Coach Carter 4th Reading log/fim

The 2005 film Coach Carter is an amazing story of a change. Coach “Ken Carter” is offered the role of basketball coach at Richmond high school. He accepts and turns up to coach boys that won’t even come to school. Throughout the movie each boy learns, and changes. They grow as an athlete and become a student. By signing a contract given to them, stating that they must maintain a 2.3 grade average, turn up to every class and sit at the front of every class, they also earn the idea of a “student athlete, student comes first.”

I first really liked this movie because of my personal enjoyment for basketball, and throughout the film I could connect with a lot of what was happening. Although, this is inspired by a true story, and it tells me of students that fought against their culture to play basketball, study at school, and most of all succeed in their life. At the end of the film they played against the team the viewer first saw them play against, St Francis.  The whole game was tight, until the final buzzer went with the score board showing 70-68, St Francis takes the win. This film didn’t have the storyboard ending like I hoped, but it had a lesson woven into it instead. Turns out that a few of the players went on to college and graduated with degrees and played basketball while attending. This was a movie a really enjoyed because it taught resilience, persistence and most importantly, it taught friendship. Resilience is found when we as person are challenged by great struggles and overcome them. For me I relate to the ending, when they didn’t win the championship. In my basketball years I’ve failed in games and lost countless too. With resilience and persistence I’ve come to practice harder, play harder, and drive to be better. And even through all this, I’ve made friends with people that are so much better than me and less too. In Coach Carter, they worked as a team with each others strengths and weaknesses, and this is what I now strive to do too.

“You said we’re a team. One person struggles, we all struggle. One person triumphs, we all triumph.”

 

Is our planet useful Speech draft

Is our planet useful?

For most of our time on this earth we humans have been driven by wealth and power. With food, an essential need to our survival, it makes sense that the wealthy and the powerful get the say, as they are the one’s who own and profit off it, they control it for their own gain knowing that either way we still need food.

In economics there is a term called the law of demand; so there is demand, where people want something and the quantity, how much is available. Demand(lift hand) and quantity(lift hand). When there is high demand and low quantity, the good that people want is limited, so the price will rise, people will pay more for it, just to get it, they will bid the price up, and vice versa as the economic students will know.

Let us look at China, biggest population in the world, they’re a growing economy right now. Their middle class are getting richer, and are buying more luxury items such as meat, and dairy. A country like China can’t afford to feed its 1.4 billion people due to the space it has. So this is where New Zealand and Australia come in. China is now the world leader in meat consumption mainly because of their massive population. This is great for our economy, dairy is booming and we send meat over there so much you’d wonder where it all actually came from.

So rich countries eat meat, here’s why. It is common for in a farming family that when you shoot an animal and I’m going to stick with cattle, if they shoot a cow out of their herd to put in the freezer it should last them from half a year to a year, because every cow is different, if you look at the fat amount, the muscle size, how much it weighs, and on. So one cow, half a year to a year.  The average is that you get 250lb/ 113.4 kg of beef from one acre of land, but at the same time you can get 50,000lb/22,680 kgs of tomato’s or potato’s, off the same acre. Are we being effective?

Our world population now stands at over 7.3 billion people, and our cattle population is at 1.4 billion. 71% of our earth is covered in water, and of that 29% that is land, 37% is used for cultivation. By 2050 we will be at about 9 billion people, that’s not getting any better for land space and agriculture, because as we grow, we will want to develop the most comfortable land first, but what’s already there, our growing food. Now here’s where it gets interesting, one of the worlds greatest problems right now, worse than climate change, and that the media seem to sweep right under the carpet, is soil degradation. Soil degradation is when artificial pesticides and fertilizers are slowly destroying the life in the soil. The living ecosystem it is contains absolute trillions of microorganisms, and by unleashing all of our controls on nature, it comes back to bite us. We need soil, 95% of our food comes from the ground, and it has a key role in adsorbing carbon and filtering water, why are we messing with our planet. We won’t be able to breath soon let alone eat. Some scientists estimate we only have 60 years left of grow-able soil. From life in the right direction. com I found these facts,

  • “40% of soil used for agriculture around the world is classed as either degraded or seriously degrading”
  • “70% of the topsoil, the layer allowing plants to grow, is gone”

But here I am only talking about land, well what’s left of it. What about the 70% water. Lots of people want to go to organic farming, and look after the land better, but how long will that last us with our population still rising. In the ocean there are numerous amounts of life that we could harvest and feed on. There are a few companies that are investing in farming in the ocean. Through study we have only just started to learn about the life that lives below the waves. From the fish that we already over catch to the seaweed and kelp lots of other cultures have been eating for generations. Wakame is a popular Japanese seaweed salad that few of you might have had before. Last checked only eight asian countries were actually farming seaweed and the total output reached over 24 million tons. From only eight countries… Going to who… and this is one type of seaweed and one species among the thousands that live in the ocean. What if the western diet was completely changed. No genetically enhanced meat and vegetables, no processed products. I’m saying that by investing in our oceans capability we could spread our needs over a greater spectrum and start to utilize our planet with out completely destroying it and us too.  And who knows we could even stop world hunger, too.