Day 2 (24/7)

Day 2 of the conference, woke up with a slight headache - probably from the knee to the head, I popped in a couple of painkillers, freshened up, checked my face for visible bruises (and thankfully none) and headed to my chaperone for breakfast. After that we headed to the CIRS Theater for a talk by John McCall MacBain on Sustainability. A sentence I liked from him was "Think of CO2 as water in a bathtub, plenty of water input but one small exit - the drainage hole". So technically, he was saying that the CO2 input was so much but the output isn't enough to balance out the CO2 input. It was a very interesting point of view, and it helped a lot in the whole understanding process.

After that, we had a decision theater session whereby we chose amongst many options in the case that we were the government of the area. Apparently, the majority made the option "walkable neighborhood" as the highest priority over than "clean air" for the neighborhood. After that we adjourned for lunch and came back after for a session called Globalization 101.

Globalization 101. Room 406. I was the only one in my GAT that didn’t have the same sessions as the rest of my group. So basically, I was alone. I entered halfway through due to the short UBC Admission session during lunchtime. We talked about how producing products by a company can be a great impact to the earth.  For example, to produce a cotton shirt, the cotton wool from Texas is imported to China or India to be processed and manufactured and then shipped back to USA to be sold again, which then after 5 years or more of usage is then thrown away or given to charitable organizations to be shipped away again to be made into rugs which is shipped to the worldwide market. From here, I could see the amount of logistics needed in order to produce a product. This was a very alarming.

Next we headed off to our GAT rooms for further discussions into the topic of sustainability, and one of the questions were "Should we save people or save the world?" and I gave deep thought to it and came out with, if humans were the sole cause of the earth going down the drain, then why not just eliminate all of mankind? Earth will then be self sustainable as there will be no more wastage and the environment will be stable.  But then again, the role of ethics has a heavy role in this, and since this whole conference, in general, is about being ethical, so we can't just take the whole human population out.

Next we had a drumming session, which I believe was the MOST exciting event in the whole day! We learnt how to play African drums and also the short history behind it which was that Jazz and Rock was all based on African drums!

End of Day 2. 

Adam and I in drumming