Progress Report

Having reached the halfway point of the term, I thought it'd be nice to take a step back and have a look at what we've covered here so far. 

The objective that I set out at the beginning of this blogging experience was to examine the environmental impacts of global food production through time. To do this, it was first necessary to understand the origins of agriculture (e.g. Bar Yosef, 1998; Price & Bar Yosef, 2011; Zeder, 2011)  and the environmental impacts associated with the Neolithic Revolution (e.g. Zeder, 2008; Zhou et al., 2011). We are now going to fast-forward several millennia to quickly examine the environmental impacts of the industrial revolution with respect to agriculture. After that, the remainder of the posts will deal with what has been referred to as the Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene (Steffen et al., 2007). We will examine how agricultural production has boomed over the past century to meet the needs of a rapidly growing global population and how this expansion has altered the environment.

During our very first lecture in Global Environmental Change, Professor Mackay showed us a Wordle he had made on the Internationalisation of Science and Technology. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Wordles, they work by assigning different sizes to words from a certain text to denote their importance. Larger words are those that showed up repeatedly throughout the text, while smaller words were those that didn't show up as much. I created the above Wordle using the entirety of the text in Picnics Past and Present to date. The words that showed up the most were food, agriculture, environmental, and diet. 

To evaluate the progress of this blog's content and how it's keeping in line with these objectives, I'll repeat the same exercise in the new year. I'm very interested to see how the picture will change!

I'll be back as promised to introduce the industrial revolution in terms of global food production. Thanks for reading, and have a lovely weekend!