In Review

As most of you know, I've been blogging here as part of my course in Global Environmental Change. As the term comes to an end (wow, the past few months just flew by!), I'd like to take this opportunity to review what we've been talking about here these past few months. So please join me for a cappuccino to look at the term in review...

The aim of this space was to examine the environmental impacts of global food production through time. To do this, we started off by briefly taking a look at the big picture, summarising the very long story of food, from the origins of agriculture straight through to the Anthropocene. Then we set off to examine things in a bit more depth. Using a chronological format, we saw that there are many hypotheses for cause of the origination of agriculture and that agriculture was born in several geographic locations, including the Fertile Crecent. We also learned that the birth of agriculture 10,000 years ago altered the Earth and had its associated environmental impacts. Moving forward in time, we learned that the industrial revolution truly accelerated global food production by harnessing energy with the help of fossil fuels. This allowed us to produce food at rates never seen before, which brought on its own new set of environmental impacts. To examine these impacts, we then moved on to the present era, the Anthropocene. We covered topics such as the livestock sector and its environmental impacts and greenhouse gas emissions associated with intensive agriculture. We also looked at how intensive agriculture can affect hydrological systems such as the Aral Sea. 

Along the way, we time-travelled between past and present, looking into our grocery carts for environmental impacts, digging deeper into current issues like food waste (here and here), and talked about indigenous fruits and veggies and the paleolithic diet. We also cooked up a storm (see the recipe archive), went on a field trip to see food growing in action, and had the opportunity to listen to some really interesting speakers like Will Steffen, Tristram Stuart, Jonathan Foley, and Birke Baehr! 

At the end of November, I wrote a post titled Progress Report where I made a wordle on the blog's content so far. I said I'd come back in the New Year to show how how the picture changed, and here it is! Similar to the last one, the words that showed up the most were agriculture, environmental, and food. Interestingly, some new words have also come into the picture, such as emissions, global change, impacts, waste, and production. The progress between these two word images nicely summarises the evolution of the content of this blog: food production's evolution from the past into the present. It also highlights how intensified the food system has become.

On a final note, thank you all for your comments and for reading my blog. It was really interesting to have your input and to talk with you about food and the environment. I'm really happy that the assignment for this module was to keep a blog - it's been something that I've wanted to do for a long time but never had enough courage to start one - I do hope to continue with this blog in the future, so please come by from time to time and say hello!

Thanks again,

Katherine