Blog 08

Before spring break, Chad Norman came in and talked with us about his experiences of living in India in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains. In this resourcefully rich region, water is such an important ingredient in its ecological life. There were many stories about unfair ways people were abusing the environment and indigenous cultures in those areas, but there was one part that I found particularly interesting. When trees were logged off the foothills of the mountains, rainfall could easily wash the dirt and ground away with no roots to hold the soil in place. This causes all of the nutrients to wash away from an area, become more dry as rain just washes over the dense earth and rock. When this happens, it makes it extremely difficult ans sometimes impossible for an ecosystem to return to its original state, and this presents many problems for an environment whose resources are becoming fewer and farther between.

The next two days of class were spent watching a movie regarding water wars that are shaping our environment, foreign and domestic. While many of the points brought up were alarming and very interesting, there were many aspects of how they went about their arguments that I disliked and found to be unprofessional. When depicting courtroom trials between the individuals and the companies, they made their own "courtroom artist" representations of the people and had all of the company's people look big, mean, and scary. That's a cute little tactic but it just looks unprofessional. Also, when the guy went to Nestle's seminar about some of their water projects and expected an answer right away about the letter he received  how would those individuals talking about the projects have any idea about that situation? It makes sense to try to talk about that at the end of the presentation when they can find out more about the situation, as the suggested. I'm not saying that Nestle as a company wasn't doing anything wrong, there is just no way to expect those presenters who were likely engineers and other technical employees to have any idea about that situation immediately. And the crowd didn't sound outraged as they suggested. 

I understand with a film like this where you have strong feelings about something, some points or arguments may be a little biased, and sometimes this is necessary to get across a point. But using unprofessional tactics and typical "political moves" leads me to disregard their arguments and thoughts.