Presentation on Creedmoor, NC

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Education and the Proliferation of New and Old Concepts

This article streams from the idea or belief that "earth is a common treasury," meaning that limits should be placed on a variety of things. Some of these include land ownership and even the possible creation of a federal maximum wage. The article takes into consideration many leaders in America's history to focus on the agrarian aspect of wealth and the industrial aspect of it. There were pro-industrialists like Marx and Ricardo that believe specific things within a community need to be decided fully and that there was nothing that could stop the advancement of industry. Ruskin, another scholar alive during the 1800s, was famous for not agreeing with the fact that "poverty was brought on by the poor themselves." It seems as though many of the leaders the author chose were those that were either pro capitalism or against it. The author of this article seems to create a debate on how the economy should be handled from a government perspective, meaning whether you believe the government should not burden citizens with many tasks or whether you believe a government should have many requirements of its citizens. Overall, it can be said that no one is still quite sure how much government we need in our lives and that a system that is dominated by the upper class is not one that is beneficial to all. It is important for educational systems are not only responsible for preparing students for their futures as well as allowing for creativity and opinions. Therefore, this author believes that education is the main way to stop capitalism in a sense by allowing agrarianism and a maximum wage.

Indigenous Resistance- March 26, 2012

This article was mainly about the Coast Salish people and the hardships they had to go through for preserving their culture during colonization. The North American imperialists attempted to use the residential schools to turn the Coast Salish people and other indigenous people into more modern people just like those settling the land. North America created very racist public schools and tried to force these people in them instead of their typical residential schools. I found it quite shocking that in one part of the article, it talks about how Canada and America assigned spaces for these people to live in the Pacific Northwest. I find that rather rude considering the fact that these people inhabited the area before. These people were simply expected to stay out of the way of American and Canadian development. I also find it kind of rude how the Americans and Canadians expected the aboriginal people to "shake off... their pre-modern life-ways and fully embrace the cultural standards of their colonisers." Once again, this type of logic is extremely absurd. That would be like going to another country and forcing those people to believe in only what you believe in and telling them that they are wrong. It just doesn't make sense. I just feel bad for these people because they weren't allowed the be themselves and were forced out of their cultures. They had to fight for their own beliefs and that just isn't fair to them.

The Meatrix

Honestly, this website talking about factory farming is kind of scary. The city that I'm from is known for having quite a few farms around town. Some of these include tobacco farms and several other family owned farms. Many of my friend's parents rely on the income they get from selling their products in order to make money. Therefore, it is very scary to think that maybe shortly in the future, factories will try to buy these farms and land out in order to demand more food and more animals. The entire town would lose its small-city feel and I don't want that at all. What's even more scary, however, is the fact that this is happening in so many areas already. So much of our food is no longer family owned and grown. Most of our food comes from these big farms that demand a certain amount (typically a large amount) of output in order to make a lot of money. All of the antibiotics that the companies put in the feed is probably getting into humans when we eat the animals. That cannot be healthy for humans. Overall, people need to stop supporting factory farms and demand that our food be returned back to family grown in order to save ourselves and the precious lives of the animals that are being affected by these machine-like companies.

March 12 Response

This excerpt from the Real Text book is mainly about writing within the field of biotechnology. Writers within this field are required to use proper rhetoric in order to persuade readers and their audiences into believing various things. The issues that biotechnology writers write about are usually variable all about healthy and affordable food. By reading these pages in the text book, I discovered how writers can say things in order to persuade an audience's opinion. The other part of our homework was to watch the Food INC preview. This short clip kind of reminded me about what I read in the textbook. Industries create ads and other things in order to sway audience's opinions and in the case of Food INC, to make an audience not really worry about what they're eating. I'm quite excited to continue our talk about this video further in class.

EPA and Fracking in Wyoming

          The article entitled EPA: Natural Gas Fracking Linked to Water Contamination that was featured on the Scientific American website is quite a shocking article to read. This particular article talks about hoe hydraulic fracturing, or fracking for short, has recently been linked to water pollution underground in Pavillion, Wyoming. The Environmental Protection Agency crafted a rather large report on the water contamination in the Wyoming town.

            The people of Pavillion began having distasteful water in the 1990s and the situation on got worse after the gas wells began to be fracked in nearby fields. Once this water began getting repulsive, the gas companies began giving water for drinking to the residents.

            The report that the article mentioned found some of the compounds that are commonly used for this particular gas drilling process. Even after these compounds were found in the water, the EPA looked for other possible explanations for the contamination but none were proven as well as the fracking hypothesis. The EPA even found that the cement around the gas wells for protection actually separated from the well, which could have caused even more contamination. These findings are quite shocking for many reasons.

            One of the main reasons is that the water contamination caused by fracking strongly challenge the original argument from the gas drilling industry claiming that the process is safe. It is also shocking due to the fact that it has struck a political debate in Congress on new regulations and standards for fracking by oil industries. 

            The industry that has been fracking the area in Wyoming claims that it is impossible to prove that fracking could have caused the water contamination due to the inconclusive data. The EPA report has yet to undergo the peer and public review process in order to go through the publishing process, however.

            Overall, the findings are shocking enough to want to dig deeper and discover more on the water contamination issue in Wyoming. If, in the end, fracking is found to cause the contamination in the wells in the town, some major laws will have to be implemented to make sure more water is not contaminated in the future in other towns across America.

Environmental History "Artifact"

http://www.cfr.org/interactives/GH_Vaccine_Map/index.html#map

I chose this "artifact" dealing with environmental history because of the history it contains within the medical field. Since I'm a biology major, vaccines, medications, and outbreaks of certain diseases, bacterial and/or fungal infections is pretty interesting. This map of the world shows outbreaks within a particular timeline of various highly contagious diseases like measles, mumps, and rubella (which is also what I wrote my paper #1 about). It's very interesting to see how various diseases can have different types of outbreaks. One particular disease could cause an outbreak of 1000 cases while another could only have 6 cases and be considered an outbreak. I feel as though this map relates to environmental history due to the fact that it shows the recent outbreaks of certain diseases, which is a sense, is history.