MW 1:30 Blogging to Learn & Share

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Last Exploration: My Thoughts Amber McLaughlin

I learned a lot from "The Idea of a Local Economy." My personal favorite part of the essay is when Berry talks about the type of person you need to be in order to shop in a total economy. I thought their description was blunt and kind of funny at the same time. First time reading the essay I was very confused but after reading it a couple times I was able to catch on to what Berry was saying and the point trying to be made. I'm not a big economy person so I don't necessarily agree or disagree with what Barry wrote but one quote that stuck out to me was "The problems of pollution, species extinction, loss of wilderness, loss of farmland, loss of topsoil may still be ignored or scoffed at, but they are not denied." This particularly stuck out to me because it is so true, and goes along with what Mike was saying in class when talking about the new group he would like to make on campus. A lot of these problems are major problems in our country and people know they are deep down but still ignore them like they aren't there and I don't really know why. If we lose a species of an animal it messes with the whole food chain and then causes more species to die off. The loss of farmland affects our society because if farmers don't have land to grow then they can't grow crops and that puts a damper on our food chain and how we as humans eat and cook. So if I grabbed anything out of this essay I would have to say that paragraph and the paragraph following really hit me.

To me an issue that isn't discussed enough in our culture would be the use of chemotherapy on cancer patients. Growing up with a mom that had cancer my whole life up until the age of 12 I seen first hand what it does to a person. The patient suffers a lot undergoing chemotherapy and in the bigger scheme of things for no good reason. There is no guarantee that the chemotherapy will get rid of the patient's cancer, it just gives you a longer time to live. The point of chemotherapy is to kill the cancer cells, but chemotherapy kills cells at such a rapid pace that it also kills the patient undergoing its healthy cells too, which to me hurts the patient more than helps them. Also it causes many side effects that come with chemotherapy like not being able to eat and nausea for just a few examples. So in the end it really is a choice of preference and belief, but to me there has to be better ways out there to help cancer patients.

Comments for Andrea and Amanda: Ellis Island/SOL

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