We all have a messy roommate or probably guilty of being the messy roommate ourselves. So I am wondering, what are the other countries thinking of us? I think this video really changed a lot of our views on global warming. 

Thanks for reading! Leave a comment!

**None of us can forget this moment in the documentary where Al Gore literally had to get on this lifter and be raised up to show that we are going off the charts. This photo is from globalpact.org

"Be the change you wish to see in the world." ~Mahatma Gandhi