Essay two Thesis

A Long Way Gone teaches us that the effects of war and brainwashing can bring out the underlying strength of a man.

Extra credit for English 110NNW

For extra credit, you have three choices:

One: you can do a review of a current popular Music CD.  You must record this review on video and post it to our blog.

Two: you can attend an artistic performance (dance, music, theater, exhibit, etc.) and write a review of the strengths and weaknesses of the performance.  Again, you must record this on video and post it to our blog.

Three: you can write a poem about an American icon and perform it for the class during our last class on Thursday, Dec. 1.  You must also write an intro for the poem for our blog, and then record yourself reading the poem and post it to the blog as video.

If you do this well, I will raise your overall grade up to half a grade.  In other words, if you are at 85 percent, you can go up to 90 percent.  This would take you from a B to an A-.

The idea here is to be creative, have fun, use your brain, and use technology well!

The World as a Polder

The focus of Diamond's research is natural resources. He was trying to learn how the patterns of civilization have affected our natural resources. *Humans are destroying or losing natural resources such as: natural habitats, wild food sources, biological diversity, and soil. These resources are all part of a cycle that cannot function properly without one, and we need to be aware of that.*

Natural habitats are very important to human survival. We need the functions of natural habitats to continue and remain healthy if we want to stay healthy ourselves. If we continue polluting our earth we will be polluting to food we eat and the water we drink. We should be conscious of these issues. I believe this is the most important topic Diamond brings to our attention in this entire essay. Without Natural habitats we will not survive.

I thought these paragraphs were important in the essay.

“But biodiversity losses of small inedible species often provoke the response, ”Who cares? Do you really care less for humans than for some lousy useless little fish or weed, like the snail darter or Furbish lousewort?” This response misses the point that the entire natural world is made up of wild species providing us for free with services that can be very expensive, and in many cases impossible, for us to supply ourselves.” (pg474 p7)

“Thus, because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable course, the world's environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today. The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies. While all of those grim phenomena have been endemic to humanity throughout our history,their frequency increases with environmental degradation, population pressure, and the resulting poverty and political instability.” Wow, frightening! (pg483 p31)

Four definitions for this essay:

Natural resource: a material source of wealth, such as timber, fresh water, or a mineral deposit, that occurs in a natural state and has economic value.

Natural habitat: the environment in which an organism: plant, animal, insect, bacterium or virus lives.

Biological diversity (biodiversity): the number and variety of organisms found within a specific geographic region.

Soil (don't laugh, I'll explain): The top layer of the earth's surface consisting of rock, and mineral particles mixed with organic matter.

Plants only grow in certain types of soil. (there are different types) Some soils cannot support plant life. These are called dead soils. This could potentially happen to our healthy soil if we continue to not pay attention to our natural habitats, for example.

The themes that stood out to me was power of having family, and how people need help finding there family. It's amazing how people start to lose themselves with there roots, or their family. One lady from Congo spoke about how she just want to know where her kids where. I thought the goal of the Refugee united is amazing, on how they use just little details to try and get people together. The two brother that start where ask what they would put and it fun that they said almost the same thing. one brother said his brother would say something about there cat, and how they would also say something about there tattoo. "we both share the same tattoo on our left arm." It amazing how just some little detail united us to someone else and how we all sometimes just forget about these details. But these little details are uniting refugees who lost their families.

Refugee United Film Response

This film is very power and it is talk something that most refugee going through . This film is talk about how there are we was billion displacement people and they don't know there their family are. This two guy create the Refugees United ,so they can help the refugee find their family and they can help their-self.This refugee the thing important to them is know that they are not only who are live. I think it sad how young man has be the father of his two brother and sister., but that is something that big in the refugee. It remember of what my family went through when we was living in Somali , just because we were a different tribe and we had money . Young man only want to know if his father was live . He was job less and he didn't go to school because they raise his brothers and sister. They burn our houses. No one in this world doesn't want to the only in their family .

Refugees United

"It is the worst thing that can happen for a mother to lose her children." Solange is a refugee from Condor who had lost her children. We saw the sadness that overcame the witnesses who had lost loved ones in Condor. One great theme about this video is hope. Through Refugees United, which is an online search method to help people find lost friends and family, refugees gain hope to live another day. With that same hope many refugees have already found their loved ones and will continue to do so. "At the end of 2009, there were more than two million sociably displaced individuals worldwide." Obviously Refugees United can help to change this statistic, and bring hope to many who are lost. "It is my only hope that I can get connected to them."

Response

What stood out to me was the most is how people have no idea where their family is. It is crazy to me that people around the world do not even know if their family members are alive. I know how much my family means to me and I can not imagine what it would be like to not know where they are or to be split up. I think the website refugee united is a great idea. It gives them a chance to be able to reconnect with their family members again. Even though it is not 100% that they will, the video shows that many people did. "There is only one thing that keeps you routed in this world, and that is family".