The first step to global learning is global awareness

The first aspect of global learning is that of global awareness. It is the step you must take in order to be fully globally educated and fully globally aware. It is the foundation of all global learning, as one must be aware of something in order to act upon it. 

Global awareness is being able to understand these relationships and analyze how they affect our planet. For example, in this class, we talked a lot about global climate change, the impact that humans had on this detrimental process, and how to calculate it. On several of my blogs, I talked about how the factory farm industry has a massive negative impact on our environment, and I used math to support my answer.

I used what we learned in the breakfast foods project, as well as my own research, to discover what kind of impact eating meat and dairy has on the health of our Earth. In one of my blogs, I stated that “Right now, it is estimated that 30% of the planet’s landmass is set aside for  factory farms, a.k.a. for meat, dairy, and egg production.” I went on to talk about that “Livestock production causes an even larger contribution to climate change than the transportation sector worldwide.” It turn out that it is very simple to use math to make sense of concepts like these, and that is all part about being globally aware in order to globally learn.  

Global Learning: Water Conservation

The key to making our world’s population more aware of the impact of the individual is to expose it. In general, we need to have higher standards and we need to do a better job to promote global learning from all three aspects: global awareness, global perspective, and global engagement.

In terms of resources, if a person was to cut his or her shower down from twelve minutes to four minutes, he or she would be saving sixteen gallons of water per shower, or 5,840 gallons per year. This could save a person up to $100 a year on water usage. It is these kinds of mathematics that provide people with the  incentive to change their unsustainable ways. But the big issue is getting this information out to the public, and actually making people relate the issue back to themselves.

Water consumption is a huge concern for today’s population due to how wasteful we tend to be. More water consumed results in higher energy costs and possible shortages in areas where water is not easily accessible. Certain cultures, simply by geographic location, are naturally bound to have a smaller water supply and a higher demand from the population. A huge part of global learning is having that perspective that just because you have a faucet with running water, doesn’t mean another person across the globe has the same luxury.

Below is one way we can start to spread more information to the public.