GC Wk12 OVERVIEW TO BEGIN MODULE 12

Purpose

This week Après l'hiver, le printemps (After Winter, Spring) takes us to visit family farmers in southwest France, to the Périgord region of the current Dordogne département where families have farmed their land for generations. We find that there—as in many parts of the globe—they “are forced to confront challenges that threaten the very existence of their small farms.” In Après l'hiver, le printemps we witness “an intimate portrait of an ancestral way of life under threat in a world increasingly dominated by large-scale industrial agriculture.” As my colleague Dr. Jonathan Deutsch of Drexel University notes, it is "a beautifully shot film that takes complex issues of a globalizing food system and makes them relatable, personable and powerful."

We’ll also take up some persistent 2000+-year-old debates that have been circling the globe for all that time.

And from there we look backwards to catch up, and forwards to drafting your Term Paper and finishing your Presentation.

We also look at the "Three Major Perennial Debates" and their relation to modern-day events.

And in our Discussions this week you get to prioritize which of the world issues we should address first: GC Wk12 Discussion: Climate, Inequality, Hunger: Which Global Problems Would You Fix First?

Outcomes

• • Some of today's  common problems are global in nature--in two different ways: (1) they affect the global populations as a whole (globalization), and (2) they occur almost everywhere locally (where conditions permit).
    
    Food production is one of those, and it is especially important in that food is one of the fundamental requisites of life. You should come away from Après l'hiver, le printemps with a good understanding of the global problem of BIG AG taking over small farms on the one hand, and world power players allowing tens of millions globally to face acute hunger and starvation:
     
    • • "up to 783 million people — 1 in 10 of the world's population — face chronic hunger" (World Food Program Links to an external site.)
        
        
      • "For the last three decades, roughly 40 U.S. family cattle operations have gone out of business every day", like the one you saw in Après l'hiver, le printemps (Missouri Independent Links to an external site.)
        
        
        • This changes the nature of small towns and rural life
          
          
      • A handful of global corporations control almost all aspects of world food production, including commercial seeds
        
        
      • and somewhere around 40 percent of the row crops of the U.S.A. are grown for ethanol production and not food
        
        
    • You should be aware of and understand the global issues involved, and at the same time understand the local situations occurring globally
      
      
    • You should be able explain your understanding of these issues to your neighborhood school board members using concepts like EMIC and ETIC, and methods like COMPARISON/CONTRAST, and HOLISTIC theoretical frameworks
      
      
    • People debate the cause of the problem, many times addressing millennia-old ideas.
      
      
      • You should know and understand the "Three Major Perennial Debates" and how they apply to modern-day issues like the ones considered this week in class
        
        

Begin Week 12

Now that you have a sense of the purpose and outcomes contained within this module, begin working through the activities:

• by using the “Next” button below to advance through the activities in sequential order
  
  
• or by going directly to the Week 12 Module for a listing of the activities.