My own understanding of GMO’s is most aligned with system 8 “A system of sustainable agriculture, with long time horizons.” I support sustainable farming practices that encourage diversity in both the cultivated crops (for soil and ecosystem health) and our human diet, as eating too much of the same couple cash crops can have negative health effects. Short-term, band-aid solutions have dug us into trouble in the past, and I believe we owe it to our future to act accordingly in our present, no matter how uncomfortable and challenging the transition phase might be (i.e. reduced profits and potential issues supplying current demands from switching to sustainable methods). Feeding the world should not go further down the path of unequal distribution and profits, and GMO-based mass farming seems like a step towards that familiar, capitalist, slippery slope.
While I see the anxiety around global supply and demand of food, I also have some background information on the ways in which food production could match global demand and about how distribution methods are more the locus of the issue than whether we have sufficient quantity of food. Also, I learned in the past that farming feed (soy or other) en masse for livestock damages and disrupts ecosystems for example in the Amazon Rainforest. Though I feel I’m lacking the full picture, I could imagine how this money, land, labor, and overall effort could have a wider reach and nourish more people if put towards cultivating plants.
I support the use of technology to solve contemporary issues in ways our ancestors on this planet did not employ, however I find the risks of GMOs for human health as well as the environment as well as the way large corporations profit at the expense of smaller farmers as far too negative of risks to go forth with the testing. In my high school biology class, I researched GMO’s and learned that some farmers in India took their lives after wind carried pests or fertilizer from nearby GMO farms and ruined their harvests and income. This is the background information that leads me to align with system 8, though I am curious to understand more about how this system’s logic integrates with the logics of other systems.
The stakes of these stakeholders are long-term environmental conservation and the health, societal systems, and values of future generations. I think values are an important stake here because they function as a sort of promise that creates trust between our present and our future society. If we act with care about sustainability today, then the future that has been sustained, when it arrives at the present, has more faith and goodwill towards humanity for having its best interests at heart.
3 Stakeholders on the issue of floating population in china OR the floating barrier in the Gulf of Mexico:
1)government: system of considering the economy, favor from the public for political reasons (support through dollars and votes), trust from the nation’s people, global reputation affected by their immigration policy and response to illegal immigration/their response to the breaking of laws in general, trying to maintain authority
2)migrants: system of survival based on economic and life needs, the risk of migrating is less dangerous than the risk of not migrating, their own economic sustenance, being able to support their own lives and the lives of their families, seeking safety and opportunity, precarity of living conditions
3)US or Chinese residents who oppose migration of non-permanent residents (or of the perceived “other”): system of fearing the changes brought on by the uncontrolled influx of new people to their home community, and of perceived threat to their own job security, social status, and feeling of security in their lives and the lives of their families
I have not yet connected with Margaret because I’m camping mostly off the grid in Utah this week, but I plan to meet over Zoom with her when I get back to NY this weekend. I feel a little behind with my research, so I also hope to catch up this weekend. Through conversation though, which I’m embracing as a valid form of research, I learned about someone in Mexico who collected rubber tires that floated down a river from the Southern United States and used them to create a barrier that stops debris from avalanches from falling into places occupied by people. This story inspires me to research what floating objects migrate with the current of water across political borders, or how the act of floating can traverse borders in a way that influences immigration and emigration. I looked into the floating barrier in the Rio Grande. I found this quote from an article particularly intriguing:
“The U.S. has a strategy in enforcing the border that involves physical border patrol enforcement, drones, heat sensors and so on. So when a state comes and physically blocks off a part of the border, that frustrates the entire strategy.
It means that certain identifiable routes where people are being apprehended are now obstructed. This creates new migration routes, so people might not cross at this particular small section of the river, but they will find another section of the river and cross there, instead.
And if the buoys create an unsafe situation that results in rescue operations of migrants, it adds to the cost – not on enforcing the border, but on rescuing people.”
https://theconversation.com/federal-government-is-challenging-texass-buoys-in-the-rio-grande-heres-why-these-kinds-of-border-blockades-wind-up-complicating-immigration-enforcement-210517
And here is another article I’m looking at:
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/06/1198028921/texas-floating-border-barrier-rio-grande-abbott-judge-mexico-immigration
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