Dandilions!

First and foremost great job with the dandelion ice cream it was so good. I want a dandelion cookbook now! I though the guest lecturer did an amazing job and was a great choice by the group. She was really insightful, and provided us with a lot of great information, recourses and visual displays. The video that she showed about the children in Mexico just stunned me. I have spent a lot of my life working closely with both typically developing children and kids with disabilities and watching these four and five year olds who could not complete simple motor tasks was just sending off alarm bells that there was a serious problem here. The knowledge that pesticides can inflict so much damage on the bodies systems is very disturbing to me. Although the pesticides used in Mexico are most likely subjected to less stringent safety laws it goes along way in showing how these things can get into your system and cause lifelong pervasive damage. I am very glad to hear that Ontario is taking a stand against pesticides because it is another step in the fight to allowing nature to be nature without striving for an ideal of aesthetics. Choosing a beautiful lawn over the safety of ones family and neighbours seems crazy to me. I remember being younger and seeing the no walking on signs on lawns after they have been sprayed with pesticides and thinking ‘what a waste that is, why would you want a lawn you can’t play on.’ Maybe we all need to spend more time thinking like 10 year olds, we should enjoy our natural word not try to manufacture it.

Presentation - Feb. 5/09

I thought the concept of e-waste explored by the group was very interesting. They did a great job on the presentation covering a lot of the important points and succinctly discussing their chosen topic. I found the article they chose to be interesting and constant with their topic, which was great. But the part that I really enjoyed was their video. I was a little unsure at first just how directly it would tie in with their topic, but it was beautifully shot, with haunting photos that really put a great visual display on what our actions mean to individuals around the world. It is so difficult to think about concepts like e-waste in real terms because garbage disposal is an unsightly problem and therefore one that receives very little media attention, the pictures of the little girls climbing on top of the piles and piles of wires and technological waste as well as the old woman sitting on her porch surrounded by the same materials are images that really made the issue real for me. It was an interesting perspective to look at this issue on a global scale, we are the creators of the waste yet we are (for the biggest part) totally unaware that we take no responsible for cleaning it up, rather we just dump it somewhere else with less stringent laws. The technology industry keeps growing in leaps and bounds, constantly encouraging up to buy the best, the fastest, and the latest products. It is important for us to learn where this drive for consumerism always end up – the dump, though its not always our own.