I attneded the 47th Paul L. Errington Memorial Lecture that invited Dr. Jonathan Foley to speak on October 20, 2011. It was a great lecture, and jam packed with interesting information about the very serious issue of our growing population and being able to feed the world within the next twenty and even fifty years. Jonathan Foley was a very personable person I thought and I really enjoyed listen to him talk. The topic he addressed really kept my attention which surprised me because I was kind of thinking the lecture wouldn't appeal to me as much as it did.
I got a chance to sit by Dr. Jim Colbert at this lecture, as well, which was a great time to get to know him and also have him learn a little bit more about me rather than just a face in his class. he asked to about my major, future plans, and he even got to know a bit about my family and a little of our history. I was very surprised at how easy he was to talk to, and he had a great sense of humor.
During Dr. Foley's lecture, many surprising and quite shocking facts stood out to me about our future as a planet. His main focus of studies is agriculture. I was so surprised to find out how much agriculture really has to do with everyday life throughout the world. There are 1 billion people out of the 7 billion on this plant that are hungry. In 40-50 years, it is estimated that our global population will grow to 9-10 billion. There is a great chance that the amount of food we are producing now will no where near be able to provide food for all of those people, so Dr. Foley and his research team are trying to find a way to produce more food, and not damage too much land this earth has because right now agriculture takes of 40% of global land. His five step approach to this problem allowed for the balance between sustaining the planet and feeding the world. I hope it goes into affect because this is an issue we cannot get around.
Attending a diversity event was a great experience to not only hear about events happening in our world today. I also had a great conversation with one of my professors. I enjoyed listening to someone very passionate about the issue Dr. Jonathan Foley was speaking about, and it made me aware of this inevitable crisis.
