Post Eight

Welp, this is it. The final blog post in my semester-long series on the nation-state of Singapore. I really enjoyed learning about the world this semester in Think Global 3510HW. I got to listen to so many interesting speakers from so many different backgrounds. It was fun to learn so much about Singapore, a country I previously knew nothing about and would have never considered checking out if it wasn’t for this class. Out of all of the speakers this semester, I would have to say that Soren Larsen and Peter Motavalli were my favorites. Their lectures were very inspiring and I loved entering their diverse worlds through their storytelling.

Soren Larson is a geography professor at Mizzou who has devoted a large portion of his life for the wellbeing of an indigenous group in British Columbia, Canada. He gave a lecture on his experiences working with the group and how he brought his family and students to the tribe. In his early 20s, he learned the unique perspective of the Cheslatta Indian tribe while working on his senior thesis project for college. The natives believed that their territory had agency, it had power and personality, and that Cheslatta Lake spoke and taught them about their ancestors. At first Larson couldn’t conceptualize this mindset because Western culture doesn’t have the same strength connection with a specific piece of land (with the exception of maybe places like graveyards or places of worship or historical significance). As Larson continued to return to Canada over future summers, he came to understand agency as he watched the effect that the land had on its people, and how sad it was when the land was ruined by flooding. I agree with him that agency is a very deep topic, and I understand and can sympathize with the emotions of the Cheslatta and other indigenous groups.

Peter Motavalli is a a soil fertility and plant nutrition professor at Mizzou who studies the negative effects of climate change and soil degradation in food insecure countries such as Sudan or Peru. I really enjoyed his lecture on globalization and agriculture, and it inspired to write my first paper on the hunger crisis in Africa. He talked about the challenge of feeding the world, as “a total of 822 million people (11% of world population) in 2018, or around one in nine people in the world, are estimated to be undernourished” (Source). In his lecture, Motavalli touched on all sorts of worrying issues related to world hunger: climate change, global consolidation of agriculture, food waste, and hypoxic zones. One thing I found really interesting about his speech was the almost paradoxical situation in the Andes. Even though Peru is home to the most quinoa crops, the people there don’t eat it. The price of it became too high so they decided to by inferior goods such as pasta or rice instead. Overall, I think that his presentation was very well put together and I enjoyed the way that he made sense of the graphs and charts.

I learned so many things about Singapore after researching it for so long. Singapore is home to many great environmental groups such as The People’s movement to Stop Haze, which was created following the worst Singaporean haze of all time in 2013, and the Waterways Watch Society, which keeps the water of the city state clean and well preserved. Singapore has an economy that is largely based off of factory production, and it is also a city-state, so one could see how pollution and environmental issues would be at the front of everyone’s mind there. I also did my second paper on a NGO called the Singapore International Foundation. I hope that one day I could travel there and volunteer in a completely different culture.