Welcome Post

WELCOME!

The beginning of my blogging adventure is both an exciting and perhaps slightly scary prospect, with the chance to speak openly about a topic close to my heart. I hope that in the coming weeks and months I will be able to consolidate relevant literature, popular cultural views and my own opinions to create a personal discussion on the pivotal role of agriculture in global environmental change.

The Topic and its Relation to this Course

I am writing this blog as part of the GEOG3057 module ‘Global Environmental Change’. Through this blog I aim to investigate the linkages between agriculture and the global environment by understanding agricultural contributions to environmental change and what implications and possible crises lie ahead if current practices and trends continue. As the title of the blog alludes to, I will focus particularly on food production and fertiliser use, with further exploration into addressing the growing challenges faced by agriculture in the future.

The relevance of this topic to GEOG3057 centres on the issue of human-induced environmental change. Agricultural advances have played a crucial role in not only altering the natural landscape through conversion and degradation, but also in supporting major population expansions such as The Great Acceleration period of the mid-20^th Century that has led to many of the environmental concerns of today. Currently, global agriculture is becoming more intensive, and synthetic fertiliser use not only more common but also more excessive. This has severe implications for the health and stability of the global environment, and will continue to contribute to environmental changes. 

Some broad questions I hope to address as I explore this topic include:

How have agricultural evolutions impacted the global environment?

To what extent has modern agriculture been detrimental to the global environment?

How does agriculture relate to other contributors of environmental change?

What are the issues faced by future generations that have resulted from modern agriculture?

How should agriculture progress into the future in order to address these issues?

Personal Rationale

Having grown up on a farm I have always had a personal connection with where our food comes from and how it is produced. The connection between the human and the physical has remained a real interest throughout my life. This topic allows me to draw upon my own opinions and experiences to discuss contemporary issues of global environmental change. Not only will I be exploring a topic key to the GEOG3057 module, but also a personal topic that I can really engage deeply with.

A further reason for choosing this topic is that of its societal relevance, being a topic with which anyone can relate to on one level or another. The ways in which food is produced has implications for everyone across the globe, both because of nutritional provision and how it affects other sectors such as biodiversity, nutrient cycles, fossil fuel consumption and freshwater security to name a few.

Thank you for visiting this blog and I hope my future posts are of interest!