Essential Question Research

1.NationMasters.com

• The U.S. is consuming 20,680,000 bbl/day, which is more than the following 4 ranked countries following the U.S. in most consuming countries. As of 2007 (most recent data I could find). This site's information could also be integrated into our visual element of mine and David's project.

2.Life Cycle Analysis and Assessment

• Explaines what a life cycle analysis is and what the importance of them is. For my particular use though, the importance of them is to explaine how much energy is being used throughout somethings life cycle. From this site I got more questions that I'm going to ask myself to help answer my essential question, for example, how much energy was used in the extraction and processing of raw materials, manufacturing, packaging, marketing, use, reuse and maintenance of the product, recycling and disposal as waste at the end of its useful life for each of our sounds in our RnB track.

Three Annotated Sources for Propogation

Source One: "Plant Propogation" (visited 10-9-09)
This site gives information on sexual propagation and asexual propagation. It also has an interesting link to hydroponics that covers all principles of indoor hydroponic horticulture and gardening. This source also provides many links related to propagation that can be very helpful.


Source Two: "Stem Cuttings!" (visited 10-9-09)
This source is mainly for home gardeners, but I thought would be usefull to our classmates as well. The site is very user friendly because of its images, steps, charts and more. If anyone should be choosing to start something from a cutting they should consider going here.

Source Three: "Propagate How To" (visited 10-9-09)
If anyone should be wanting to know how to do a simple to complicated propagation technique then they should use this source. Someone from the class could visit this site and search a particular plant and get a complete walkthrough on how to care for it. With the sites search feature it makes it incredibly easy to navigate.

Farmer in Chief

I thought this article was very insightfull and really took a good look at the base of many of the problems in not only the United States but the world. It seems a lot of current issues have to do with the food crisis we are in. I don't think there is any easy or quick solution, but some of the solutions that the author talked about seemed like a start.

I thought some were a little over the top and would be very hard to get people to go along with, but they all addressed part of the problem. I thought the idea about giving one more dollar a day to each child in a school seemed reasonable, but then the author went on saying that each school should have its own garden and that there should be way more food education. That may not be in every childs or even parents interest.

A metaphor that he used that really struck me was "when we eat food from the industrialized food business we are eating oil and spewing out green house gases." This really grabbed my attention, but curious enough it made me think about organic foods. If for some of the reasons the industrial food business is causing all these things wouldn't it make sence to say eating some organic foods is doing the same? There seems to be no way to not contribute to the food crisis, oil prices and global warming.

All in all this article has left me wondering how the world is going to approach these matters and even if these problems will affect me in my lifetime. I hope you, John!, will be able to shed some light on us and take us more in depth on the subject.