Good Information

Hey, I like this class very much. These people are bringing really great information to the class, and we all get to know more about these important topics. Tonight's class was fascinating.

Jerry, the coffee expert, brought some good iced coffee to share with everyone. More importantly, he had the lowdown on those little numbers that appear in a triangle, on the bottom of various plastic items. This is an important little number to watch. I'm hoping he'll send me the link to his very useful guide, but for now the word is:
DON'T USE NUMBER 7 PLASTIC FOR FOOD OR DRINK.
It can release BPA, a harmful chemical that replaces human hormones and causes birth defects and prostate trouble in men. Unfortunately, it's been released into the ocean by tons and tons of plastic garbage, especially in the Great Plastic Garbage Patch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLrVCI4N67M
(The patch is actually smaller than the movie says, but it's twice the size of France, which is pretty big.) Also see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch
(Click for Chinese version on the left, if the English is too hard.)

Barrett told us that a Canadian company has some kind of plan to harvest all the plastic in the Great Patch and use it to make shelters for the homeless. If it works, that's great! (If they run out of plastic and want more, they can come here.)

Then Kiki showed us a very powerful short film, Chicken a la carte, about hunger in the world. It won first prize at the Berlin Film Festival, and the filmmaker wrote and pefrormed the song. See it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1bOteXhwrw

Kiki went on to point out that food aid is sometimes a political tool, which harms a country while pretending to help it. Hunger and poverty are political problems, and they reinforce each other. A hungry person has a hard time getting a job, working hard, and rising out of poverty. A poor person has a hard time eating. So it's a vicious cycle.

May shared some organic mulberry jam, and told us that her way of helping make a better world was to support organic farmers. She buys lots of fruits or vegetables from them, then gives these away to her friends. What a great gift! She says she'll have bags of organic sweet potatoes at 100 NT each, in the future. I want at least one bag.

Jonas had quite a few statistics about poverty. He says nearly half a billion kids do not have access to clean water, one in seven people in the world do not get enough nutrition, and 30% of the world's women have their first child before age 18. Wow. He also told a story about the "green city" being built in the Arabian desert, in Abu Dhabi. It's called Masdar City, and you can see it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V7UpFOm8w0
Notice how few trees are in the Green City. Jonas tells us it will also cost 22 billion USD to build, and only about 100,000 people will live there. My, with 7 billion people, we'll have to build quite a few of these! "Solutions" like this give people confidence in the future for NO GOOD REASON.

Just at the end of class, Ammar told us about Operation Green Hunt, in which the government of India has declared war on Maoists, and killed 16,000 of them since 2004. The Maoists have apparently killed 6000 in return. Seems it is extreme poverty that motivates the people to throw in with the Maoists, in the hopes that they can share the wealth of their country, which is now dominated by a fairly small group of people. Six out of 24 Indian states are affected by this conflict. Ammar will give us more on that next week.

This is a very good class. I am learning so much. We all are.