My ecological footprint

My ecological footprint My ecological footprint percentage is 70.82%. We would need 4.51 earths if everyone had the lifestyle that I lead. The results made me feel concerned because my footprint is below average by almost 20 percent, which seems like a lot to me. I was surprised that my results were so poor because I think of myself as someone who is environmentally conscious. I do not litter by throwing garbage on the street. If a garbage can is not conveniently located by me, I carry the garbage with me until I can find a garbage can. Because of little things like this, I was surprised that my ecological footprint is so low. That is why I think this was a worthwhile assignment because it educated me about how environmentally friendly I am. I would realistically reduce my footprint by about 25% by using cleaner transport. Usually I drive whenever I need to go somewhere, but I think from now on whenever possible, I will take the Metro Transit bus instead. I think that resource depletion is likely to increase as Developing Countries attempt to increase their standard of living. The country where I am from, a developing country, Yemen, does not have as large an ecological footprint as Canada does. In our cities, cars are used a lot but in the countryside, people uses horses and camels as their main way of transporting themselves. Yemen is trying to become more developed like the West, but so far it has not worked out that well. Originally, because Yemen started out as a kingdom, only the King had a car but over time, as it became a republic, cars became more common as everyday people began driving them in the cities. I think that as Yemen seeks to become more like the Western world, especially the United States, resource depletion will become more pronounced. Developing Nations should not have the right to deplete resources just to become more like the West, because that will make just the situation with the environment worse as time go es on. If every country has a large ecological footprint, then we will increasingly need more earths to satisfy everyones energy consumption. The article, found on http://www.edie.net/news/news_story.asp?id=16168. says that people in Europe are relying too much on groundwater. If this continues, then the water supply could become a problem. If that happens, the price of water will go up, and this will be bad for the world economy because everyone needs water. If people who need it cannot afford to pay for it, then that could be an economic, as well as environmental, disaster. The root cause of this problem is that people are relying too much on groundwater. We can reduce our footprint as countries by making sure that some people do not get extra water, while others go without. References Retrieved online on May 18, 2009 at http://www.edie.net/news/news_story.asp?id=16168

Edible Cutlery Essay

In the eco-friendly world, it will no longer be enough to eat your meal before getting dessert; you will have to eat your plate before you get dessert. In fact, your plate may even be dessert. In a brilliant moment of inspiration, Universite de Montreal industrial design professor Diane Bisson saw a vision of a world in which food product waste was drastically reduced and even recycling, as we know it, would carry a lesser burden. Edible plates and containers. The perfect and thorough recycling method. Ms. Bisson stewed her ideas for 10 years until she finally applied and won a research grant allowing her to work with dieticians and chefs to create recipes for plates made without without preservatives, artificial colours or sugar. Their creations are beautiful, spanning all the colours of the spectrum with carved designs of varying thicknesses. Recipes are primarily vegetable-based, so the plates and containers are nutritious. Two hundred of her 400 edible prototypes were prepared for Ms. Bisson’s new book launch at commissaries design gallery in Montreal. They were very tasty, according to gallery owner Pierre Laramee. The book, Edible: The Food as Material will be available in late January. I’ll let you know in the comment section below where it’s being sold. It will have many recipes for edible containers that you can prepare at home. Many of the edible plates made for the book launch were made to blend with the foods they hold, both visually and taste-wise, like a carob plate made to serve sweets. Others included beets or poppy seeds as a base. â€Å"Her ambition is really to try out as many shapes and as many gastronomic food combinations as possible so that we can get into many different markets. She could see a lot of different venues. Just a few of those venues would be shopping mall food stands, hospitals, and catered food services. Next project for Ms. Bisson is to work with a caterer to come up with a five course meal with accompanying edible plates and cutlery. Also, she will have to figure out how to preserve her edible plates without common preservatives, as her current container prototypes are drying up after awhile. Edible plates, containers, cutlery. Think of how they could tastefully change our world. However, the problem with edible plates, and indeed any edible containers, is that in order to be hygienic, they need to be protected by some other packaging that is NOT meant to be eated. Hence, what we need is re-usable packaging. A sealed container protecting the sterile contents inside, from the contaminating world outside, which can be reused many times. An Indian entrepreneur manufactures delicious edible cutlery forks, knives and spoons that can all be eaten up post-meal Even as global warming turns up the heat on the world stage, entrepreneur Narayana Peesapaty, 44, may have found the perfect answer to the mountains of disposable plastic cutlery choking the world: he makes them edible. In other words, after people have eaten their curry and rice, they can now chew and swallow the spoon. The Hyderabad-based entrepreneur’s company – B. K.  Environmental Innovations Private Limited – manufactures eco-friendly forks, knives, spoons and chopsticks in delicious flavours of vanilla, strawberry and pineapple. And all can be gobbled up after the meal. The outfit is part of the New Ventures Global initiative to encourage environment-friendly business ideas in developing countries. Peesapaty, a former scientist at the Institute for International Crop Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), is already supplying his product to a raft of hotels, sweet shops and organised retailers in the city. Samples have also been sent to corporate caterers, schools and housewives. It took the scientist another two years to give commercial shape to his idea. I began by checking out the suitability of various cereal flours – wheat, rice and sorghum (jowar) as base for edible cutlery,† he says. Finally, he zeroed in on sorghum. Jowar has traditionally been an important source of nutrients such as folic acid and fiber, yet the domestic consumption of this crop has recently decreased and been replaced by starch-laden rice. B. K. Innovations is thus helping to revitalize the popularity of jowar with consumers, especially since those with diabetes have shown an interest in consuming edible cutlery as a nutritious snack. Vegetable pulp – spinach, beetroot and carrot – were used to add colour and nutritive value to the cutlery. Spinach gave it a green shade, beetroot red and carrots brought out a yellow hue. In 2006, the entrepreneur applied for a process patent for producing edible cutlery. The entrepreneur’s entire production line – comprising blenders, slicers, dyes and an oven – had to be designed and calibrated to ensure that the spoons retained their hardness while not losing out on their taste and nutritive value. BK offers spoons in three flavours and has also expanded its production to edible sandwich wrappers and edible chopsticks. Large-scale domestic buyers have already shown initial interest, and BK Environmental Innovations hopes to eventually enter the international market. Requests from international sellers have come from various countries including Singapore, New Zealand, and Canada. With Japan and China’s growing demand for chopsticks and the decreasing availability of resources, an environmental movement has grown to search for better options. Narayana expects edible chopstick to be a popular alternative to disposable chopsticks. Peesapaty feels there’s a great future ahead for his edible chopsticks which will give stiff competition to the disposable ones. In fact, he aims to corner a portion of the global disposable chopsticks market, which sees sales of around 24 billion units per annum in Japan and 35 billion units in China. However, the innovator’s path has not been without challenges. When he wasn’t getting investors for his dream project, Peesapaty says he had to sell his flat for Rs 35 lakh (about US$ 100,000) three years ago. He then moved to a rented house with his wife and young daughter. In other words, of the Rs 50 lakh Peesapaty has invested in the venture so far, 70% of the funds have come from his own pocket.

Full Metal Jacket Psychological Analysis

War brings out the worst of us. It turns innocent people into men of arms, soldiers, and murderers. It destroys morality, wipes out an entire culture, and tears families apart. War is something human beings can’t help but meddle with, sometimes not even knowing why they are fighting for, or what is their cause. It changes people from inside out, either transforming them to blood-thirsty soldiers, or breaking their minds, driving them beyond reason. The one positive aspect of war, though, is the camaraderie and brotherhood that sparks between the men of a unit in its midst. Full Metal Jacket† is the perfect example of both the negative and positive aspects of a war, perfectly depicting all the psychological tests men are put through under the stress of it, and how some of them fight to keep their humanity. â€Å"Full Metal Jacket† in an anti-war film. It stares straight at the ugliness of war and the potential for violence within almost every human being, especiall y those who were trained, conditioned, and even twisted into military roles. The film starts at Gunnery Sergeant Hartman’s Boot Camp on Paris Island during the Vietnam War. There, this type A personality man motivates his platoon by ceaselessly insulting and demeaning them, giving them abusive nicknames. A pragmatic recruit who talks behind his back becomes â€Å"Joker. † A Texas recruit becomes â€Å"Cowboy. † And a slow-witted recruit with no intelligence or ambition becomes â€Å"Gomer Pyle. † It seems as if this man needs to inspire fear in the men he is training to obtain respect and have his orders followed. There is, however, one specific soldier who is the constant subject of Hartman’s brutality. Gomer Pyle is the overweight boy of the group, and he constantly fails to keep up with the other more physically fit recruits in the grueling obstacle courses of Paris Island. He is a soft, good-natured kid that wants to be a Marine. It is obvious that he lacks the necessary personality and physical qualities to be a Marine, though, him being a type B personality, makes him an easy target for Hartman’s insults. There is a point in the film in which the Sergeant finds a jelly doughnut among Pyle’s belongings. This is forbidden in the barracks, and so, enraged he dictates that instead of punishing Pyle, he’ll punish all the other recruits in the platoon. This is obviously done to inspire peer pressure among the men, perhaps thinking that with this, Pyle would stop making mistakes. This is not the case though, and one night, the recruits attack Pyle with soap bars wrapped in towels while Cowboy gags him and a few others hold him down. At first, Joker is reluctant to attack Pyle, as he had grown close to him after days of teaching him how to do everything, from polishing his weapon to making his bed. However, after Cowboy persuades him, Joker hits Pyle longer and harder than the others. While Pyle howls in pain, Joker covers his ears while lying in his bunk, ashamed of his actions. This was positive punishment. The tactics used to make him â€Å"hard† destroy Pyle’s soul. After the traumatic experience, he slowly begins to go insane, his personality changing drastically. He, however, shapes up and becomes the fastest and quickest rifleman of the entire platoon, impressing Hartman. Nevertheless, when Joker sees Pyle talking to his rifle and staring off into space blankly, and not responding to interaction, he realizes that Pyle is losing his mind, and confides in Cowboy about Pyle’s growing mental breakdown. By the end of basic training, Pyle clearly has been completely dehumanized by its rigors, and ends up killing both Sergeant Hartman and himself. Private Joker is that, a joker who doesn’t take things too seriously but is adept at being a soldier nonetheless. This may be what makes him the most humane character in the movie as his jokes relieve the stress that can eventually cause death. After being assigned to teach Pyle to be a proper soldier, he proves to be a patient, gentle teacher, who uses a different tactic from the one used by the Sergeant to motivate the slow private. He then witnesses Pyle kill the Sergeant after eventually going mad at initial training. At the beginning of the movie, Joker insists that he is a killing machine; that he was â€Å"Born to Kill. This highly contrasts with his gentle personality. The liberal Joker arrives in Vietnam as part of a Media Liaison Unit with the US Army. He, instead of just taking pictures for â€Å"Stars and Stripes Magazine† actually sees a lot of combat during the movie and is ultimately tested when he kills a Vietnamese girl sniper who is responsible for killing several of the men in his unit. The sniper girl may as well symbolize the violence and desperation that war brings to the ones who are supposedly innocent. This may also show that women, or girls, can be ruthless in protecting what is theirs; in this case, their country. The girl’s two braids symbolize her innocence, the fact that she left the stage of childhood rather quickly due to the circumstances. By the end of the movie, we see that Joker has developed from a mere protester wearing the Peace symbol showing the â€Å"duality of man† on his uniform, the Peace symbol perhaps standing as the morality that he still carries, to being a reliable grunt in the heat of battle. The movie shows in a crude way how a war affects people’s personalities and lives in different ways. Most soldiers see their lives turn upside down when facing the violence of it. Civilians that live in the areas under attack are forced to either yield or fight back in any way they can without distinction of sex or age. Sometimes peer pressure makes us act in ways far from our nature, and this is one of the many things that can ignite a war.

Reflection Of Self Reflection - 804 Words

During the duration of this course and the numerous discussions initiated in lecture, I have been able to utilize the concepts proposed in class to further my intellectual development and thinking. While many concepts have been discussed in class, the topic of secondary witnessing was the one I could relate to the most. Just like Art Spiegelman, I am a second-generation witness to my fathers life post-Vietnam war. I am a part of the generation that will continue to transmit my fathers war stories to future generations. I am witness to the Vietnam war in terms of how it affected survivors, such as my father, even though I didnt live through that experience myself, tying in the concept of post-memory as well. I first learned about my†¦show more content†¦My father often has a bad temper, even when it seemed like everything is going well. I never understood why my father never appeared happy. I witnessed my dad become a raging alcoholic, which only worsened his temper. After discussing the significance of traumatic events in class, I truly able to understand the strength that PTSD can have on many individuals, causing them to seek out various methods of relief, both good and bad. You often hear about these issues in society, but personally witnessing it as a second generation provides a different perspective on the matter. Growing up, I had to come to terms with my race, nationality, and religion. I was the first person in my family to be born in the United States. While I quickly became Americanized, I never forgot about my origin. To this day, I still speak fluent Vietnamese to my parents because they dont understand English. When I was 10, I went grocery shopping with my parents. While we were checking out, I had to translate what the cashier was saying for my parents. I can vividly recall this Caucasian women behind us muttering to herself, Its fucking America, speak English for gods sake. 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