Hot Flat and Crowded

Hot flat and crowded are the words used to describe our earth today. Reading this chapter really opened my eyes to the things you usually don’t think about. Do you really think about how many people are in the world or why it so hot outside or why the world is “flat”? These questions don’t cross my mind on a regular base but they should. Reading this has really taught me something about our earth.  Hot, everyone complains how hot it is. But do we ever ask ourselves why it is so hot?  The main reasons to why our core temperature is on a raise are due to greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide and methane. These two greenhouse gasses do the most damage they are released by burning fossil fuels, burning trees and even cow belching. Would you have ever though cow belching would be bad for the atmosphere? But sure enough it is. “Cattle belching can be worse than a highway full of hummers”. The reason why cattle gasses is are high methane. Even the little bit of things end up adding up and causing a big effect on the earth’s temperature. Don’t get me wrong green house gasses are good but too much of them are when they start causing problems and that’s where we are at. When reading this I would have not learned any of this. Looking back and seeing that our core temperature has on average warmed .8 degrees Celsius is a really bad thing. Think about it when the temperature raises a lot of bad things happen. Ice melts, crops don’t grow and it is horrible to be outside in. I really see now how using my car instead of bike can really make a difference. If we all do our part it could really help our environment, our atmosphere and our future. The next half of this that I found interesting was the crowded part. I mean when am on the highway trying to get to school or work I think that’s crowded. But I have never actually thought how crowded our earth really is. As of right now there are 6.7 billion people on the world. That is a lot of people. Think about you waiting in line to eat at a restraunt and then seeing 6.7 billion people in front of you. You would feel like a needle in a hay pin. That’s how we all feel now but just don’t know it. The world is growing and things are just getting more and more crowded. They have averaged that the world will grow 2.5 billion people within the next 43 years. THAT IS INSANE!!!!  If none of us know what we are doing and we keep doing what we are doing to the environment we will run this planet into the ground. We are already doing serious damage to the universe imagine not teaching the 2.5 billion people that will be born in the next 43 years how to reuse, reduce, recycle or teach them all that we know now. With our planet getting bigger we need to teach everyone what we are doing to our atmosphere so we can put a stop to it and contain what has already happen. The last aspect was flat. When I think of flat I think there is no mountains, no hills just flat. But that is not what the author was saying. The author pertains “flat” as everyone becoming the same person. Not like clones but we are all technological and that we need to wind off of that. For the fact that we use fossil fuel to ruin America we need to stop that and become dependent on something else. The author says that we are all going into the Energy Climate Era and that we need energy to run anything. Well the energy that we need is coming from things that will hurt us. The fossil fuel that gets burned like I said before gets used by methane and carbon dioxide gets released into the air and hurts us in the atmosphere. Being flat is not a good thing neither is crowded or hot. If this has taught me anything it has taught me that we need to become a lot more cautious of what we are doing and really see what we are doing to this planet. Thinking about what I do I feel ashamed because I contribute to this hot, flat and crowded planet.  I use my car when I could walk or ride a bike. I could use a library computer instead of my own and when I have children if I don’t teach them everything I know I will just be another statics. I have really realized that the world is hurting and we are to blame for it.

Inconvenient Truth

When I heard we were going to watch a documentary I thought it was going to be boring and long but I was defiantly wrong. An Inconvenient Truth is about Al Gore and his research on global warming. It is a very intense and very “put it in your face” kind of movie. He really tells us that if we don’t start changing our ways we will not have a world to live on. The world has already started to change due to global warming from the polar bears drowning because the ice caps are melting to the increase hole in the ozone layer to the droughts to the floods. Mother Nature is telling us to stop what we are doing or even worse things are going to happen. If we don’t change things this will have a huge effect on not how we live but how our children live and their children live. He really told us that the time to change is now. He showed charts about China and how they are trying to stop this global warming and showed all these different ways we could at least slow down this aspect of global warming. One being lets use wind power instead of burning fossil fuel. Fossil fuel release green house gasses into the atmosphere that makes the hole in our ozone layer even bigger. This then makes it thicker and makes the green house gasses that use to be able to diminish in the atmosphere come back and be reflected back onto earth. When this effect happens the core of our earth hearts up. When an increase of 1 degree at the equator happens it makes an effect at the arctic of seven degrees. So what we think isn’t a big deal at the equator is actually a huge deal in the poles. With wind power we wouldn’t be releasing those toxic fumes into the atmosphere and would be able to control the temperature. We know what we need to do to stop this but we aren’t. Ale Gore in the Inconvenient Truth shows us all these stats and really shows how bad we are treating the environment. All these other countries are trying to do their best in trying to prevent pollution as much as  possible and it seems us Americans feel like we cannot be touched. We really need to look at what we are doing and try to find away to stop these entire greenhouse gasses. What are these green house gasses? They are carbon dioxide, methane and all the material that gets stuck up into the atmosphere that makes an impression on the temperature. Ale Gore is very passionate about global warming and made predictions on what has happen to what will happen if we keep it up. We have used more than double our natural resources in the past 50 years than we have in the past 500 years. This documentary has really shown me that America in general needs to own up for what we have done and try to fix it. Because in the end we are only hurting ourselves and we will end up paying for it.

ECHO-feild trip

                                

Semi arid

Tropical Highlands

Urban Gardening

ECHO was something that I was really looking forward in going to. I love their mission and love how they are taking something so serious such as global hunger and trying to make a difference. I love farms so when I was told that’s where we were going I was very excited. But once we pulled up I knew it wasn’t going to be the exact farm I was use to. Instead of lots of animals and livestock they had plants and trees and vegetables and fruits. Their mission was to see in different climates what food would grow so that they could send the seeds over sea so people that need it could have it and grow food so they could eat it. Some areas that they had were semi arid, hot and humid high lands and tropical forest. They mimic the weather with sprinklers and made the geographic identical to what other people would have to be farming on. So if they were trying to figure out what plants would grow on a hilly area they had a hilly area and tested out the different seeds. Where ever you went you saw something different. From plants, vegetables, tress, fruits, to some animals. They were all there for a purpose. You saw a goat and rabbits and they were a cash crop. You could use their milk, fur, and meat to sell, use and eat. You saw strawberries and cabbage that was used for their families so they could eat. But something that I wasn’t expecting was tires. You would think old tires wouldn’t be useful for anything but boy are you wrong. Old tires can be made for steps going up a hilly area or for urban gardening. Urban gardening is another thing we learned about. It is when people don’t have a lot of space to grow things so they use their roofs or old tires or anything that has space in it. They take old aluminum cans and line them around the old tire in socks and then put the soil and seeds in it. You wouldn’t have thought something like grocery bags or tires could do something but man it does. Then we looked around and they had us sit down and told us about this amazing seed call Maringa seeds. These seeds do wonders for people. For the fact that it gives off more calcium, vitamin a, potassium iron and protein than there competition it can really help people. They told us a story about how all these mothers that were pregnant being very poorly feed. But only a couple of weeks later after eating the leafs these mothers were healthy and so were their babies. It is amazing that something like that can make someone healthy. Not to mention that the Maringa trees are beautiful. They are huge kind of an off white color and their roots are amazing. I learned so much from there and defiantly would love to do volunteering there. They are taking their time and money and really helping out the world a little at a time. On another aspect of what they do at ECHO they try to see what different kind of planting works the best. So they will have different techniques for planting things, to see which one gives more products. ECHO is a place where there is so much to learn that you defiantly have to come back to really grasp what they are doing there. I feel honored that I had the privilege to see what they do and see how people are making a difference.

Corkscrew Santuary

Corkscrew sanctuary is something I was not expecting.  I didn’t even know it was there and had no idea what I was getting myself in to. But as I looked around and tried to get the sense of feeling of nature I became more and more interested. I learned so much from the different kinds of trees, to birds, and animals. All of it was very new to me. I was raised up in a not so much commercialized area but coming out here and seeing how Mother Nature works is amazing. At one glance you will see huge cypress trees, different types of plants and then in the next second a huge alligator. It was so interesting to see how everything works together. While there I learned things that I never knew before. Such as fires are sometimes a good thing and how we are trying to re-establish a bird colony and the living machine. The living machine was the one thing that caught my eye. I have never even heard of it before. Corkscrew Sanctuary has the first living machine in Florida. It is used to reuse the water in the restrooms. It takes what ever gets flushed down the toilet to these two big tanks underground to start initial anaerobic digestion. It then goes to 5 different takes where these tanks are full of bacteria, green pants such as trees all the way to algae, and small animals. This is where nitrates comes from and are converted from ammonia and organic nitrogen. Now the water gets pumped into a sixth tank and then pumped out for the next step. This is where all the little sediments that made it through all of that get pushed back to the anaerobic tanks again to be broken down again. The water then goes to two plastic lined with artificial marshes filled with crushed limestone. With all the marsh in there it removes the last bit of nitrogen and converts it to the harmless nitrogen gas. But they also have the water get disinfected with chlorine and put into a holding tank and then travels to a chamber to dechlorinate the water with sodium sulfite. That is when it goes back into the toilets as the clean water that we saw. I would have never believed it unless I saw it. The living machine isn’t this big contraption it is a 40 x 40 area and helps the sanctuary a lot. For the fact they have so many people visiting this living machine really helps and promotes what can be done to help reuse water. I learned so much about nature and just really how everything works together. I really enjoyed this field trip.