And if I can't find something online, well, I can still visit the massive Robarts Library and sift through old dusty tomes neatly sorted in fourteen floors' worth of books.
It turns out I have a small research essay due in a couple weeks about the collapse of Easter Island. This is for my Anthropology 101 class, and I really should get ahead on that. I have a tendency to leave things like this to the last minute - but don't all university students? Well, anyway, I have to find some good scholarly information about the collapse of this society and argue against environmental factors as the primary reason for collapse.
If you don't know, Easter Island is that place where they have giant stone heads (called Moai), supposedly created by the old inhabitants a few centuries ago.
Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent.
I wish to speak more about knowledge, or more specifically, my seemingly unlimited access to it as a UofT student.
It's a little bit exciting! Knowledge is power, right?
The problem I have is that I'm short-sighted. I should clarify: I mean to say that I tend to strive for short-term goals, not long-term ones. It's a flaw of mine.
Arguably, one of the only long-term goals I've managed to keep is writing this very blog.
Anyway, I don't want to make this too long (as I should be keeping a good sleep schedule and going to bed very, very soon), but I just wanted to give an example of how I've used my unlimited access to scholarly works for personal gain.
It turns out that the city of Windsor has decided to end the fluoridation of drinking water.
And I found out about this by stumbling upon a reddit debate on r/canada.
I'm no expert on the pros and cons of fluoridation of water (personally, I'm against it), but what's striking to me is the sheer amount of people there who are outraged that the city decided to stop fluoridation.
If you don't know, fluoridation is mainly advocated as a way to stop dental cavities from developing.
And so many users there have said "there are literally hundreds of scientific studies that prove that fluoridation is safe" - without ever really providing proof that they exist.
Well, I have the ability to look up said studies, and there are indeed quite a few (about 5000 total with "water fluoridation" as a topic, according to my search).
And while many of them supposedly prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that fluoridation is beneficial (i.e. not harmful), there are others that mention such things as increased lead accumulation in children, as well as infertility in populations with high fluoridation levels in drinking water.
I have a lot to say about the subject of drinking water fluoridation (including some ethical concerns), but for the purposes of this post, I just wanted to give you an example of what I, as a humble undergrad, have the ability to do when it comes to researching any given topic.
And on that note, goodnight.
4 comments:
Nice post. One of the best yet. You are exceptional at English. I would argue that the Rapanui (and I had to look that up to be reminded of what they were called) were to blame in their own demise as they were in direct control of the environment in which they inhabited. By that same token, it is not our environments fault that millions of tonnes of anthropogenic carbon emissions are being pumped into the atmosphere every day; unless, or course, you are to argue that we are no less a part of the environment than the igneous bedrock that underlies us in ontario, or every atom of ever molecule of air that surrounds us. I suppose you have to enterain all tangential possibilites when discussing blame. I would say that fundamentally, it was not that their environment couldn't support them, but rather they didn't support their environment in the ingeneuous way required for it to support them.
Very solid argument. I totally agree with the idea that the environment is us. Thus, because this human-environment relationship broke somehow, the Rapa Nui did not survive, and one could say they did not survive because they did not control enough.
i.e. not a symbiotic relationship, but it is impossible to be in -direct- control of 'the environment'.
... and thank you, by the way, Anon, though that's implied by me commenting on yet another one of my blog posts.
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