Post #8
End of the Year: Favorite Speakers and Chile
If I had to choose my favorite speaker of the semester, it would have to be Soren Larsen. He did such a fantastic job of explaining his story and what he is doing to help the Cheslatta people. Since they are an indigenous group, they face many hardships that we, as American citizens, do not have to face. Some of these include food, water, living conditions, moving, and many more. It bothered me how the government made these people move just to utilize the lake, even though they were living there for years and have claimed that area. Nevertheless, when it comes to industry, all they care about is money and make them get out of their way. They said they could come back, but the lands were ruined when they returned. I just really liked his speech because he took something real and made it visible for everyone to see. He even is writing a children’s book about their story. People like the Cheslatta are overlooked and not thought of because we do not see it a lot of the time. However, people like Soren Larsen are a voice for them when they do not have one. He is excellent at explaining their story and all the help that he continues to do for the Cheslatta people.
“This is their story,” Larsen says. “We (myself, Portell, Davis, and Eli Larsen) learned the story when we were there doing research the summer of 2018. We simply collaborated with Cheslatta to tell it in the form of a storybook.”
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Peter Motavalli was my second favorite guest speaker. My aunt was the first one hired at her agriculture business company, and now she runs the whole office in Kansas City. I also have a few other family members, so agriculture is strong in my family. However, Peter Motavalli helped explain some things I did not understand before. I did not realize how many greenhouse gasses we pumped in the air and soil due to agriculture. To be completely honest, I thought agriculture was helping climate change because it is growing plants, which reduces carbon emissions. But a lot of these chemicals we put in plants to help them grow bigger and better are negatively affecting our climate. For example, the Mississippi river that gets runoff from all farming land has created a “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico when it dumps in. These “dead-zones” cause decreased oxygen levels, which is hard for many marine organisms to live in. All the things he explained helped me understand parts of the agriculture industry that I did not know about, which is why I enjoyed his talk so much.
Chile has shown me a multitude of things. First, it showed me how fortunate I am to be where I am and how these people go through struggles every day that we will not have to go through once in our lifetime. However, doing my research has shown that Chile is on the rise of vastly decreasing their poverty, which was something not seen in Chile a few decades ago. This has created income inequality, something we experience here in the United States as well. Second, I also did not realize how they are going through a “civil war” of some sort, not with weapons, but with mass protests and gatherings to voice how they believe there is corruption in the government. They believe the government is misusing their powers, like mistreating prisoners and women. These include not feeding or treating prisoners after beating them, and making women undress and body searched in front of male officers. All in all, my research has shown me a lot about the country of Chile and how every country has its own domestic problems.
South America 