Day 7

Day 7 was an exciting one! I didn't manage to post anything until this morning because yesterday was so busy! We got to sleep in, which was glorious in itself. Then we had our first speaker who spoke to us about Sustainable Futures Program. The main thing he spoke to us about was food production and how much Americans waste and why there is no good reason that there are parts of the world that are starving. Out of all the food produced and consumed in the United States, one third of that is thrown away. Now I know I'm guilty with never finishing my meal, but the fact that one third is being thrown away, without donating any of it? I think that's a bit ridiculous. If all of that food was donated, the starvation rate could go down immensely. We actually also touched on the reason why they do the vegetarian thing here. The reason is mores because it is a better way to feed people. If all the farms that are used for cattle production, instead turned into vegetation there would be 7X more food being produced. When you think about it, that's a huge number. That could absolutely make a dent in the world starvation. Now I'm not saying that everyone should go vegetarian, because I'm a huge fan of meat, as is everyone else. But hearing these kind of facts, has to make you at least think about changing up your diet a little bit.

After lunch we had our second speaker of the day, which was Dan Millis of the Sierra Club Borderlands. This organization seeks to raise awareness about how the U.S. Government's policy to deter human movement across the border has resulted in severe damage to fragile lands and wildlife along the entire border and promote more environmentally sound border policy. I had never realized until yesterday that the actual border wall causes some environmental damage. The big thing that it causes a problem for is animal migration. The border isn't just keeping humans out, but animals as well. It's cutting back the familiar territory for the animals, including marine life as well! There are border walls that reach around 100 feet into the sea and the ecosystem under the sea is so complex that we can't even imagine how much this border is affecting it. The border wall also causes major erosion is some areas and also can cause some flooding. Before this trip I never realized how many problems the border wall actually causes because I figured it's just a wall! But in reality it affects not just the humans trying to cross, but every other form of life as well.

After we heard from the two speakers, we got to go to the University of Arizona to do our reflection of the day. We talked about each of the presentations we heard today, and some of the conversations got pretty heated!

Alessandro, our Italian, gets especially passionate when discussing all of these things. Then we headed out to dinner because it was Shahd's 20th birthday! We went to this restaurant a couple of blocks away called the Hub. It was a very nice setting and the food was really good! I got some Lobster Mac and Cheese and man I was not disappointed at all! This is also the place we usually get ice cream from, and some people were tempted to get some for dessert, but we had a cake back at Borderlinks! It was a delicious cookies and cream cake! This was our second time celebrating Shahd's birthday all together because her birthday landed on our Washington trip last year! She seemed to really like her surprise this year! After birthday celebrations, it was time for all us procrastinators to write our reaction to the book we were all supposed to read. It was a funny sight, seeing all of us sitting on the couches scrambling to write it, and then when it was lights out we had to move to the kitchen. Luckily, we all finished on time! Today should be quite the interesting and emotional day. We are actually hearing from someone who has the opposite opinion of everyone we've heard. He is on the side of the people who believe that the border should stay up and he is against immigration. I know it's going to be really hard for some of us to keep our mouths shut from arguing with this guy. I guess we will see what happens!