For the first week of the class I expect you to carefully read through the syllabus and the orientation material for the course. You can access the Syllabus [1] and the Orientation [2]; by clicking on the links in the blue menu bar.
The links below provide an outline of the material for this lesson. Be sure to carefully read through the entire lesson before returning to Canvas to submit your assignments.
In the SYLLABUS, ORIENTATION, and on the following pages you will find important information about the course structure, requirements, scheduling, and technical requirements and assistance — all of which you'll need to know in order to pass the course.
You are also responsible for knowing this information and not knowing it could easily CAUSE YOU TO LOSE VALUABLE MARKS.
Please see the calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
At the end of this week:
Questions?
If, AFTER YOU HAVE READ THE WEEK 1 MATERIAL AND SYLLABUS, you have any questions, please post them to our General Course Questions discussion forum (not e-mail), located under the Modules tab in Canvas. The TA and I will check that discussion forum regularly to respond. While you are there, feel free to post your own responses if you, too, are able to help out a classmate.
I am a PhD Candidate, ABD starting my fifth year here at Penn State. ABD stands for "All But Dissertation" which means I've completed all required coursework and exams, and now I am working on writing my dissertation.
My research interests are centered in Environment and Society geography, specifically looking at food and agricultural systems, through the lens of political ecology. By the end of the course, you will know what that means! If you are interested in learning more about food and agricultural studies, political ecology, or geography in general, feel free to reach out.
My dissertation research itself centers on a bacterial plant disease affecting bananas of all varieties in East Africa and the knowledge networks farmers have crafted and relied on in order to manage the disease effectively. Bananas are a staple crop in East Africa, particularly in Uganda where I work. Therefore, this disease and its impacts on banana production not only affect farmers, but the broader food system as well. This project relies primarily on content analysis of qualitative research data gathered from interviews, print materials, and participant observation.
My master's research was based in Uganda as well but focused on a different sector of the food system, tea. This project combined land cover/land use change analysis, GIS, and archival research to understand how the tea industry within Uganda has influenced landscape change, particularly to surrounding forest areas.
Gabriel is from Mexico City, has a BA in International Relations (Mexico) and a MSc in Political Ecology (Barcelona), and is now doing a PhD in Geography at Penn State. He is most interested in the interactions between agrobiodiversity, food sovereignty, and power, particularly in conflict landscapes.
This course will be conducted entirely on the World Wide Web. There are no set class meeting times, but you will be required to complete weekly assignments. Registered students in this course will need to navigate between several environments in the World Wide Web. These include:
Not registered? Students who register for this Penn State course gain access to assignments and instructor feedback, and earn academic credit.
GEOG 430 examines the human use of resources and ecosystems, the multiple causes and consequences of environmental degradation, and the questions of justice at stake in how we understand and manage the environment. The major objective of this course is to help geographers, earth scientists, and other professionals develop an awareness and appreciation of the multiple perspectives that can be brought back to studies of human use of the environment and of the social and environmental consequences of the resource-management decisions that are made in different parts of the world. This is a capstone course that encourages students to place their individual major and technical skills within the context of multiple approaches to environmental decision making and management in complex and dynamic social-ecological systems.
A table outlining the weekly lesson topics can be found on the syllabus page.
For this course, weeks run on a Friday-Thursday schedule.
Our weekly schedule for this semester will be Friday-Thursday. You will have access to the Week's materials beginning on Friday at 12:01 am Eastern so that you can work on them on Friday and over the weekend in preparation for the week's activities. You need to complete all the requirements for that week by the following Thursday. Each week, you will have course content, assigned readings, a short automated quiz, and writing assignments. Every few weeks, you will additionally have a current event essay writing assignment to reinforce your learning. In this assignment, we will ask you to examine a current event in relation to course material and specific readings. Every few weeks, you will turn in certain components of your final essay and thus you can expect to receive feedback for your pieces of the final essay throughout the semester. We hope that doing this will help you know our expectations better and do better on your final essay. Note that in the Canvas Modules tab, each week will have its own content including a checklist specifying all the associated work and deliverables of the week.
I have designed the course so the assignments requiring student feedback are due Tuesdays at 11:59 pm Eastern Time, and all student feedback is due by Thursdays at 11:59 pm Eastern Time (except for the very first week of the course). Assignments that do not require feedback are due on Thursdays at 11:59 pm Eastern Time. For specific due dates, you can always refer to the calendar in Canvas.
Note: General information about each assignment type can be found in the Assignment Outlines and Instructions [4] section of the syllabus. Specific information about each type of assignment can be found in within the lessons.
There has been a troubling increase in the number of cases of academic integrity violation, which spans from honest mistakes to worse cases where students know the behavior is "copying" but still do it anyway. Yes. There are real people who get the dreaded "XF" on the Penn State transcript. Penn State faculty and staff have become very alert and vigilant, including our own team of instructors.
Throughout the course, you will be regularly writing and submitting your written assignments, mainly your Weekly Questions and Reactions, Current Event Discussion, and Final Essays. Every element of the submissions should be either (1) your original work, or (2) properly cited idea of somebody else's. If you want to mention somebody else's idea in your work, you should follow an established set of rules for doing so. In this class, we use the APA citation style for all citations done in all assignments. More information can be found in the 'Quick Guide to Citations' in the 'Resources' menu. Be aware that the material you submit for this course will be compared with online material using tools including Turnitin.
In terms of quizzes, you need to come without any information about the specific quiz questions themselves and correct/incorrect answers to them. Yes, they are open-book exams, but the only things you can refer to is raw course materials and your own notes about them. Sharing answers with classmates, or seeking answers on websites such as Course Hero is an intentional violation of academic integrity and will be carefully watched for using a variety of methods.
Penn State does not exempt you from consequences even when the violation was done without sufficient knowledge ("honest mistakes"). So, please make yourself aware of what constitutes a breach of academic integrity.
Please have a look at Penn State resources (Undergrad Advising Handbook [9] and a web page from College of Earth and Mineral Sciences [10]) to see what academic integrity is and what consequences it might bring when breached.
As the heroine of Little Women notes, Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents. (Wrong)
As the heroine of Little Women notes, "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents"(Alcott, 1868, pg. #). (Correct)
In this course, we seek to provide a learning experience to practice properly citing other people's works. One of the ways to do so is reflected in the fact that the citation information you can get from this website deliberately omits some of the essential citation information. You are the one who needs to look up the information to provide complete citation information in your submissions of Weekly Questions and Reactions, Current Event Discussions, and the Final Essay.
Typically, the citation on this website is lacking the following information about the cited material you need to fill in in your assignments:
Add a web address when it is an exclusively web-based resource (e.g., YouTube video clip).
In the below image, the first (wrong) one is a Google Scholar result, copy and pasted without any revision.
The second (correct) one is still a Google Scholar result, but I added missing information by doing an additional search.
This shows that 1) You MAY use Google Scholar or another citation generator, BUT 2) more often than not, you need to ADD to or EDIT your citation generator result to get them right.
Moseley, W. G., Perramond, E., Hapke, H. M., & Laris, P. (2014). An introduction to human-environment geography: local dynamics and global processes. John Wiley & Sons.
We’ll begin this semester with the first chapter from one of the leading Human-Environment Geography textbooks. This chapter is meant to make sure we are all on the same page. It offers a great introduction to some of the major themes we will encounter during this semester. Reading this will help you understand what Human-Environment Geography is and how it might relate to some of the more specific issues we talk about in this course. It will also be helpful for you as you get ready to write your first Current Event Essay which will be due in Week 3 and focuses on the California drought.
Registered students can access a copy of this reading in the Week 1 Module in Canvas.
Feel free to start reading the chapters for Week 2 in order to get a head start for next week....
The links below provide an outline of the material for this lesson. Be sure to carefully read through the entire lesson before returning to Canvas to submit your assignments.
Please make sure that you have completed the Course Orientation [11] before going any further. The course orientation will introduce you to the instructor for the course, all the steps you need to take in order to be up to speed on the logistics of the course, and more. You need to be familiar with the course expectations and deadlines before moving on with the material.
Please see the calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
At the end of this week:
Stevens, Fisher (Director) and Leonardo DiCaprio, with Fisher Stevens, Trevor Davidoski, Jennifer Davisson, Brett Ratner, James Packer and Martin Scorsese (Producers). (2016). Before the Flood, [Motion Picture Written by Mark Monroe]. RatPac Documentary Films, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
This film follows Leonardo DiCaprio's journey to learn about Climate Change in his role as U.N. Messenger of Peace. The film covers the dramatic changes now occurring around the world due to climate change. It also discusses the actions we can take to prevent catastrophic disruption of life on our planet. The film follows DiCaprio as he travels around the world speaking to scientists, world leaders, activists, and local people to gain a deeper understanding of this complex issue.
The Film is available through Penn State Libraries by clicking here [12] or, if you prefer, for rental/streaming from National Geographic, iTunes, and Amazon (https://www.beforetheflood.com/screenings/ [13]).
Once you have watched the film please go to the EPA Carbon Footprint Calculator [14] to calculate your own Carbon Footprint.
You might also want to try The Nature Conservancy [15] and see how the two are different.
Why do you think they are different?
Now that you've had a chance to think about how your actions and activities are connected to environmental change, we are going to take a look at some of the ways researchers have approached these questions.
Paul Robbins [16], director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has made significant contributions to critical scholarship on environmental politics, challenging researchers to rethink how we conceive of human-environment interactions. His impact on geography and numerous other fields has been profound, in part due to a strong commitment to interdisciplinary research. In that spirit, try to connect what you study, or have interests in, to the themes and ideas presented in these two chapters of his book, Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction.
Chapter 2: "A Tree with Deep Roots” provides a historical look at the theoretical underpinnings of much human-environment research. Robbins traces how different scholars researched and described human-environment interactions and indicates how the very act of description can be imbued with charged language replete with assumptions about the nature of things—even when scholars are working to account for those imbalances! These relationships of power are central in scholars’ descriptions—people, places, nature, and the problems encountered.
Take note of how Robbins describes the role of nature in each of these perspectives. Additionally, track how Robbins describes how critically examining the questions that research asks can reveal underlying assumptions about the world, and more specifically, about the power relations that order society. As you encounter these passages, try to think for yourself about how you could ask different questions, or what you like about how these scholars account for issues of power in the research they pursue.
This chapter will introduce you to many names and terms—you don’t have to remember all of them. When you come away from this reading, you should have a sense of how determinist, hazards, and cultural ecology frameworks approach questions of human-environment interactions. The purpose of this chapter is to get you thinking critically about the theories and assumptions underpinning research. You will find this way of thinking helpful as you continue on with the material in this course.
The excerpt you will read from “Chapter 3: The Critical Tools” describes theoretical threads of human-environment research, often referred to as political ecology. Each will provide you with tools to conceptualize different human-environment questions. These emphases are important for you to think about as you move through this course. In particular, Robbins highlights how power and ethics are related to struggles over land, resources, the means of production, and the language with which we understand these conditions. In reading this passage, you want to take note of the central issues present in each of the following:
As you did with Chapter 2, take note of what these different theoretical approaches emphasize and how they engage with issues of power. What do they react to? How do they emerge from particular historical moments in world events and from within research?
Finally, reflect. Are any of these ideas surprising to you? Why? Do these perspectives change your own thinking? Do they reflect any of your own ideas?
These readings will challenge you to think critically about the very foundations of how we perceive human-environment interactions by drawing attention to the complex processes that not only shape how we view human-environment issues, but also the material conditions of those interactions. As you proceed to the next page where you will find instructions for the first discussion, think about how different perspectives shape your own ideas and interests.
Robbins, P. 2012. Chapter 2: A Tree with Deep Roots. In Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., pp. 25-48.
Robbins, P. 2012. Chapter 3: The Critical Tools. In Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., pp. 48-72.
Hopefully, the readings and film from these first two weeks have helped prime you to think about how environmental change happens, how our lives impact it, and how the way we think about it shapes what we see.
For this week's Weekly Questions and Reactions, please write two brief paragraphs of 150-200 words each that detail:
Your hopes or fears might relate to...
There are no right or wrong hopes or fears! Your hopes and fears do not have to be universal! Perhaps your hopes or fears relate to a certain group of people, or to a certain place or region at a specific time in history. That said, try to share hopes or fears that are expansive and that will relate to many of the topics that we explore in the course! It will help you connect your personal hopes/fears to broader human-environment concerns if you reference the week's assigned materials and reflect on how they resonate with or differ from your own perspective. That is what the readings and films are for! Anytime you refer to course materials or outside sources, you should cite them at the end of your response.
So, this discussion is a chance to share with your instructor and your classmates what you are most interested in and what you think some of the most urgent issues are. We expect different people to believe different things. To receive full credit, you should submit your post to Week 2 Questions and Reactions in Canvas (by Tuesday by 11:59 pm Eastern Time) and also respond to at least two of your classmates (Thursday by 11:59 pm Eastern Time), while observing proper rules for netiquette.
Use the following link to access an example weekly reaction [17] submission.
Read through at least two of your classmates' posts and respond to them. Remember to be polite and respectful of your coursemates, even if you disagree with what they have said.
Please review the Rubric in Canvas carefully.
**Take your time with this first discussion. The format and grading will be similar for all other discussions throughout the course.**
NOTE: For the remainder of the weekly Question and Reactions assignments I will expect you to be able to formulate your submissions based on the materials provided in each lesson. I will not be providing specific prompts for your Q&R submissions.
This is our first current event essay, which is designed to get you thinking about how the course material from the last two weeks can help us understand real-world problems.
For this assignment, you will write a 750 - 1000 word essay in response to the prompt below by Thursday of week 3 at 11:59 pm (Eastern Time). Check the calendar in Canvas for specific time frames and due dates. This current event essay is worth a possible 60 points toward your final grade. Please see this page for more information on how you will be graded [18].
This week, we will be examining the National Monument system in the U.S. The current administration recently issued an executive order calling for the review of 27 national monuments. Specifically, the Department of the Interior is tasked with reviewing boundaries and classifications of these monuments by August 24, 2017. These decisions will have long term impacts on the landscape and people who live and work within and outside the monument boundaries.
Below are a couple of articles here that take a more in depth look at some of the implications of changing national park boundaries and a general picture of the stakeholders involved in this situation. In addition to these articles, feel free to do your own research on the topic.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's Statement on the End of the Monuments Review Public Comment Period [19]
Zinke completes review of 2 more national monuments, leaves them as is [20]
27 National Monuments Are Under Review. Here Are Five to Watch [22]
US cattle grazing plan for Idaho national monument approved [23]
In response to these articles and drawing on things we've covered in class already, consider the following questions in your response:
The strongest answers will draw specifically on course materials (articles, videos, etc.), use college level language, and make connections across the literature. Make sure to use proper citations!**
All assignments will be submitted in Canvas, check the calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
The links below provide an outline of the material for this lesson. Be sure to carefully read through the entire lesson before returning to Canvas to submit your assignments.
This week we focus on building a foundation of knowledge about how we think about and relate to Nature, and why it matters. The readings and film will demonstrate that our ideas about Nature - what it is, what we want it to be, what our role as humans is in relation to it - have a profound impact on the world around us.
The first item is a reading by an influential geographer and environmental historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, William Cronon. [24] His research seeks to understand the history of human interactions with the natural world: how we depend on the ecosystems around us to sustain our material lives, how we modify the landscapes in which we live and work, and how our ideas of nature shape our relationships with the world around us.
The second item is a film featuring narration by another prominent thinker on the environment, Michael Pollan [25]. He takes a creative approach to understanding human-environment relations and asks us to reconsider how much control we humans have over the process of crop cultivation and domestication.
Check the calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
Michael Schwarz and Edward Gray (directors) (2009).The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World [documentary]. USA: Kikim Media.
At the end of this week, you should be able to:
Let's dive in!
William Cronon (1995). Foreword and Introduction: In Search of Nature. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. pp. 19-56.
We'll begin with the forward and introduction to Cronon's edited volume Uncommon Ground (this reading is located in the Week 3 Module in Canvas). This book brings together thoughts from prominent historians, scientists, and philosophers about, as the book's title states, how to "rethink the human place in nature." The book argues that "nature" is a human idea with a long and contested history, and that we must understand this history very well if we seek to use and live with the environment in a conscious and responsible way. In Cronon's words:
“At a time when threats to the environment have never been greater, it may be tempting to believe that people need to be mounting the barricades rather than asking abstract questions about the human place in nature. Yet without confronting such questions, it will be hard to know which barricades to mount, and harder still to persuade large numbers of people to mount them with us. To protect the nature that is all around us, we must think long and hard about the nature we carry inside our heads" (Cronon 1995: 22).
As you read, consider the following questions:
Flowers. Trees. Plants. We've always thought that we've controlled them. But what if, in fact, they have been shaping us? Using this provocative question as a jumping off point, The Botany of Desire takes viewers on an exploration of our relationship with the plant world – seen from the plants' point of view.
School children often learn about the mutually beneficial relationship between honeybees and flowers. To make their honey, the bees collect the flowers' nectar and in the process spread pollen, which enables the flowers to reproduce. The Botany of Desire proposes that people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. "We don't give nearly enough credit to plants," says Pollan. "They've been working on us – they've been using us – for their own purposes."
The Botany of Desire examines this relationship by telling the stories of four plants that ensured their survival and expanded their habitat by satisfying our most basic yearnings. Connecting fundamental human desires for sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control with the plants that satisfy them – the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato – The Botany of Desire intends to show that we humans don't stand outside the web of nature; we are very much a part of it.
The program begins with Pollan in a California garden and sets off to roam the world – from the potato fields of Idaho and Peru to the apple orchards of New England and Kazakhstan; from a medical marijuana hot house to the lush tulip gardens of the Netherlands.
Click here for further information regarding The Botany of Desire [28].
The Penn State University Libraries provides access to stream the film. To access the film, head to https://libraries.psu.edu [29] and enter "The Botany of Desire" into the search field. Then select the online film option (should be the second item) and follow the links to view the film.
As you watch the film, consider the following questions:
During the semester, you will complete one final essay on a topic of your choosing. The topic should fit into the content we are covering in this course (Social Construction of Nature, Overpopulation and Scarcity, Commodity Chains, Food and Waste Consumption, Environmental Health, Environmental Justice, Resource Extraction, Conservation, or Climate Change). The final essay assignment will be divided into five components worth a total of 410 points toward your final grade.
For the final essay, you are asked to write a 3000-3500 word paper that documents a topic and proposes a resolution to a place-based problem/challenge surrounding human uses of the environment. The goal is for you to address a real-world issue using the skills you have learned and perspectives you have gained in the course. You will propose a topic, write smaller components throughout the semester, receive feedback from your classmates and instructor, and submit a final paper at the end of the course. The goal of submitting pieces of your final paper throughout the course is designed to give you feedback and ultimately help you write a stronger final paper. The paper will be due at the end of the course.
Consider reading the Essay Tips [30] page for a list of things to consider while drafting your essay.
The instructor will remind students of upcoming dates for submitting essay components throughout the course.
Points for the final project will be distributed as follows:
Activity | Points |
---|---|
Topic/Thesis (Week 4) | 50 |
Bibliography (Week 7) | 50 |
Paper Outline (Week 10) | 50 |
Providing Feedback to Classmates
|
60
|
Final Essay Due (Week 12) | 200 |
Begin thinking about your final essay topic and thesis statement (these will be due in Week 4) .
Before Wednesday of week 4, please submit your Final Essay Topic/Thesis Statement. Your assignment should be submitted as a Word document or PDF file. Check the calendar for specific due dates.
NOTE:
If your submission is late, you will NOT be assigned anyone to peer review and you will miss out on the 20 available peer review points. Also, no one will review your work, so please be on time.
Peer Reviews:
After the Tuesday night due date has passed for your initial Topic/Thesis Statement, please return to the Final Essay Component: Topic/Thesis Statement assignment page in the Week 4 module in Canvas and click on the "Peer Review" link to see who you have been assigned to peer review.
This week, you've been asked to think about different ways of defining nature and about how nature (and ideas of nature) influence human use of the environment.
All assignments will be submitted in Canvas, check the calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
The links below provide an outline of the material for this lesson. Be sure to carefully read through the entire lesson before returning to Canvas to submit your assignments.
This week, we will focus on debates about two key topics - global population growth and natural resource scarcity. These concepts are very important in shaping our understanding of environmental change and our fears about environmental crises. This week, we will begin to critically examine these important concepts by questioning how we think about the availability and use of resources and population pressures. We will compare how they have been used in political debates about the environment in centuries past and in contemporary times, and we will engage perspectives that strongly disagree with one another.
Remember
You are expected to include the full citations for these materials in your assignments, as detailed in our Quick Guide [31]. You should look up the missing information not provided with the materials, which, if it is not to be found in the document or opening film credits, can easily be located through a quick online search.
At the end of this week, you should be able to:
Let's dive in!
Overpopulation is the idea that there are not enough resources on the earth to sustain the earth’s population. Key to this idea is that there are certain human needs that must be filled, and that there are finite resources to fulfill these needs. As you engage with this week’s materials, ask yourself—how do these viewpoints conceptualize the relationship between humans and nature? How do these viewpoints conceptualize human wants and needs vis-a-vis natural resources? How does the geography of resource use change this debate? How do these viewpoints echo or conflict with the ideas and arguments from the readings/films that we have covered in previous weeks?
Thomas Malthus is perhaps the most well-known scholar on the topic of overpopulation. Born in England in 1766, he postulated in “An Essay on the Principle of Population” [32] that population growth eventually will place catastrophic pressure on resource use—leading to famines, conflict, and other stress.
As you reflect on these passages, take note of the two general ideas Malthus set forth in Chapter 1. Think about how these two points figure into his argument and his understanding of the demands human populations inevitably can put on natural resources. Malthus suggested that population pressures lead to resource overuse, famine, conflict, and misery, in particular, because exponential population growth outstrips food production. Overpopulation, he surmised, would eventually lead to catastrophe, entailing high death rates until the human population was culled to a more sustainable size.
Driven by some of the pressing issues of his day, Malthus was particularly interested in connecting the predicament of England’s poor to these issues of resources use and proposed moral restrictions on the poor, suggesting that the poor practice sexual abstinence. In the excerpt you will read from Chapter 5, Malthus takes issue with England’s Poor Laws, a kind of welfare system for those unable to work in Elizabethan England which Malthus wanted to see reformed. As you read this passage, you’ll see that he considered the laws to exacerbate the predicament of the poor specifically by enabling the population to increase and not providing the food they needed to survive.
Read the following excerpt from Chapter 1:
I.11
The most important argument that I shall adduce is certainly not new. The principles on which it depends have been explained in part by Hume, and more at large by Dr. Adam Smith. It has been advanced and applied to the present subject, though not with its proper weight, or in the most forcible point of view, by Mr. Wallace, and it may probably have been stated by many writers that I have never met with. I should certainly therefore not think of advancing it again, though I mean to place it in a point of view in some degree different from any that I have hitherto seen, if it had ever been fairly and satisfactorily answered.
I.14
I think I may fairly make two postulata.
First, That food is necessary to the existence of man.
Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.
I.15
These two laws, ever since we have had any knowledge of mankind, appear to have been fixed laws of our nature; and, as we have not hitherto seen any alteration in them, we have no right to conclude that they will ever cease to be what they now are, without an immediate act of power in that Being who first arranged the system of the universe; and for the advantage of his creatures, still executes, according to fixed laws, all its various operations.
I.16
I do not know that any writer has supposed that on this earth man will ultimately be able to live without food. But Mr. Godwin has conjectured that the passion between the sexes may in time be extinguished. As, however, he calls this part of his work a deviation into the land of conjecture, I will not dwell longer upon it at present than to say that the best arguments for the perfectibility of man, are drawn from a contemplation of the great progress that he has already made from the savage state, and the difficulty of saying where he is to stop. But towards the extinction of the passion between the sexes, no progress whatever has hitherto been made. It appears to exist in as much force at present as it did two thousand or four thousand years ago. There are individual exceptions now as there always have been. But, as these exceptions do not appear to increase in number, it would surely be a very unphilosophical mode of arguing, to infer merely from the existence of an exception, that the exception would, in time, become the rule, and the rule the exception.
I.17
Assuming then, my postulata as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.
I.18
Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.
I.19
By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal.
I.20
This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere; and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind.
I.21
Through the animal and vegetable kingdoms, nature has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand. She has been comparatively sparing in the room and the nourishment necessary to rear them. The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years. Necessity, that imperious all pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed bounds. The race of plants, and the race of animals shrink under this great restrictive law. And the race of man cannot, by any efforts of reason, escape from it. Among plants and animals its effects are waste of seed, sickness, and premature death. Among mankind, misery and vice. The former, misery, is an absolutely necessary consequence of it. Vice is a highly probable consequence, and we therefore see it abundantly prevail; but it ought not, perhaps, to be called an absolutely necessary consequence. The ordeal of virtue is to resist all temptation to evil.
I.22
This natural inequality of the two powers of population, and of production in the earth, and that great law of our nature which must constantly keep their effects equal, form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society. All other arguments are of slight and subordinate consideration in comparison of this. I see no way by which man can escape from the weight of this law which pervades all animated nature. No fancied equality, no agrarian regulations in their utmost extent, could remove the pressure of it even for a single century. And it appears, therefore, to be decisive against the possible existence of a society, all the members of which, should live in ease, happiness, and comparative leisure; and feel no anxiety about providing the means of subsistence for themselves and families.
I.23
Consequently, if the premises are just, the argument is conclusive against the perfectibility of the mass of mankind.
I.24
I have thus sketched the general outline of the argument; but I will examine it more particularly; and I think it will be found that experience, the true source and foundation of all knowledge, invariably confirms its truth.
And read the following excerpt from Chapter 5:
V.1
The positive check to population, by which I mean, the check that represses an increase which is already begun, is confined chiefly, though not perhaps solely, to the lowest orders of society.
V.2
This check is not so obvious to common view as the other I have Mentioned; and, to prove distinctly the force and extent of its operation would require, perhaps, more data than we are in possession of. But I believe it has been very generally remarked by those who have attended to bills of mortality, that of the number of children who die annually, much too great a proportion belongs to those, who may be supposed unable to give their offspring proper food and attention; exposed as they are occasionally to severe distress, and confined, perhaps, to unwholesome habitations and hard labour. This mortality among the children of the poor has been constantly taken notice of in all towns. It certainly does not prevail in an equal degree in the country; but the subject has not hitherto received sufficient attention to enable any one to say, that there are not more deaths in proportion, among the children of the poor, even in the country, than among those of the middling and higher classes. Indeed, it seems difficult to suppose that a labourer's wife who has six children, and who is sometimes in absolute want of bread, should be able always to give them the food and attention necessary to support life. The sons and daughters of peasants will not be found such rosy cherubs in real life as they are described to be in romances. It cannot fail to be remarked by those who live much in the country that the sons of labourers are very apt to be stunted in their growth, and are a long while arriving at maturity. Boys that you would guess to be fourteen or fifteen, are upon inquiry, frequently found to be eighteen or nineteen. And the lads who drive plough, which must certainly be a healthy exercise, are very rarely seen with any appearance of calves to their legs; a circumstance which can only be attributed to a want either of proper, or of sufficient nourishment.
V.3
To remedy the frequent distresses of the common people, the poor-laws of England have been instituted; but it is to be feared, that though they may have alleviated a little the intensity of individual misfortune, they have spread the general evil over a much larger surface. It is a subject often started in conversation and mentioned always as a matter of great surprise, that notwithstanding the immense sum that is annually collected for the poor in England, there is still so much distress among them….
V.10
The poor-laws of England tend to depress the general condition of the poor in these two ways. Their first obvious tendency is to increase population without increasing the food for its support. A poor man may marry with little or no prospect of being able to support a family in independence. They may be said therefore in some measure to create the poor which they maintain; and as the provisions of the country must, in consequence of the increased population, be distributed to every man in smaller proportions, it is evident that the labour of those who are not supported by parish assistance, will purchase a smaller quantity of provisions than before, and consequently more of them must be driven to ask for support.
V.11
Secondly, the quantity of provisions consumed in workhouses upon a part of the society, that cannot in general be considered as the most valuable part, diminishes the shares that would otherwise belong to more industrious and more worthy members; and thus in the same manner forces more to become dependent. If the poor in the workhouses were to live better than they now do, this new distribution of the money of the society would tend more conspicuously to depress the condition of those out of the workhouses by occasioning a rise in the price of provisions.
V.12
Fortunately for England, a spirit of independence still remains among the peasantry. The poor-laws are strongly calculated to eradicate this spirit. They have succeeded in part; but had they succeeded as completely as might have been expected, their pernicious tendency would not have been so long concealed.
V.13
Hard as it may appear in individual instances, dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful. Such a stimulus seems to be absolutely necessary to promote the happiness of the great mass of mankind; and every general attempt to weaken this stimulus, however benevolent its apparent intention, will always defeat its own purpose. If men are induced to marry from a prospect of parish provision, with little or no chance of maintaining their families in independence, they are not only unjustly tempted to bring unhappiness and dependence upon themselves and children; but they are tempted, without knowing it, to injure all in the same class with themselves. A labourer who marries without being able to support a family may in some respects be considered as an enemy to all his fellow-labourers….
V.26
A plan of this kind, the preliminary of which should be an abolition of all the present parish laws, seems to be the best calculated to increase the mass of happiness among the common people of England. To prevent the recurrence of misery, is, alas! beyond the power of man. In the vain endeavour to attain what in the nature of things is impossible, we now sacrifice not only possible but certain benefits. We tell the common people, that if they will submit to a code of tyrannical regulations, they shall never be in want. They do submit to these regulations. They perform their part of the contract: but we do not, nay cannot, perform ours: and thus the poor sacrifice the valuable blessing of liberty, and receive nothing that can be called an equivalent in return.
V.27
Notwithstanding, then, the institution of the poor-laws in England, I think it will be allowed, that considering the state of the lower classes altogether, both in the towns and in the country, the distresses which they suffer from the want of proper and sufficient food, from hard labour and unwholesome habitations, must operate as a constant check to incipient population.
V.28
To these two great checks to population, in all long occupied countries, which I have called the preventive and the positive checks, may be added vicious customs with respect to women, great cities, unwholesome manufactures, luxury, pestilence, and war.
V.29
All these checks may be fairly resolved into misery and vice.
V.30
And that these are the true causes of the slow increase of population in all the states of modern Europe, will appear sufficiently evident, from the comparatively rapid increase that has invariably taken place whenever these causes have been in any considerable degree removed.
You might notice that many of the ideas and language Malthus uses resonates with discussions of population, food, and poverty heard in the press today. Malthus’ ideas gained renewed interest in the 1960s and 1970s with the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb which revisited Malthus’ prediction that overpopulation would outpace food production, resulting in catastrophe. The ideas presented in these works conceive of resources as finite. This viewpoint begets discussions of resource scarcity, as it assumes that there are limits to the capacity of nature to produce or supply resources.
However, many scholars have taken issue with these ideas, in particular pointing out that human needs can be met by multiple forms, that needs can be a product of social pressures (do you need Doritos to satisfy your hunger? or an iPhone to have human interaction?), and human ingenuity and technological fixes have helped us adapt ways to meet our needs.
Population Research Institute’s videos - Overpopulation is a Myth:
Take a look at the Population Research Institute’s videos on “Overpopulation is a Myth” [33]. Click on the link to watch Episodes 1-6 and look at some of the associated content under each video (You don’t have to read all the comments that others have posted!!). These videos are short, only a few minutes each, so make sure you watch all of them!
MAKE SURE YOU WATCH ALL 6 EPISODES, this material will be on your quiz!
Ellis 2013 - Overpopulation is not the problem:
In the Week 4 Module on Canvas, you will find a PDF of an op-ed written by geographer Erle Ellis, challenging some of the basic claims about overpopulation and scarcity. Think about how his perspective of human use of the environment differs from Malthus. How does this perception change the solutions he sees?
As you look at these materials, consider what assumptions about human environment interactions, in particular, resource use and scarcity, these authors make. How might you connect some of these issues to Pollan’s arguments in The Botany of Desire?
Now, think about these issues in a specifically geographic sense. The maps and photos below (access via the links) are intended to foster a discussion about your place in these important debates.
Use these to think carefully about the causes of hunger, poverty, and resource scarcity.
This week, we've taken a critical look at influential theories of overpopulation, the environment, and resource scarcity.
All assignments will be submitted in Canvas, check the calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
That's it for Week 4!
The links below provide an outline of the material for this lesson. Be sure to carefully read through the entire lesson before returning to Canvas to submit your assignments.
"Why don't we pay more attention to who our farmers are? We would never be as careless choosing an auto mechanic or babysitter as we are about who grows our food." - Michael Pollan
How is our food produced, and how should it be produced for the well-being of humans and the environment? We've been circulating around the topics of food and agriculture during many of our discussions, and this week is our chance to dig in a little deeper. This week, we will consider the history of agricultural change, and take a close, critical look at corn, arguably the most dominant food crop in the United States. We will consider where it is grown and how, who grows it, for what purposes, and the impacts that corn production has on human and environmental health. We will also examine the "afterlife" of our food: as food waste.
As Wendell Berry famously wrote, "Eating is an agricultural act." (Click here if you'd like to know more [38]). It is also a political, spiritual, ecological, cultural, economic, and moral act. As we go through the week, let's think carefully about the geography of the food we eat, from when it is first planted, and processed, and sold, and eaten... or thrown away.
You are still expected to include the full citations for these materials in your assignments, as detailed in our Quick Guide [31]. You should look up the missing information not provided with the materials, which, if it is not to be found in the document or opening film credits, can easily be located through a quick online search.
Let's dive in!
We begin this week with McNeill's chapter on land use and agriculture (this reading is located in the Week 5 module in Canvas). McNeill characterizes the twentieth century as a time when societies, economies, and ecosystems were transformed by changes in agricultural practices and technologies. It's particularly important that we carry this perspective with us as we investigate the agroecosystems that we have created during the past century, and upon which we all depend.
As you read and reflect, consider these questions:
In 2004, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis were best friends and new graduates from Yale who were concerned about the American obesity epidemic and embarrassed by how little they knew about what they were eating. They moved to the heartland to learn where their food was coming from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, nitrogen fertilizers, powerful herbicides and government subsidies, they rented an acre of land and grew a bumper crop of corn. But as they tried to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they found raised troubling questions about how we eat and how we farm.
KING CORN, a feature-length (83-minute) documentary directed by Curt’s cousin Aaron Woolf, records the year-long journey of the two friends. As an outreach tool, the film challenges audience members to think through the consequences of U.S. agricultural policies, our own eating habits and the intersections between the two.
The film is available to stream through the Penn State Libraries. Click here [40] to access the link to stream the film through the PSU library server.
As this film takes you through the commodity chain of corn, think about how you would answer the following questions:
According to a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Americans are tossing up to 40% of the food supply each year, along with all the resources used to produce food that never gets eaten. Food waste occurs at home, on the farm, and in supermarkets.
In this TED Talk, NRDC's executive director Peter Lehner explores some of the statistics on food waste in the U.S. and walks us through some major sources of waste in common food supply chains.
Waste is not always a major component of commodity chain analyses, but it is a very important (and large!) component of our food systems, and Lehner argues it is an area in desperate need of innovation and improvement.
PETER LEHNER: Food issues are very important to NRDC, from food agriculture production to environmental justice, from food safety to food waste. But today I'm talking to you about food waste and what we can do about it.
I started thinking about food waste back when I was climbing mountains. When you're carrying 30 days of food on your back or climbing to 21,000 feet, every ounce makes a difference. So before the trips, we would measure out the pasta and the beans and the oatmeal down to the tablespoon.
And when we were on the trips, we would lick every pot so clean that we barely had to wash them. This is a picture of me licking a margarine wrapper to get that last calorie. But when I came home, those good habits left me. I would throw away a slightly bruised apple. I wouldn't eat the heel of a loaf of bread. I'd order too much in restaurants.
Sometimes it even became a science experiment. We had a game we called "journey to the back of the fridge" where we'd would look for the multicolored, fuzzy mold growing on the old food. So like most of you, I always knew we wasted some food, but I never really gave it much thought.
Honestly, how much did we think about the wasted food at today's lunch? Although, I'm sure Diane has taken care of it and is going to do something good with that. But then NRDC's food program came up with this report that David mentioned. And what we found was shocking.
40% of the food that is grown in this country isn't eaten. That's almost half of the food that is grown is wasted. The average American family spends $2,000 on food that it doesn't eat-- $2,000 on food that it doesn't eat. There is waste at the farm, in transit, at supermarkets, and restaurants, at homes. It's everywhere.
And think of the consequences of that waste. 25%, a quarter of all the water consumed in the United States, is used on crops that we don't eat. One fifth of all the fish that are caught are thrown out before the boats ever get to the dock. And one fifth of all that goes into a landfill is food. That's food that isn't even being fed to animals or being composted.
This is crazy. It's like air conditioning empty buildings. And that is what got us thinking. You know, we've known about energy waste for a long time from gas guzzlers to leaky buildings to inefficient appliances. And now there's an explosion of solutions. We have LED light bulbs. We have hybrid cars. We have green buildings.
So we wondered, could we learn from those energy solutions to help us tackle food waste? And here's what we learned. Those solutions, those energy solutions, came about by design because governments design better programs to create incentives and opportunities for efficiency.
And as a result, manufacturers design products that do more with less. For example, today the average refrigerator is bigger, is fancier, and it costs less in real terms than a refrigerator 30 years ago. And it uses one-quarter the energy. Not one-quarter less-- one-quarter the energy.
Consumers now have a whole range of energy efficient appliances to choose from. And let me be clear, that didn't happen because there was some great cultural awakening about the dangers of energy waste or because manufacturers suddenly realized, oh, we're spending too much on energy. They don't pay the electricity bills of their appliances.
It came about because people like those here in this room-- advocates-- pushed the government to design better programs that would force manufacturers and encourage manufacturers to design better products. And that's the lesson we can learn here.
Here's how. It starts on the farm. Every year we waste 6 billion pounds of food. 6 billion pounds of crops go unharvested every year. According to one survey that was done, sometimes up to 30% of the food lies unharvested because of market fluctuations or pests or because it's not the right size, shape, or color.
One peach farmer told us that 8 out of 10 peaches he can't sell. You couldn't even tell the difference. Can't we do something with the second fruit? Turns out there is, and I have a personal example from managing a coffee farm-- a certified coffee farm-- down in Costa Rica.
We know that the world market likes coffee beans that are uniform, big, round, green, and nicely shaped. But about 5% of our crop every year, the beans are cracked and broken and black or have holes in them. Instead of throwing them away, we sell them to the local market at a reduced price. And I'll tell you the truth, I can't tell the difference between the export coffee and the local coffee.
Here's another market solution. We know you can make juices and jams with misshapen fruits. It doesn't really matter what they look like when they're in a jam. England has a program called Rubies to Rubble, which sets up kitchens next to farmers markets which takes all the unsold fruit and makes them into gourmet chutneys.
Can't those types of programs be repeated again and again? And of course, sometimes you can't have a market-- there's still good food out there. California started a program called From Farm to Family, which every year takes 125 million pounds of food and provides it to needy families. That's enough for 100 million families. Certainly, other states could follow that example.
Now, of course, most food does get harvested. And it goes to supermarkets where a lot of it is wasted. The average supermarket wastes 10% of its food. The USDA estimates that supermarkets lose $50 billion every year on food waste. But it doesn't have to be this way.
Jose Alvarez, the former CEO of Stop and Shop, realized that he could save money, increase customer satisfaction, and reduce food waste just by changing how he displays the food and a few other small things. You see, the traditional wisdom is that customers like to see plenty. Stack them high, watch him fly, the saying goes. So Stop and Shop employees would put several days worth of food out to make customers see the plenty.
The trouble is, it wasn't always fresh. Alvarez realized he could put out 4 fish fillets rather than 10. Or he could put out 20 avocados rather than 40 but maybe with a dummy layer to give the illusion of abundance. Within several months, customer satisfaction was up, waste was down, and Stop and Shop was saving $100 million a year.
Now, obviously, there will be some waste in a supermarket, some spoilage in a supermarket. But that doesn't mean it has to be wasted. A friend, a local Hudson Valley farmer, told me that he went to his local supermarket and said, could he take what they were putting in the dumpster to feed his animals? And he was told, no, they can't do that without a policy directive from above. Well, that's the type of policies we can change.
And then how about if you go inside the supermarket? How many of us have been confused by those expiration dates on the labels? Well, it turns out we're not alone.
A survey showed that 60% of Americans get confused by those labels and throw out food prematurely. And with good reason. There's no standards or guidelines for those labels. They're just what the manufacturers want them to be.
In the UK they realize this, so the government got together with the manufacturers and standardized the labels. No more display by, sell by, best by, and all of that. That simple change, consumer confusion went down and food waste went down.
See, these solutions don't have to be very complicated if they're well designed. And they can make a big difference. Let's think about other areas where a lot of food is served.
We probably all remember being in school. Remember taking the school cafeteria, piling our plate and our trays with all that food that looks so good. We probably don't remember how much food we chucked at the end because our eyes were bigger than our stomach. Well, it turns out that the food service company Sodexo piloted trayless cafeterias at 300 schools and colleges around the country. And that simple move reduced food waste by 30%.
How about sports stadiums. NRDC worked with 60 major league sports teams, including the New York Rangers. And they now box up the food that is prepared and uneaten and give it to needy families in the area. We've worked with the Yankees who now compost their waste rather than sending it to the dump.
And at a much, much bigger scale many of us probably heard Mayor Bloomberg just a couple of days ago establish a food waste composting program. He's going to start in Staten Island in the New York City schools. You see, this is following the hierarchy that many of us probably remember with garbage-- reduce, reuse, recycle.
First, you try to reduce food waste, then you try to feed it to people. And if not, to animals, and if not, to compost. Sending it to the landfills is just dumb. But that brings us now to the final frontier of food waste-- we, the consumer.
As some of us probably remember from being told in school, there's room for improvement. The average American throws out 25 pounds of food per person every month. That's as much food as I carried in my backpack for a month. For a family of four, that's like taking $170 every month and shredding it in the Cuisinart.
This is double the amount of food-- or 50% more than the amount of food we wasted just a generation ago. Now many of the trends that lead to this nation's obesity epidemic have also contributed to this increase in food waste. Portions have gotten bigger. The average cookie is four times bigger than it used to be. Even the average plate is 35% bigger. The Joy of Cooking-- a recipe that used to serve 10 now serves 7.
So does that mean we have to choose between obesity and food waste? No, in England they started a program called Love Food Hate Waste. They gave consumers some simple tips. Make a list, buy only what you need, freeze your leftovers. Most food holds up pretty well in the freezer.
And don't necessarily trust those expiration dates. Trust your nose. It actually does pretty well for telling when the food is still good. And when you go to a restaurant, take a doggy bag and get a free second meal. Following just these simple steps and a few others, consumers in the United Kingdom reduced food waste by almost a fifth.
Now those are simple solutions. What if we had technology on our side? Imagine a refrigerator that could tell you what's in your fridge when you're at the supermarket. Or that could tell you what's in your fridge that is on the verge of getting bad and give you a recipe of how to do it.
Well, it turns out that fridge actually already exists. It's called a Smart Fridge with these apps and even more. Imagine how technology could help us if we had the right incentives and paid attention to food waste.
So why does all this matter? Well, as I mentioned, 40% of our food is wasted. Think of the resources that would be saved if that didn't happen-- less air pollution, water pollution, climate pollution, toxic pollution. But in addition to that, if we were to reduce food waste by just a third, we would be able to feed all 50 million food insecure Americans their total diet.
Let me say that again. All 50 million Americans who don't have enough food could get their total diet if we just cut food waste by a third. That's why we have to get going. Now I've given you some ideas of some proven solutions. And you heard some others today earlier. And many of you in your own works probably have others.
The question is, how do we scale those up? Two key ways of how we can do that. One is to start the conversation. All of us heard President Obama a couple of days ago announce a national goal of reducing energy waste by 50% by 2030. Well the UK has already announced a goal to reduce food waste by 50% by 2020. Shouldn't every city, state, and our federal government announce food waste reduction goals and get us going? Yeah!
And the second thing we need to do is measure it. When we did our report, our wasted report, one of the most salient findings was that nobody measured food waste from the farm to transit, supermarkets, or anywhere. Nobody really knew what was going on. And we know that if you don't measure it, you don't manage it. So let's insist that we measure the food waste so we can start having a real step forward and take attention to this.
Now if we can do this, it all comes back to us. Not just US consumers, but us as advocates. We have to be the ones to push the government, the food manufacturers, and everyone else in the food chain to pay attention to food waste. Now I'm not saying that you should only eat what you can carry on your back.
But honestly, it's a long way between licking a margarine wrapper and letting your food become a science experiment. We know the path forward. It starts today, and it starts with us. Thank you.
Click on the image above to watch the TEDx talk. For more information about how to make the most of our national food systems, check out:
Natural Resources Defense Council [41]
NRDC Food Waste page [42]
As you watch and take notes on Lehner's TEDxTalk, consider these questions:
Using the course content and the information provided below, you will write your second Current Event Essay to understand real world problems as they relate to palm oil production and the destruction of the rainforests and impacts on wildlife.
For this assignment, you will write a 1000 word essay in response to the prompt below by Thursday of week 6 at 11:59 pm (Eastern Time). Note that this current module is week 5 module . Check the calendar in Canvas for specific time frames and due dates. This current event essay is worth a possible 60 points toward your final grade. Please see syllabus for more information on how you will be graded.
This week we will be looking at palm oil. Palm oil has become ubiquitous in its usage in food and cosmetic production. One prominent example that recently made the rounds in the news and on social media is Nutella when the French ecology minister suggested that consumers boycott the hazelnut spread based on its involvement in the palm oil industry, setting off a controvery dubbed "Nutellagate" (Longeray 2015, click here for more info [43])
Take a look at the websites/articles below to understand the issues related to palm oil, the impact this industry has on the rainforest environment, and how the use of this product is related to issues we have learned about in the course in recent weeks (think: overconsumption, technological advances and farming transitions, environmental conflict, and commodification).
Zero deforestation in Indonesia: Pledges, politics and palm oil [46]
Living in a toxic haze: The daily reality of Indonesia's peatland fires [47]
Indonesia’s Orangutans Suffer as Fires Rage and Businesses Grow [48]
Forbidden fruit: Indonesia palm oil plantations boost security to stop thieves [49]
In response to these articles and drawing on things we've covered in class already, consider the following questions in your response:
The strongest answers will draw specifically on course materials (articles, videos, etc.), use college level language, and make connections across the literature. Make sure to use proper citations!**
This week, we have learned about how agriculture has transformed in the twentieth century. We have more food than ever before, but we also have more waste, and the costs and benefits are complicated to trace. We have seen how important it is to trace each stage in the production of food - from designing the crop seeds to assessing our food waste - in order to identify costs and benefits for social equity, for the economy, and for the environment.
Keep in mind the objectives for this week:
All assignments will be submitted in Canvas, check the calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
Well done! Now on to Week 6!
The links below provide an outline of the material for this lesson. Be sure to carefully read through the entire lesson before returning to Canvas to submit your assignments.
We have grappled with some of the key concepts that geographers use to understand human uses of the environment. We have unpacked ideas like Overpopulation, Scarcity, and Nature, and found that they are much more complicated than they might seem at first. This week, we will put our advanced understanding of human-environment geography to use!
This week's topic is the Commodity Chain. You have only one assigned item to read, watch, and complete your regular assignments for: a multimedia presentation of the commodity chain of a T-Shirt.
At the end of this week, you should be able to:
Let's dive in!
Watch the National Public Radio production about how Planet Money Makes a T-shirt. [50]
A Commodity is any product or activity that is produced by human labor for the purposes of being sold in a commercial market. Commodities can be accumulated for a period of time (some are perishable while others can be stored for virtually centuries), exchanged as part of transactions or purchased on specific markets (such as futures market). Some commodities are fixed, implying that they cannot be transferred, except for the title. This includes land, mining, logging and fishing rights. In this context, the value of a fixed commodity is derived from the utility and the potential rate of extraction. Bulk commodities are commodities that can be transferred, which includes, for instance, grains, metals, livestock, oil, cotton, coffee, sugar and cocoa. Their value is derived from utility, supply, and demand, which is established through major commodity markets involving a constant price discovery mechanism.
A Commodity Chain (sometimes known as a "supply chain" or "value chain") is a network of production, trade, and service activities that cover all stages from the transformation of raw materials, through intermediate manufacturing stages, to the delivery of a finished good to a market.
Commodity chains are what link specific production systems in particular places to a global, highly interdependent economy.
A commodity chain is a common tool that geographers, economists, and other social scientists use to understand the journey of a particular resource, from when it is first extracted through processing and refining, to when it is sold and consumed as a finished product. Some commodity chains also study of the "afterlife" of a product by looking at where it goes (and how it might take new forms of value) as an after-market waste product. This tool is especially useful for tracing the connections between the places and people involved, and the impact that our demand for a particular commodity has on the environment.
Keep these definitions in mind as you work through all five chapters of the following multimedia presentation. Make sure that you watch the videos and scroll down to read all the text in each of the five chapters:
You are expected to know the material contained in both the text and the videos. The links within the reading that take you to external sources of additional information are not required (but you are encouraged to explore them; they are certainly very interesting!).
Click the image below to link to the multimedia presentation: (Click the CHAPTERS icon in the lower left corner of your screen to watch all the five chapters.)
As you work through the material, pay especially close attention to the geography of this commodity chain:
As part of the process of writing your Final Essay, you will write an annotated bibliography that summarizes some of the literature you will be drawing on for the final paper (approx. 2-3 pages double spaced). The annotated bibliography should include at least 10 resources that you intend on using in the final paper, and a 2-3 sentence summarization of each resource.
You will also be required to provide feedback in the form of a peer review to two of your classmates.
I have included an example annotated bibliography below the deliverables information.
You should begin working on your annotated bibliography so you not rushed when it is due in week 7. Your bibliography should be submitted as a word document or a pdf file.
Before the end of week 7, submit your bibliography to the Final Essay Component: Bibliography assignment in the Lesson 7 module in Canvas. Check the calendar for specific due dates.
NOTE:
If your submission is late, you will NOT be assigned anyone to peer review and you will miss out on the 20 available peer review points. Also, no one will review your work, so please be on time.
Peer Reviews:
After the Tuesday night due date has passed for your initial bibliography submission, please return to the Final Essay Component: Bibliography assignment page in the Week 7 module in Canvas and click on the "Peer Review" link to see who you have been assigned to peer review.
This article introduces the concept of “energy landscapes” a combination of spatial planning and energy modeling. Using Austria as a case study, the authors indicate that finding places to place RE farms is more complicated than just finding the place with enough energy potential. Meaning the authors believe that taking political-social and economic restrictions into account is all a part of a move toward RE.
These are Brewer’s original thoughts that eventually turned into ColorBrewer. There are great examples in maps of the color schemes that she identified including the concept of color scheme usage in maps such as sequential, diverging, and qualitative.
This article outlines a study to evaluate which data classification scheme is best. Their conclusions are inconclusive although quantiles are generally agreed to be the best with a lot of caveats.
This article specifically studies different types of ways to use participatory mapping to identify land-use conflicts. The authors use several different methods to determine land-use conflicts. They surveyed people from both urban and rural areas. In their analysis they used both a simple density and clustering methods to demonstrate how to the choice of method can influence areas identified as conflict areas. The authors conclude there is not much difference between the two.
This is a critical overview of the work in cognitive cartography. He states that cognitive cartographers are adept at finding new ways to study cognitive issues in cartography as the cartographic technology changes, and as ways to study it improve. There has also been extensive study of mental maps (i.e. cognitive spatial thinking). However, there has been little research to reduce "the tensions that have existed for decades between the empiricist and the critical perspectives.
This chapter talks about how prejudices against certain groups are a moving window, specifically in how prejudice is a continuum between completely acceptable to be prejudiced or completely unacceptable. In general, the authors state that legislation has mostly concerned groups that are moving from acceptable to unacceptable, and in general, psychologists are interested in these groups as well. This is called the "normative window", "a window of time in which social norms are shifting toward the equal treatment, the normalization, and the reduction of stigma and exclusion of a group, but for which the entire process has not yet been completed, and for which complete social agreement about the standing of the group has not yet been achieved." (p. 56)
This is a review of current research to show how visuals are a key communicative tool for visualizing climate change and for stimulating imaginations of climate futures. It divides the moments of communication in the cycle: the moment of production, the moment of the visual, and the moment of consumption.
This article is a very short summation of why Raisz thinks showing the "physiography" is more important and is different than showing simple contours. He gives a list of how each of the different physiographic regions should be drawn and indicates everyone can draw them with a bit of practice.
This article explains adaptive management and how GIScience and interactive online maps can be used for better management of lake level rise and fall in the Great Lakes for the NOAA Lake Level Viewer. Their goal is to use wireframing to plan out UX design for both representation and interaction. They use competitive analysis and focus groups to determine what to test in the user testing phase (the focus of this article). They design two sets of wireframes: high fidelity representation and low-fidelity interaction and use cognitive walkthroughs to test their designs.
This article outlines two studies assessing whether identity with a group predicts the potential for attitude change, i.e., they wanted to test whether students who found their identity as students of the University of Buffalo as essential to their identity would be more likely to do the same thing and have the same attitude as other students vs. students who did not find that their identity was linked to their status as a student of UB. The results indicated " in-group identification moderated consensus effects" (p. 674).
This week featured a dramatic commodity chain that showed us how complex the journey of a simple T-Shirt can be. Hopefully, you were able to recognize the relevance of key concepts from past weeks along this commodity chain: moments where those involved in making the T-Shirt encountered resource scarcity, or competing ideas of nature, or agricultural technology.
All assignments will be submitted in Canvas, check the calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
Well done! Now on to Week 7!
The links below provide an outline of the material for this lesson. Be sure to carefully read through the entire lesson before returning to Canvas to submit your assignments.
This week discusses chemical exposures and human and environmental health. We often take for granted that we are exposed to chemicals every day and everywhere as we breathe, touch, and eat them. Some of these chemicals are harmful to human health, like lead and asbestos, while others are beneficial, like those found in medicines. Some chemicals are toxic at all levels of exposure, while others may be harmful at a certain threshold and beneficial at another.
This week, we will focus on chemicals that have harmful effects. We'll explore how you and others are exposed to chemicals through your everyday geographies, and will consider the relationship between human and environmental health. You will:
Check the calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
You are expected to include the full citations for these materials in your assignments, as detailed in our Quick Guide [31]. You should look up the missing information not provided with the materials, which, if it is not to be found in the document or opening film credits, can easily be located through a quick online search.
Okay, now let's get started!
Before we get started, take a moment to think about what health means to you. Does it mean you're free of disease or illness? Able to accomplish the physical and mental tasks you need to accomplish?
Or, what do you mean when you use the term "health" to talk about non-humans? What does it mean to call a dog healthy? or say, "that is a healthy tree"?
Health is a contested term, used to describe individuals, populations, regions, humans, and non-humans alike. We often have a better idea of what is not healthy, rather than what is. Keep struggling with what health means and how you are using it as you consider this week's materials.
As mentioned in the introduction, we are exposed to chemicals every day, everywhere. They are in our water bottles, the air we breathe, and the furniture we sit on. For a sense of this magnitude, chemicals that are manufactured or used in products sold in the United States are required to be included in the Toxic Substances Control Act Registry, a catalog with over 84,000 chemicals (EPA, 2014). Some of these chemicals can be harmful to human and environmental health at a given dose, others are always dangerous and require additional regulation. Some chemicals can cause changes in the body that can lead to diseases, like cancer. However, it's important to note that susceptibility to these adverse effects can be different for individuals based on many factors, including age, weight, and genetic predisposition.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health has developed a tool to give you a sense of the extent of your daily exposures, depending on the kind of places in which you might live and work. Tox Town [52]details just some of the most common exposures to chemicals you might have in a city, on a farm, or in other kinds of locations. As you explore this interactive activity, make sure to click on some of the links with more information about exposures and the chemical toxins in those exposures. As you work through some of these links, ask yourself not only what your own personal exposures are, but also what your exposures might be if you lived in a different location, had a different occupation, or had a different class, racial, ethnic, or gender background.
Source:
Silent Spring:
Chemicals can have harmful effects on human health, but also what we broadly understand as environmental health. Remember how we’ve examined how humans and nature are intertwined concepts. Thus, understanding the complex relationships between exposures in nature requires tracing interactions between plants, animals (including humans), soils, air, and water.
Pesticides and fertilizers used in agriculture are essential entry points to understanding this relationship. Perhaps the groundbreaking work on this topic was published in Rachel Carson’s [54] 1962 book, Silent Spring. In her book, Carson details the extensive harm the pesticide DDT poses to humans and non-humans alike; after DDT has been sprayed, it persists in the environment, circulating through soil, water, bodies, and food. Carson’s work challenged industry and government groups for promoting DDT spraying programs despite mounting evidence of its deleterious effects. Her analysis, expanded on by many scholars in the 50 years since the publication of Silent Spring, draws strong connections between environmental harms and political and economic policies, programs, and institutional structure. Many consider Carson’s book to be a major turning point in environmental politics in the United States, laying the ground work for the environmental movement in the United States and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Read the excerpt from her book, found in the Week 7 Module on Canvas. As you read it, pay special attention to the everyday encounters with chemicals Carson describes, and the way she analyzes governmental and industry actions. This will be helpful to you next week when we encounter the environmental justice movement.
Changing Risks:
Since the publication of Rachel Carson's book, the use of pesticides in developed countries has become much more highly regulated (check the WHO map and think about if the regulations are equally cautious in developing countries?). While few of us today are careless when applying pesticides to our lawns (if we do at all) and many of you may have never even heard of moth prevention treatments (used by your grandma to keep moths from eating holes in woolen clothing and blankets), there are new and evolving risks that we are exposed to. For example, many carpets are sprayed with fire retardants that are now emerging as a potential health risk. And the chemical used to make your stylish new jacket waterproof are being questioned and linked to health risks.
The World Health Organization has recently published new figures showing Ambient Air Pollution [55] as one of the top 15 risk factors for mortality globally, along with Occupational Risks (which include acute pesticide poisoning).
Although the United States and many other countries have banned DDT, agricultural uses of other pesticides continue. The impacts of these new pesticides are often less acute; however, as was the case for the chemicals described by Carson, their impacts on human health are often not well understood. In this video, [56] Tyrone Hayes, a Professor of Biology at the University fo Californa, Berkeley, and Penelope Jagessar Chaffer, a filmmaker, discuss the impacts of a common herbicide on hormonal health, as well as other chemical compounds that can be harmful to humans and fetuses.
Penelope Jagessar Chaffer: I was going to ask if there's a doctor in the house. No, I'm just joking. It's interesting, because it was six years ago when I was pregnant with my first child that I discovered that the most commonly used preservative in baby care products mimics estrogen when it gets into the human body. Now it's very easy actually to get a chemical compound from products into the human body through the skin. And these preservatives had been found in breast cancer tumors.
That was the start of my journey to make this film, "Toxic Baby." And it doesn't take much time to discover some really astonishing statistics with this issue. One is that you and I all have between 30 to 50,000 chemicals in our bodies that our grandparents didn't have. And many of these chemicals are now linked to the skyrocketing incidents of chronic childhood disease that we're seeing across industrialized nations. I'll show you some statistics. So for example, in the United Kingdom, the incidence of childhood leukemia has risen by 20 percent just in a generation. Very similar statistic for childhood cancer in the U.S. In Canada, we're now looking at one in 10 Canadian children with asthma. That's a four-fold increase.
Again, similar story around the world. In the United States, probably the most astonishing statistic is a 600 percent increase in autism and autistic spectrum disorders and other learning disabilities. Again, we're seeing that trend across Europe, across North America. And in Europe, there's certain parts of Europe, where we're seeing a four-fold increase in certain genital birth defects. Interestingly, one of those birth defects has seen a 200 percent increase in the U.S. So a real skyrocketing of chronic childhood disease that includes other things like obesity and juvenile diabetes, premature puberty.
So it's interesting for me, when I'm looking for someone who can really talk to me and talk to an audience about these things, that probably one of the most important people in the world who can discuss toxicity in babies is expert in frogs.
(Laughter)
Tyrone Hayes: It was a surprise to me as well that I would be talking about pesticides, that I'd be talking about public health, because, in fact, I never thought I would do anything useful. (Laughter)Frogs. In fact, my involvement in the whole pesticide issue was sort of a surprise as well when I was approached by the largest chemical company in the world and they asked me if I would evaluate how atrazine affected amphibians, or my frogs. It turns out, atrazine is the largest selling product for the largest chemical company in the world. It's the number one contaminant of groundwater, drinking water, rain water. In 2003, after my studies, it was banned in the European Union, but in that same year, the United States EPA re-registered the compound.
We were a bit surprised when we found out that when we exposed frogs to very low levels of atrazine -- 0.1 parts per billion -- that it produced animals that look like this. These are the dissected gonads of an animal that has two testes, two ovaries, another large testis, more ovaries, which is not normal ... (Laughter) even for amphibians. In some cases, another species like the North American Leopard Frog showed that males exposed to atrazine grew eggs in their testes. And you can see these large, yolked-up eggs bursting through the surface of this male's testes. Now my wife tells me, and I'm sure Penelope can as well, that there's nothing more painful than childbirth -- which that I'll never experience, I can't really argue that -- but I would guess that a dozen chicken eggs in my testicle would probably be somewhere in the top five.
In recent studies that we've published, we've shown that some of these animals when they're exposed to atrazine, some of the males grow up and completely become females. So these are actually two brothers consummating a relationship. And not only do these genetic males mate with other males, they actually have the capacity to lay eggs even though they're genetic males. What we proposed, and what we've now generated support for, is that what atrazine is doing is wreaking havoc causing a hormone imbalance. Normally the testes should make testosterone, the male hormone. But what atrazine does is it turns on an enzyme, the machinery if you will, aromatase that converts testosterone into estrogen. And as a result, these exposed males lose their testosterone, they're chemically castrated, and they're subsequently feminized because now they're making the female hormone.
Now this is what brought me to the human-related issues. Because it turns out that the number one cancer in women, breast cancer, is regulated by estrogen and by this enzyme aromatase. So when you develop a cancerous cell in your breast, aromatase converts androgens into estrogens, and that estrogen turns on or promotes the growth of that cancer so that it turns into a tumor and spreads. In fact, this aromatase is so important in breast cancer that the latest treatment for breast cancer is a chemical called letrozole, which blocks aromatase, blocks estrogen, so that if you developed a mutated cell, it doesn't grow into a tumor.
Now what's interesting is, of course, that we're still using 80 million pounds of atrazine, the number one contaminant in drinking water, that does the opposite -- turns on aromatase, increases estrogen and promotes tumors in rats and is associated with tumors, breast cancer, in humans. What's interesting is, in fact, the same company that sold us 80 million pounds of atrazine, the breast cancer promoter, now sells us the blocker -- the exact same company. And so I find it interesting that instead of treating this disease by preventing exposure to the chemicals that promote it, we simply respond by putting more chemicals into the environment.
PJC: So speaking of estrogen, one of the other compounds that Tyrone talks about in the film is something called bisphenol A, BPA, which has been in the news recently. It's a plasticizer. It's a compound that's found in polycarbonate plastic, which is what baby bottles are made out of. And what's interesting about BPA is that it's such a potent estrogen that it was actually once considered for use as a synthetic estrogen in hormone placement therapy. And there have been many, many, many studies that have shown that BPA leaches from babies' bottles into the formula, into the milk, and therefore into the babies. So we're dosing our babies, our newborns, our infants, with a synthetic estrogen.
Now two weeks ago or so, the European Union passed a law banning the use of BPA in babies' bottles and sippy cups. And for those of you who are not parents, sippy cups are those little plastic things that your child graduates to after using bottles. But just two weeks before that, the U.S. Senate refused to even debate the banning of BPA in babies' bottles and sippy cups. So it really makes you realize the onus on parents to have to look at this and regulate this and police this in their own lives and how astonishing that is.
(Video) PJC: With many plastic baby bottles now proven to leak the chemical bisphenol A, it really shows how sometimes it is only a parent's awareness that stands between chemicals and our children. The baby bottle scenario proves that we can prevent unnecessary exposure. However, if we parents are unaware, we are leaving our children to fend for themselves.
TH: And what Penelope says here is even more true. For those of you who don't know, we're in the middle of the sixth mass extinction. Scientists agree now. We are losing species from the Earth faster than the dinosaurs disappeared, and leading that loss are amphibians. 80 percent of all amphibians are threatened and in come decline. And I believe, many scientists believe that pesticides are an important part of that decline. In part, amphibians are good indicators and more sensitive because they don't have protection from contaminants in the water -- no eggshells, no membranes, and no placenta. In fact, our invention -- by "our" I mean we mammals -- one of our big inventions was the placenta. But we also start out as aquatic organisms.
But it turns out that this ancient structure that separates us from other animals, the placenta, cannot evolve or adapt fast enough because of the rate that we're generating new chemicals that it's never seen before. The evidence of that is that studies in rats, again with atrazine, show that the hormone imbalance atrazine generates causes abortion. Because maintaining a pregnancy is dependent on hormones.
Of those rats that don't abort, atrazine causes prostate disease in the pups so the sons are born with an old man's disease. Of those that don't abort, atrazine causes impaired mammary, or breast, development in the exposed daughters in utero, so that their breast don't develop properly. And as a result, when those rats grow up, their pups experience retarded growth and development because they can't make enough milk to nourish their pups.
So the pup you see on the bottom is affected by atrazine that its grandmother was exposed to. And given the life of many of these chemicals, generations, years, dozens of years, that means that we right now are affecting the health of our grandchildren's grandchildren by things that we're putting into the environment today.
And this is not just philosophical, it's already known, that chemicals like diethylstilbestrol and estrogen, PCBs, DDT cross the placenta and effectively determine the likelihood of developing breast cancer and obesity and diabetes already when the baby's in the womb. In addition to that, after the baby's born, our other unique invention as mammals is that we nourish our offspring after they're born. We already know that chemicals like DDT and DES and atrazine can also pass over into milk, again, affecting our babies even after they're born.
PJC: So when Tyrone tells me that the placenta is an ancient organ, I'm thinking, how do I demonstrate that? How do you show that? And it's interesting when you make a film like this because you're stuck trying to visualize science that there's no visualization for. And I have to take a little bit of artistic license.
(Video) (Ringing) Old man: Placenta control. What is it? Oh what? (Snoring) (Honk) Puffuffuff, what? Perfluorooctanoic acid. Blimey. Never heard of it. PJC: And neither had I actually before I started making this film. And so when you realize that chemicals can pass the placenta and go into your unborn child, it made me start to think, what would my fetus say to me? What would our unborn children say to us when they have an exposure that's happening every day, day after day?
(Video) Child: Today, I had some octyphenols, some artificial musks, and some bisphenol A. Help me.
PJC: It's a very profound notion to know that we as women are at the vanguard of this. This is our issue, because we collect these compounds our entire life and then we end up dumping it and dumping them into our unborn children. We are in effect polluting our children. And this was something that was really brought home to me a year ago when I found out I was pregnant and the first scan revealed that my baby had a birth defect associated with exposure to estrogenic chemicals in the womb and the second scan revealed no heartbeat.
So my child's death, my baby's death, really brought home the resonance of what I was trying to make in this film. And it's sometimes a weird place when the communicator becomes part of the story, which is not what you originally intend. And so when Tyrone talks about the fetus being trapped in a contaminated environment, this is my contaminated environment. This is my toxic baby. And that's something that's just profound and sad, but astonishing because so many of us don't actually know this.
TH: One of the things that's exciting and appropriate for me to be here at TEDWomen is that, well, I think it was summed up best last night at dinner when someone said, "Turn to the man at your table and tell them, 'When the revolution starts, we've got your back.'" The truth is, women, you've had our back on this issue for a very long time, starting with Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" to Theo Colborn's "Our Stolen Future" to Sandra Steingraber's books "Living Downstream" and "Having Faith." And perhaps it's the connection to our next generation -- like my wife and my beautiful daughter here about 13 years ago -- perhaps it's that connection that makes women activists in this particular area.
But for the men here, I want to say it's not just women and children that are at risk. And the frogs that are exposed to atrazine, the testes are full of holes and spaces, because the hormone imbalance, instead of allowing sperm to be generated, such as in the testis here, the testicular tubules end up empty and fertility goes down by as much as 50 percent. It's not just my work in amphibians, but similar work has been shown in fish in Europe, holes in the testes and absence of sperm in reptiles in a group from South America and in rats, an absence of sperm in the testicular tubules as well. And of course, we don't do these experiments in humans, but just by coincidence, my colleague has shown that men who have low sperm count, low semen quality have significantly more atrazine in their urine.
These are just men who live in an agricultural community. Men who actually work in agriculture have much higher levels of atrazine. And the men who actually apply atrazine have even more atrazine in their urine, up to levels that are 24,000 times what we know to be active are present in the urine of these men. Of course, most of them, 90 percent are Mexican, Mexican-American. And it's not just atrazine they're exposed to. They're exposed to chemicals like chloropicrin, which was originally used as a nerve gas. And many of these workers have life expectancies of only 50.
It shouldn't come to any surprise that the things that happen in wildlife are also a warning to us, just like Rachel Carson and others have warned. As evident in this slide from Lake Nabugabo in Uganda, the agricultural runoff from this crop, which goes into these buckets, is the sole source of drinking, cooking, and bathing water for this village. Now if I told the men in this village that the frogs have pour immune function and eggs developing in their testes, the connection between environmental health and public health would be clear. You would not drink water that you knew was having this kind of impact on the wildlife that lived in it. The problem is, in my village, Oakland, in most of our villages, we don't see that connection. We turn on the faucet, the water comes out, we assume it's safe, and we assume that we are masters of our environment, rather than being part of it.
PJC: So it doesn't take much to realize that actually this is an environmental issue. And I kept thinking over and over again this question. We know so much about global warming and climate change, and yet, we have no concept of what I've been calling internal environmentalism. We know what we're putting out there, we have a sense of those repercussions, but we are so ignorant of this sense of what happens when we put things, or things are put into our bodies.
And it's my feeling and it's my urging being here to know that, as we women move forward as the communicators of this, but also as the ones who carry that burden of carrying the children, bearing the children, we hold most of the buying power in the household, is that it's going to be us moving forward to carry the work of Tyrone and other scientists around the world. And my urging is that when we think about environmental issues that we remember that it's not just about melting glaciers and ice caps, but it's also about our children as well.
Thank you.
As you watch the video, take note of how human and environmental life are entwined. What are some of the ethical and justice considerations this video raises for you? What are some of the regulatory issues it raises? How does the video discuss generational issues? Don't forget to pay attention to the ways these presenters make their argument. How do they set the stakes of what they're discussing?
Global Perspective:
Now for a global perspective, read the World Health Organization's page on Agri-chemicals [57] and pay attention to the map showing the number of chemical poisoning in each country around the world. Consider where your own food comes from and how your own consumptive patterns might be implicated in these exposures. How could this be a part of a commodity chain analysis that we've covered in Week 6?
This week, we’ve tried to think about how humans and non-humans can be affected by chemicals at harmful levels, and the relationships between human and non-human exposures. This week’s information builds a foundation for next week when we will think about environmental health explicitly through the lens of justice.
In your weekly reactions, be sure to think about the geographic elements of exposure: how do human exposures change based on where people live, their backgrounds, and occupations? You are also encouraged to think back to the “What is nature?" and “We are what we eat” weeks of the course in your discussion.
This week you will:
All assignments will be submitted in Canvas, check the calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
Good luck!
The links below provide an outline of the material for this lesson. Be sure to carefully read through the entire lesson before returning to Canvas to submit your assignments.
The first seven weeks of the course have given us an overview of schools of thought on Nature, what it is, and how we should use it. Now that we've thought critically about how we understand the environment, we will use these broad ideas to ask deeper, more specific questions about inequality: Who gets to make decisions about human use of the environment? Who benefits from these decisions? Who bears the negative impacts?
Assignments Due During Week 8:
You are expected to include the full citations for these materials in your assignments, as detailed in our Quick Guide [31]. You should look up the missing information not provided with the materials, which, if it is not to be found in the document or opening film credits, can easily be located through a quick online search.
It is important to pay close attention to how each author/speaker is defining racism, as this is an important concept in environmental justice, and their definitions may be very different from popular uses of the term that you are more familiar with. All three of the authors are analyzing racial and class inequality at a structural level, instead of at the level of individual people. This means that they are NOT focused on the kind of racism that manifests as one individual hating and intentionally discriminating against another person because of her race. So, read carefully: how do these authors define environmental racism?
Struggles over unequal exposure to environmental hazards have been taking place for a very long time in societies all around the world, but the origins of environmental injustice as a concept can be traced back to 1982, when the State of North Carolina needed to clean up highly toxic waste (Polychlorinated biphenyl, or PCB, which is so dangerous to the environment and human health that the US banned it in 1979) that a company had been illegally dumping along highways across the state. After sending the perpetrators to jail, North Carolina decided to clean the highways and to relocate the toxic PCB-laden soil to a landfill, which they sited in the African American community of Afton, Warren County. The landfill was not a safe way to contain PCBs, and it represented a severe threat to the health of this community. However, African Americans have historically had very little political power in North Carolina, and it took over twenty years of lawsuits, protests, and public appeals for the state to take responsibility. In 2003, state and federal agencies detoxified the 81,500 tons of PCB-laden soil by burning it in a kiln that reached over 800 degrees. The residents' struggle in Warren County remains a powerful symbol for the environmental justice movement.
In response to this experience, and others around the country, the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice commissioned a study of the geography of hazardous waste sites, landfills, incinerators, and other polluting industries around the country. This study, published in 1987, found that race is the primary determining factor in the location of these hazards and that economic class is also highly significant. Polluting industries and waste disposal sites are placed in communities of African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asians and Pacific Islanders, farm workers and the working poor, because these communities are perceived as politically weak and less able to resist these unwanted impositions.
If you are unfamiliar with the Environmental Justice Movement in the United States, you can find a summary of key historical moments, as well as detailed data and analysis on race and class as deciding factors in exposure to environmental hazards, in the report "Toxic Waste and Race at Twenty, 1987-2007" [59] prepared by the Justice and Witness Ministries of the United Church of Christ, a leader in the environmental justice movement.
You can also read a very short piece containing the "Principles of Environmental Justice" [60] drafted and adopted by the delegates to the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit held on October 24-27, 1991, in Washington DC. These principles continue to serve as a guiding framework for the growing grassroots environmental justice to this day.
These documents are not mandatory, and you will not be tested on them, but they may be helpful to you and are rich resources on a very important issue!
The Environmental Justice movement in the United States has become a powerful force influencing human use of the environment in recent decades, and it resonates with struggles over natural resource rights and waste disposal around the world. The readings for this week will introduce you to the central concepts of environmental justice and demonstrate the implications of environmental justice for people and environments at a local and global scale.
At the end of this week, you should be able to:
Let's dive in!
Majora Carter grew up in the South Bronx, and in this TedTalk, she details her struggle for environmental justice where she lives. Her talk describes how marginalized neighborhoods suffer the most from flawed urban policy, and delivers some of her ideas for a way forward.
Pay close attention to the causes and consequences of environmental injustice that Carter identifies. Two important concepts that you may not be familiar with are white flight [61]and redlining. Click on the link for an article describing the process of white flight in the United States. Then, take a look at how Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston [62] describes redlining:
Redlining is the practice of denying or limiting financial services to certain neighborhoods based on racial or ethnic composition without regard to the residents' qualifications or credit worthiness. The term "redlining" refers to the practice of using a red line on a map to delineate the area where financial institutions would not invest.
In the United States, from the 1930s through the 1960s, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which insured private mortgages and helped encourage home ownership, commonly used redlining in urban areas as a way to maintain segregation. The practice also served to concentrate economic resources in white neighborhoods and to concentrate harmful sources of pollution in black neighborhoods. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in the recent Atlantic article "The Case for Reparations" [63]:
The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand” neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.” These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods, where black people lived, were rated “D” and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.
Today, redlining is illegal, but the wealth gap that it created remains and continues to exert a huge influence on the geography of financial investment and toxic waste sitting in the United States.
If you're here today -- and I'm very happy that you are -- you've all heard about how sustainable development will save us from ourselves. However, when we're not at TED, we are often told that a real sustainability policy agenda is just not feasible, especially in large urban areas like New York City. And that's because most people with decision-making powers, in both the public and the private sector, really don't feel as though they're in danger.
The reason why I'm here today, in part, is because of a dog -- an abandoned puppy I found back in the rain, back in 1998. She turned out to be a much bigger dog than I'd anticipated. When she came into my life, we were fighting against a huge waste facility planned for the East River waterfront despite the fact that our small part of New York City already handled more than 40 percent of the entire city's commercial waste: a sewage treatment pelletizing plant, a sewage sludge plant, four power plants, the world's largest food-distribution center, as well as other industries that bring more than 60,000 diesel truck trips to the area each week. The area also has one of the lowest ratios of parks to people in the city.
So when I was contacted by the Parks Department about a $10,000 seed-grant initiative to help develop waterfront projects, I thought they were really well-meaning, but a bit naive. I'd lived in this area all my life, and you could not get to the river, because of all the lovely facilities that I mentioned earlier. Then, while jogging with my dog one morning, she pulled me into what I thought was just another illegal dump. There were weeds and piles of garbage and other stuff that I won't mention here, but she kept dragging me, and lo and behold, at the end of that lot was the river. I knew that this forgotten little street-end, abandoned like the dog that brought me there, was worth saving. And I knew it would grow to become the proud beginnings of the community-led revitalization of the new South Bronx.
And just like my new dog, it was an idea that got bigger than I'd imagined. We garnered much support along the way, and the Hunts Point Riverside Park became the first waterfront park that the South Bronx had had in more than 60 years. We leveraged that $10,000 seed grant more than 300 times, into a $3 million park.
And in the fall, I'm going to exchange marriage vows with my beloved.
(Audience whistles)
Thank you very much.
That's him pressing my buttons back there, which he does all the time.
But those of us living in environmental justice communities are the canary in the coal mine. We feel the problems right now and have for some time. Environmental justice, for those of you who may not be familiar with the term, goes something like this: no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other.
Unfortunately, race and class are extremely reliable indicators as to where one might find the good stuff, like parks and trees, and where one might find the bad stuff, like power plants and waste facilities. As a black person in America, I am twice as likely as a white person to live in an area where air pollution poses the greatest risk to my health. I am five times more likely to live within walking distance of a power plant or chemical facility, which I do. These land-use decisions created the hostile conditions that lead to problems like obesity, diabetes, and asthma. Why would someone leave their home to go for a brisk walk in a toxic neighborhood? Our 27 percent obesity rate is high even for this country, and diabetes comes with it. One out of four South Bronx children has asthma. Our asthma hospitalization rate is seven times higher than the national average. These impacts are coming everyone's way. And we all pay dearly for solid waste costs, health problems associated with pollution and more odiously, the cost of imprisoning our young black and Latino men, who possess untold amounts of untapped potential. Fifty percent of our residents live at or below the poverty line; 25 percent of us are unemployed. Low-income citizens often use emergency-room visits as primary care. This comes at a high cost to taxpayers and produces no proportional benefits. Poor people are not only still poor, they are still unhealthy.
Fortunately, there are many people like me who are striving for solutions that won't compromise the lives of low-income communities of color in the short term and won't destroy us all in the long term. None of us want that, and we all have that in common. So what else do we have in common?
Well, first of all, we're all incredibly good-looking.
Graduated high school, college, post-graduate degrees, traveled to interesting places, didn't have kids in your early teens, financially stable, never been imprisoned. OK. Good.
But, besides being a black woman, I am different from most of you in some other ways. I watched nearly half of the buildings in my neighborhood burn down. My big brother Lenny fought in Vietnam, only to be gunned down a few blocks from our home. Jesus. I grew up with a crack house across the street. Yeah, I'm a poor black child from the ghetto. These things make me different from you. But the things we have in common set me apart from most of the people in my community, and I am in between these two worlds with enough of my heart to fight for justice in the other.
So how did things get so different for us? In the late '40s, my dad -- a Pullman porter, son of a slave -- bought a house in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx, and a few years later, he married my mom. At the time, the community was a mostly white, working-class neighborhood. My dad was not alone. And as others like him pursued their own version of the American dream, white flight became common in the South Bronx and in many cities around the country. Red-lining was used by banks, wherein certain sections of the city, including ours, were deemed off-limits to any sort of investment. Many landlords believed it was more profitable to torch their buildings and collect insurance money rather than to sell under those conditions -- dead or injured former tenants notwithstanding.
Hunts Point was formerly a walk-to-work community, but now residents had neither work nor home to walk to. A national highway construction boom was added to our problems. In New York State, Robert Moses spearheaded an aggressive highway-expansion campaign. One of its primary goals was to make it easier for residents of wealthy communities in Westchester County to go to Manhattan. The South Bronx, which lies in between, did not stand a chance. Residents were often given less than a month's notice before their buildings were razed. 600,000 people were displaced. The common perception was that only pimps and pushers and prostitutes were from the South Bronx. And if you are told from your earliest days that nothing good is going to come from your community, that it's bad and ugly, how could it not reflect on you? So now, my family's property was worthless, save for that it was our home and all we had. And luckily for me, that home and the love inside of it, along with help from teachers, mentors, and friends along the way, was enough.
Now, why is this story important? Because from a planning perspective, economic degradation begets environmental degradation, which begets social degradation. The disinvestment that began in the 1960s set the stage for all the environmental injustices that were to come. Antiquated zoning and land-use regulations are still used to this day to continue putting polluting facilities in my neighborhood. Are these factors taken into consideration when land-use policy is decided? What costs are associated with these decisions? And who pays? Who profits? Does anything justify what the local community goes through? This was "planning" -- in quotes -- that did not have our best interests in mind.
Once we realized that, we decided it was time to do our own planning. That small park I told you about earlier was the first stage of building a Greenway movement in the South Bronx. I wrote a one-and-a-quarter-million dollar federal transportation grant to design the plan for a waterfront esplanade with dedicated on-street bike paths. Physical improvements help inform public policy regarding traffic safety, the placement of the waste and other facilities, which, if done properly, don't compromise a community's quality of life. They provide opportunities to be more physically active, as well as local economic development. Think bike shops, juice stands. We secured 20 million dollars to build first-phase projects. This is Lafayette Avenue -- and that's redesigned by Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects. And once this path is constructed, it'll connect the South Bronx with more than 400 acres of Randall's Island Park. Right now we're separated by about 25 feet of water, but this link will change that.
As we nurture the natural environment, its abundance will give us back even more. We run a project called the Bronx [Environmental] Stewardship Training, which provides job training in the fields of ecological restoration so that folks from our community have the skills to compete for these well-paying jobs. Little by little, we're seeding the area with green-collar jobs -- and with people that have both a financial and personal stake in their environment. The Sheridan Expressway is an underutilized relic of the Robert Moses era, built with no regard for the neighborhoods that were divided by it. Even during rush hour, it goes virtually unused. The community created an alternative transportation plan that allows for the removal of the highway. We have the opportunity now to bring together all the stakeholders to re-envision how this 28 acres can be better utilized for parkland, affordable housing, and local economic development.
We also built New York City's first green and cool roof demonstration project on top of our offices.Cool roofs are highly-reflective surfaces that don't absorb solar heat, and pass it on to the building or atmosphere. Green roofs are soil and living plants. Both can be used instead of petroleum-based roofing materials that absorb heat, contribute to urban "heat island" effect and degrade under the sun, which we in turn breathe. Green roofs also retain up to 75 percent of rainfall, so they reduce a city's need to fund costly end-of-pipe solutions -- which, incidentally, are often located in environmental justice communities like mine. And they provide habitats for our little friends!
[Butterfly]
So cool!
Anyway, the demonstration project is a springboard for our own green roof installation business, bringing jobs and sustainable economic activity to the South Bronx.
[Green is the new black ...]
I like that, too.
Anyway, I know Chris told us not to do pitches up here, but since I have all of your attention: We need investors. End of pitch. It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Anyway --
OK. Katrina.
Prior to Katrina, the South Bronx and New Orleans' Ninth Ward had a lot in common. Both were largely populated by poor people of color, both hotbeds of cultural innovation: think hip-hop and jazz. Both are waterfront communities that host both industries and residents in close proximity of one another. In the post-Katrina era, we have still more in common. We're at best ignored, and maligned and abused, at worst, by negligent regulatory agencies, pernicious zoning, and lax governmental accountability. Neither the destruction of the Ninth Ward nor the South Bronx was inevitable. But we have emerged with valuable lessons about how to dig ourselves out. We are more than simply national symbols of urban blight or problems to be solved by empty campaign promises of presidents come and go. Now, will we let the Gulf Coast languish for a decade or two like the South Bronx did? Or will we take proactive steps and learn from the homegrown resource of grassroots activists that have been born of desperation in communities like mine?
Now listen, I do not expect individuals, corporations, or government to make the world a better place because it is right or moral. This presentation today only represents some of what I've been through. Like a tiny little bit. You've no clue. But I'll tell you later if you want to know.
But -- I know it's the bottom line, or one's perception of it, that motivates people in the end. I'm interested in what I like to call the "triple bottom line" that sustainable development can produce. Developments that have the potential to create positive returns for all concerned: the developers, government, and the community where these projects go up.
At present, that's not happening in New York City. And we are operating with a comprehensive urban-planning deficit. A parade of government subsidies is going to propose big-box and stadium developments in the South Bronx, but there is scant coordination between city agencies on how to deal with the cumulative effects of increased traffic, pollution, solid waste, and the impacts on open space. And their approaches to local economic and job development are so lame it's not even funny. Because on top of that, the world's richest sports team is replacing the House That Ruth Built by destroying two well-loved community parks. Now, we'll have even less than that stat I told you about earlier. And although less than 25 percent of South Bronx residents own cars, these projects include thousands of new parking spaces, yet zip in terms of mass public transit. Now, what's missing from the larger debate is a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis between not fixing an unhealthy, environmentally-challenged community, versus incorporating structural, sustainable changes. My agency is working closely with Columbia University and others to shine a light on these issues.
Now let's get this straight: I am not anti-development. Ours is a city, not a wilderness preserve. And I've embraced my inner capitalist. And, but I don't have --
You probably all have, and if you haven't, you need to.
So I don't have a problem with developers making money. There's enough precedent out there to show that a sustainable, community-friendly development can still make a fortune. Fellow TEDsters Bill McDonough and Amory Lovins -- both heroes of mine by the way -- have shown that you can actually do that. I do have a problem with developments that hyper-exploit politically vulnerable communities for profit. That it continues is a shame upon us all, because we are all responsible for the future that we create. But one of the things I do to remind myself of greater possibilities is to learn from visionaries in other cities. This is my version of globalization.
Let's take Bogota. Poor, Latino, surrounded by runaway gun violence and drug trafficking; a reputation not unlike that of the South Bronx. However, this city was blessed in the late 1990s with a highly-influential mayor named Enrique Peñalosa. He looked at the demographics. Few Bogotanos own cars, yet a huge portion of the city's resources was dedicated to serving them. If you're a mayor, you can do something about that. His administration narrowed key municipal thoroughfares from five lanes to three, outlawed parking on those streets, expanded pedestrian walkways and bike lanes, created public plazas, created one of the most efficient bus mass-transit systems in the entire world. For his brilliant efforts, he was nearly impeached. But as people began to see that they were being put first on issues reflecting their day-to-day lives, incredible things happened. People stopped littering. Crime rates dropped because the streets were alive with people. His administration attacked several typical urban problems at one time, and on a third-world budget, at that. We have no excuse in this country, I'm sorry. But the bottom line is: their people-first agenda was not meant to penalize those who could actually afford cars, but rather, to provide opportunities for all Bogotanos to participate in the city's resurgence. That development should not come at the expense of the majority of the population is still considered a radical idea here in the U.S. But Bogota's example has the power to change that.
You, however, are blessed with the gift of influence. That's why you're here and why you value the information we exchange. Use your influence in support of comprehensive, sustainable change everywhere. Don't just talk about it at TED. This is a nationwide policy agenda I'm trying to build, and as you all know, politics are personal. Help me make green the new black. Help me make sustainability sexy. Make it a part of your dinner and cocktail conversations. Help me fight for environmental and economic justice. Support investments with a triple-bottom-line return. Help me democratize sustainability by bringing everyone to the table, and insisting that comprehensive planning can be addressed everywhere. Oh good, glad I have a little more time!
Listen -- when I spoke to Mr. Gore the other day after breakfast, I asked him how environmental justice activists were going to be included in his new marketing strategy. His response was a grant program. I don't think he understood that I wasn't asking for funding. I was making him an offer.
What troubled me was that this top-down approach is still around. Now, don't get me wrong, we need money.
But grassroots groups are needed at the table during the decision-making process. Of the 90 percent of the energy that Mr. Gore reminded us that we waste every day, don't add wasting our energy, intelligence, and hard-earned experience to that count.
I have come from so far to meet you like this. Please don't waste me. By working together, we can become one of those small, rapidly-growing groups of individuals who actually have the audacity and courage to believe that we actually can change the world. We might have come to this conference from very, very different stations in life, but believe me, we all share one incredibly powerful thing. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Ciao, Bellos!
As you watch the video, consider the following questions:
Michele Morrone and Geoffrey Buckley. (2011). Introduction: Environmental Justice and Appalachia. Mountains of Injustice. Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press. Pp. xi-xix.
Your second reading is the introduction to a book by Michele Morrone and Geoffrey Buckley called Mountains of Injustice. Research on environmental justice reveals that urban neighborhoods where people of color and low-income residents live are often the preferred sites for landfills, power plants, and polluting factories. Those who live in these "sacrifice zones" are forced to shoulder the burden of harmful environmental effects so that others can prosper. Mountains of Injustice broadens the discussion from the city to the country by focusing on the legacy of disproportionate environmental health impacts on communities in the Appalachian region, where the costs of cheap energy and cheap goods are actually quite high.
Pay close attention to how the authors define environmental justice and environmental racism. From the epigraph that begins the chapter, the authors highlight how important the concept of environmental racism is to understanding what's happening in the white communities of rural Appalachia (that quote is from Robert Bullard [64], who is known as the father of the environmental justice movement in this country). Clearly, a simplistic understanding of racism is not sufficient here, because being white has not protected these communities from, in Bullard's words, "being dumped on" (Morrone and Buckley 2011: xi).
These authors are arguing that race and class are intersecting forms of inequality. Environmental justice and economic justice are deeply connected to one another. Both the poor black residents of the South Bronx and the poor white communities are "environmental justice communities." In order to fix environmental injustice, we must fully appreciate the value of these places and the people who live in them, and recognize the routine violence experienced by communities that have less political power.
A few questions to consider as you read and reflect:
Laura Pulido. (2000). Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 90(1): 12-40.
What do you think when you hear the word racism?
That is "what bad people do because they are bad"?
If so, this article calls for a change of perspective and introduces a concept of structural racism.
The article, our final reading for this week, is an article that has had a transformative impact on how geographers approach the spatial dimensions of inequality and injustice. This article, published in the flagship academic journal in American geography, explores different ways of understanding environmental racism, and emphasizes "white privilege" as a particularly influential form of racism that has shaped urban and suburban development in the United States.
Pulido's groundbreaking contribution to geography (and environmental justice studies) in this article is that she combines the mapping of racial demographics and siting of toxic facilities with spatial renderings of suburbanization and white flight to produce a more complex understanding of environmental racism as an ongoing process.
Those of you who have not read a lot of geographic scholarship before may need to work through this reading with extra care. Please take the time to look up terms with which you are unfamiliar, and read to find Pulido's central arguments about how racism works.
The following terms are particularly important. Remember, your first job is to understand how Pulido is defining these concepts and using them in her analysis, and your second job is to think about how her arguments differ or agree with the other assigned materials, popular media, and your own perspective.
The key difference between the two pictures is the presence/absence of "the bad guy" as we would typically think.
It seems unfair to label the able-bodied person in the right picture as "the bad guy" in the right-hand side picture. But it is also clear that the right-hand side picture is not a desirable situation and a struggle is clearly present for the handicapped person that he wouldn't have to undergo if he were without the handicap.
It can be helpful that Pulido's concept of racism does NOT seek to label the able-bodied person (the white) bad and start a blame game, but it seeks to address and correct a situation or structure where a specific group(e.g. black people, the handicapped) of people are receiving disadvantage that other people don't. In short, the point of Pulido's argument is to address and eradicate "racism without racist".
As you read, consider the following questions:
Your last Current Event Essay will be on one of the real-life impacts of Climate Change. As always, this is just the prompt. The submission is due Thursday of Week 9 at 11:59PM.
Since 2014 or earlier there has been a steady flow of news stories about the impact of sea leave rise on island communities in the Pacific and more recently on coastal communities around the world, including in America. The uneven impacts of climate change forms the basis of the concept of climate justice. This topic is an ideal topic for you to engage with for you last Current Event Essay as it allows you to link to many of the topics we have covered thought out the course so far, including some of the more complicated issues such as discourse and environmental justice. It will also help you think about some of the topics coming up in our last few weeks. For example, do you remember what the film “Before the Flood” said about the predicted impact of Climate Change on coral reefs?
Below is a set of articles for you to draw on and introduced the concept of climate justice. In addition to these articles, feel free to do your own research on the topic. Remember to include at least one additional academic source.
In response to these articles and drawing on content we have covered throughout the course, consider the following questions in your response:
For this essay, you will write a 750-1000 word response to the questions.
Remember: we are looking to see you demonstrate that you are thinking critically about what you have learned throughout the course. This means that you can and should be looking for discrepancies between various approaches and authors and questioning the material. You should be supporting your ideas and questions with credible sources (peer-reviewed, published in a scientific venue, available of google scholar). For this essay, in particular, we will be looking SYNTHESIS, to see that you can bring together and ideas from across the course and from other sources as well.
Make sure to:
Avoid common mistakes:
Good luck on your last Current Event Essay!
We've covered a lot of concepts this week, and hopefully you feel that you now have the tools to approach environmental justice analysis in a rigorous and grounded manner. Work diligently to apply the concepts that you've encountered here and in past weeks into your essays throughout the rest of the semester, and it will raise the level of conversation and benefit us all. The more we have a shared language, the more we will understand each other and be able to move our own thinking about human-environment relationships forward!
All assignments will be submitted in Canvas, check the calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
Great Job!
The links below provide an outline of the material for this lesson. Be sure to carefully read through the entire lesson before returning to Canvas to submit your assignments.
This week will focus on Natural Resource Extraction and, in particular, the energy industry and natural gas drilling. Rising energy demands around the world since the Industrial Revolution place an increasing burden on the environment and those who work and live in the landscapes of oil and gas drilling, and the pollution resulting from the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels is distributed unevenly. We will use our previous work - especially ideas of "scarcity," "nature," and environmental justice - to think about social, environmental, and economic costs, and about more just and sustainable ways we might regulate the extraction of natural resources.
Check the calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
In your assignments, you are expected to include the full citations for these and other materials as detailed in our Quick Guide to Citations & References [31]. Note that some of the information is (deliberately) missing from the references provided above! You will have to find the rest of the information yourself!
Let's dive in!
Tom Wilber has worked as an environmental journalist for more than 17 years and has won awards for his coverage of the Marcellus Shale and natural gas extraction. Below is the jacket material and trailer for his book Under the Surface:
Running from southern West Virginia through eastern Ohio, across central and northeast Pennsylvania, and into New York through the Southern Tier and the Catskills, the Marcellus Shale geological formation underlies a sparsely populated region that features striking landscapes, critical watersheds, and a struggling economic base. It also contains one of the world's largest supplies of natural gas, a resource that has been dismissed as inaccessible—until recently. Technological developments that combine horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") have removed physical and economic barriers to extracting hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of gas from bedrock deep below the Appalachian basin. Beginning in 2006, the first successful Marcellus gas wells by Range Resources, combined with a spike in the value of natural gas, spurred a modern-day gold rush—a "gas rush"—with profound ramifications for environmental policy, energy markets, political dynamics, and the lives of the people living in the Marcellus region. Under the Surface is the first book-length journalistic overview of shale gas development and the controversies surrounding it.
Control over drilling rights is at stake in the heart of Marcellus country—northeast Pennsylvania and central New York. The decisions by landowners to work with or against the companies—and the resulting environmental and economic consequences—are scrutinized by neighbors faced with similar decisions, by residents of cities whose water supply originates in the exploration area, and by those living across state lines with differing attitudes and policies concerning extraction industries. Wilber's evenhanded treatment gives a voice to all constituencies, including farmers and landowners tempted by the prospects of wealth but wary of the consequences, policymakers struggling with divisive issues, and activists coordinating campaigns based on their respective visions of economic salvation and environmental ruin. Wilber describes a landscape in which the battle over the Marcellus ranges from the very local—yard signs proclaiming landowners' allegiances for or against shale gas development—to often conflicting municipal, state, and federal legislation intended to accelerate, delay, or discourage exploration.
TOM WILBER: Before frack became a loaded word, there was a time when the public was generally enthusiastic about shale gas development. I began covering the story of the Marcellus Shale when I was a reporter for the Press & Sun-Bulletin in 2008. Few people then really appreciated what the Marcellus was or what it was worth.
Landmen were leasing rights to all the land they could find for $5 an acre. When a group of farmers in Broome County landed to deal with a Texas company, XTO Energy, to lease 50,000 acres for $110 million, that's when people began paying attention. People who were sold on the prospects of clean-burning natural gas as a means to cleaner energy, national independence, and untold fortunes for the working farmer facing tax debts.
And then, on January 1, 2009, Norma Fiorentino's well exploded. It was an event that became iconic of the greatest environmental movement since Love Canal. Norma is a plumber's widow and home health aide who lives across the border of New York state in a trailer on a 7-acre homestead in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania.
NORMA: DEP was here today. And he said, I have to take your well and I have to take two different sites because, he said, the last one came back 25% gas. So whatever you do, don't drink it, he said.
TOM WILBER: I think of Norma as the Rosa Parks of the anti-fracking movement. Under the Surface chronicles the circumstances that ushered in a new era of on-shore drilling. It's a story of hope, naivete, and dashed expectations. And it's the story of a clash of ideology in two states straddling one of the richest natural gas resources in the world.
As you read and reflect, consider these questions:
Seamus McGraw grew up pitching hay and spreading manure on the same fields the gas companies are now prospecting, and he still lives in the woods of northeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and four children. McGraw is a freelance writer who has published extensively on the drilling industry in his home state.
You can read more of his coverage of the Marcellus Shale here:
Pittsburgh Quarterly articles:
Workers wanted: the Marcellus Shale [72]
Marcellus Shale: A Tricky Situation [73]
Click on the image below to watch an interview with the author.
As you read and reflect, consider these questions:
Nancy D. Perkins is Associate Dean and Professor of Law at Duquesne University School of Law in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She teaches Property and Environmental Law, and her research and scholarship explores the intersection of these two areas with a special focus on sustainability, equity, and feminism.
This article examines the legislation regulating horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing in the Marcellus Shale, with a particular focus on Act 13, which privileges the zoning rights of the state over those of local municipalities, and which Perkins argues prioritizes the interests of drilling companies over local social and environmental concerns. Since the writing of this article, this provision has been challenged in court.
Click on the link below for recent news coverage of Act 13 of Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale drilling law.
"Pennsylvania Supreme Court declares portions of shale-drilling law unconstitutional" [76]
As you read and reflect, consider these important questions:
Matthew T. Huber is an assistant professor of geography at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. His article, like Perkins', confronts the tensions between the regulation of natural resource extraction at different scales. Unlike the other articles for this week, his does not focus on natural gas, but rather on the oil industry. However, his analysis is central to our discussion of the Marcellus Shale, because "peak oil" is often raised as justification for extracting natural gas quickly and in maximum volumes.
You should notice similarities between Huber's article and our previous engagements with ideas of "scarcity" in Weeks 2 and 3. You will also notice parallels between the discussion of the dangers of overproduction between this article and our look at the national corn industry. Remember, geographers who study human-environment relations and natural resource management have long been interested in the different meanings of resource scarcity. Pay close attention to how maintaining overproduction or resource scarcity serves different interests, and how this conflict has influenced resource extraction.
As you read this article, consider the following questions:
The outline should be approximately 2-3 pages, and should include the structure that your final essay will follow. For each section of your outline, you should provide key supporting sentences that explain what you will write in your paper. You should also indicate where you will include some of the resources that you listed in your annotated bibliography.
Your outline should:
Here is an example of what part of your outline might look like:
Boykoff, M. T., & Boykoff, J. M. (2007). Climate change and journalistic norms: A case-study of US mass-media coverage.Geoforum,38(6), 1190–1204.
Hannigan, J. (2014).Environmental sociology. New York: Routledge.
Swim, J. K., & Bloodhart, B. (2015). Portraying the Perils to Polar Bears: The Role of Empathic and Objective Perspective-taking Toward Animals in Climate Change Communication.Environmental Communication,9(4), 446–468.
Weingart, P., Engels, A., & Pansegrau, P. (2000). Risks of communication: discourses on climate change in science, politics, and the mass media.Public Understanding of Science,9(3), 261–283.
You should begin working on your outline so you not rushed when it is due in week 10. Your outline should be submitted as a word document or a pdf file.
When you are ready to submit your outline, return to Canvas and open the Final Essay Component: Outline assignment in the Lesson 10 module.
NOTE:
If your submission is late, you will NOT be assigned anyone to peer review and you will miss out on the 20 available peer review points. Also, no one will review your work, so please be on time.
Peer Reviews:
After the Tuesday night due date has passed for your initial outline submission, please return to the Final Essay Component: Outline assignment page in the Week 10 module in Canvas and click on the "Peer Review" link to see who you have been assigned to peer review.
This week, we have learned about how natural resource extraction is shaped by political struggles, and how it can transform the environment and the lives of those who live and work in landscapes of extraction. We have focused on the natural gas and oil industries to consider the social, economic, and environmental impacts of natural resource extraction. We have studied how ideas of scarcity and overproduction influence decisions about who has the right to extract what resources, where, how, and what kinds of protections are put in place for the people and environments that are impacted the most. And, we have also examined how government regulation can shape the impacts of natural resource extraction.
All assignments will be submitted in Canvas, check the calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
The links below provide an outline of the material for this lesson. Be sure to carefully read through the entire lesson before returning to Canvas to submit your assignments.
This week, we explore the challenges and opportunities for conserving and restoring wildlife populations and habitats in a humanized world. As you can imagine, there is no "one-size-fits-all" solution. Each region and human community has its own unique set of circumstances, which is what makes these efforts so challenging, but also so important to study.
The debate over how to sustain human livelihoods alongside healthy and diverse ecosystems is ongoing, and now is your chance to enter into the conversation. I hope that the readings for the week help spark your curiosity and lead you to insights about our complex relationship to other human and nonhuman communities. The more people thinking about how to deal with these challenging issues, the better!
At the end of this week, you should be able to:
Let's dive in!
Dr. Brian King [79] is a geographer in our very own Geography Department here at Penn State, and his research focuses on human-environment relationships and political struggles in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region of the continent that has been a site of intense conservation efforts since the colonial era. In this article, he reviews the history of national parks and community conservation and explores the consequences of different models of conservation on local human and non-human communities.
As you read and reflect, consider these questions:
Registered students can access the reading in Canvas.
Roderick Neumann [80] is a professor of Geography and Chair of the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. His research investigates how our conceptions of nature shape the landscape and on the conflict and violence associated with conservation areas in Africa. Since the 1980s, several African governments have responded to declining wildlife populations by issuing shoot-on-sight orders for ‘‘poachers’’ found within national parks. Neumann argues that biodiversity is being used to justify violence and human rights abuses.
As you read and reflect, consider the following questions:
Registered students can access the reading in Canvas.
The massive changes in wildlife populations and forests during the past century have spawned countless efforts at conservation and restoration, and "Milking the Rhino" explores the challenges faced by such efforts in two different regions in Africa.
One of the significant transitions in wildlife conservation in recent decades has been a shift from "fortress conservation," which excludes local communities, to methods called "community-based conservation" or "integrated conservation and development projects," which try to include local residents in the design and implementation of wildlife protection.
As the film reveals, while these new integrated projects try to avoid the social and economic problems caused by earlier conservation efforts, they don't always find success.
This film provides a huge range of food-for-thought, and a few questions you might consider include:
Did this week's materials make you want to go on an African safari, or to avoid doing so at all costs? Can't wait to read your thoughts! Here are your assignments:
All assignments will be submitted in Canvas, check the calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
The links below provide an outline of the material for this lesson. Be sure to carefully read through the entire lesson before returning to Canvas to submit your assignments.
Our goal this week is to explore the latest scientific consensus on the causes of global climate change and its social, economic, and environmental impacts. This week's materials will provide a broad overview of the current state of knowledge on these issues, and also bring together many of the topics from the semester - including biodiversity, environmental justice, and natural resource extraction - to consider possible ways forward to a sustainable future.
At the end of this week, you should be able to:
Let's dive in!
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading international body for the assessment of climate change. It was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) [85] and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) [86] in 1988 to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic impacts. In the same year, the UN General Assembly endorsed the action by WMO and UNEP in jointly establishing the IPCC [87].
The IPCC is a scientific body under the auspices of the United Nations (UN). It reviews and assesses the most recent scientific, technical, and socio-economic information produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of climate change. Thousands of scientists from all over the world contribute to the work of the IPCC on a voluntary basis.
The IPCC is an intergovernmental body. It is open to all member countries of the United Nations (UN) and WMO. Currently 195 countries are members of the IPCC. Because of its scientific and intergovernmental nature, the IPCC embodies a unique opportunity to provide rigorous and balanced scientific information to decision makers. By endorsing the IPCC reports, governments acknowledge the authority of their scientific content.
The Working Group I contribution provides a comprehensive assessment of the physical science basis of climate change. The climate change report [84]includes a detailed assessment of climate change observations throughout the climate system; dedicated chapters on sea level change, biogeochemical cycles, clouds and aerosols, and regional climate phenomena; extensive information from models, including near-term and long-term climate projections; and a new comprehensive atlas of global and regional climate projections for 35 regions of the world.
NARRATOR: The scientific evidence is stronger than ever. Better and more observations, improved understanding of the climate system response, further development of climate models all point in the same direction. Human influence on the climate system is clear.
QIN DAHE: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
THOMAS STOCKER: We have looked at all the evidences that tell us how the climate has changed in the past and presently, took that evidence to ask ourselves how we understand the climate system, what the causes of these changes are, and then take that knowledge and climate model simulation to ask ourselves what possible futures are there.
NARRATOR: Many of these observed changes are unusual or unprecedented on timescales of decades to millennia. Ice cores contain an abundance of information about climate. Paleoclimate records show a closer link between CO2 concentration and temperature. These trends are seen in current observations. Each of the last three decades has been warmer than all preceding decade since 1850, and first decade of the 21st century has been the warmest.
DENNIS L. HARTMANN: Well, I think in AR5, we've done a much better job of expressing exactly how much different contributions, particular greenhouse gases, have contributed to global warming in the past and how they will contribute in the future. We're able to demonstrate that the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has increased by 40% since pre-industrial times mostly as a result of human activities and that the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are higher than they've been for the last 800,000 years in Earth history.
NARRATOR: The effects of global warming are most evident in some of the coldest places on the planet. Ice sheets and glaciers worldwide are losing mass. Permafrost is thawing, and the snow and sea ice cover in the Arctic is decreasing.
JOSEFINO C. COMISO: We're getting a lot of signals from the cryosphere in terms of warming. The most visible signs of warming can be found in the Arctic.
NARRATOR: Arctic Sea ice extension has shown a downward trend since 1980. The downward trend is also observed at the Greenland ice sheet.
JOSEFINO C. COMISO: The amount of mass that's lost in Greenland is about six times as much as what was observed 10 years ago.
NARRATOR: The observed changes in the cryosphere have serious implications. With less snow and ice, more of the sun's energy is absorbed by the ocean and land surface. This is one of the powerful climate change feedbacks that influences the whole climate system. Based on multiple lines of independent evidence, it's now virtually certain that the ocean is warming.
MONIKA RHEIN: The warming of the ocean will continue even if we stop the atmospheric CO2 concentrations to increase because the timescale of the ocean circulation which connects the surface to the deep ocean is very large in the sort of hundreds and thousands of years.
NARRATOR: There are four major contributors to sea level rise-- ocean heat outtake, melting of glaciers, reduction of ice sheets, and changes in water storage on land. Improved scientific understanding has made scientists able to make a consistent sea level rise budget.
JOHN A. CHURCH: Over the 20th century as a whole, the dominant contributions are ocean thermal expansion and the contribution from the loss of mass from glaciers. Sea level has risen by about 19 centimeters by 1900 to 2010, and it's continuing to rise. We will have to adapt to sea level rise.
NARRATOR: Our understanding of the climate system relies on combining observations and studies from many different scientific disciplines. With the help of supercomputers, this knowledge can provide climate projections for the future.
RENO KNUTTI: Climate models play an absolutely crucial role in this assessment report. They are the only tools that allow us to say something quantitative about the future. Historically, climate prediction has started with predicting weather, the atmosphere, and we included the ocean. And now we're at the point where we include every component in the Earth system, including the carbon cycle and the chemistry. So that allows us to have a really comprehensive view of all the relevant processes for future climate change.
NARRATOR: Climate change projections require information about future emissions or concentrations of greenhouse gases, aerosols, and other anthropogenic drivers. A new set of scenarios was used to project the cumulative CO2 emissions in the future.
THOMAS STOCKER: Model simulations employing the RCP scenarios tell us we have a choice. We have a choice to live in a world in which climate change is limited to less than two degrees Celsius or in a world that is warmer than four degrees Celsius.
NARRATOR: Climate models employing the RCP scenarios provide policy relevant information on a regional level. For the first time, working group one has developed an atlas of global and regional climate projections, which allows decision makers to see how climate might change in their regions. This can facilitate more informed decisions on adaptation strategies.
THOMAS STOCKER: We have three key messages-- a warming in the climate system is unequivocal. That is based on the observations of the multiple lines of independent evidence. The second message is human influence on the climate system is clear.
This is resulting from the combination of model simulations with the observed climate change. The third message is that the continued greenhouse gas emissions cause further climate change and constitute multi-century commitment in the future. Therefore, we conclude limiting climate change requires substantial and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
To prepare yourself for the quiz, please watch the video by clicking on the image above.
The 10th Session of Working Group II (WGII-10) was held from 25 to 29
March 2014 in Yokohama, Japan.
Penn State was represented in the negotiations over this report by Petra Tschakert [90], who now is a Professor in the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Western Australia.
The Working Group II contribution considers the vulnerability and exposure of human and natural systems, the observed impacts and future risks of climate change, and the potential for and limits to adaptation. The chapters of the report assess risks and opportunities for societies, economies, and ecosystems around the world.
PRESENTER: Climate change is the challenge of managing risks, risks for people and infrastructure, risks for ecosystems, risk for fresh-water resources and food production. Step to build resilient societies can reduce these risks. Adapting to climate change can benefit communities, economies, and the environment.
CHRIS FIELD: The role of working group 2 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is to assess what's known and what's not known in the scientific body of literature about impacts of climate change-- what are the physical changes that have occurred and will occur in the future-- what's the vulnerability, who's susceptible to harm and why, and adaptation-- well, what can be done to cope as effectively as possible with the climate changes that can't be avoided.
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
PRESENTER: Substantial and wide-ranging impacts of climate change have occurred across the world. Climate change is already affecting ecosystems, human health, fresh water resources, and agriculture. Over the past few decades, yields of major agricultural crops have not increased as much as they would have without climate change. Climate change poses risks for food security in the future. Ongoing warming and acidification of coastal waters have impacts on marine ecosystems.
JOY PEREIRA: Climate change has affected both the land and ocean species. You find that species changing, moving places, migrating. And in the case of trees, you find a higher rate of mortality.
CHRIS FIELD: The main message from all of these observed impacts is that many features of ecosystems and the economy are very sensitive to changes in climate. And when we look forward to the possibility of changes in climate that are much larger than the ones we've already seen, the risk of much greater impacts is also very clear.
PRESENTER: The impacts of extreme climate events tell us a lot about current vulnerability and exposure of ecosystems and societies.
ANDY REISINGER: What they're observing is a significant adaptation deficit in both developing and developed countries. Society at large is actually more vulnerable and more exposed to climatic extremes even in the current climate than one might expect. And that tells us something about the challenge of moving forward into a changing climate where be have yet to catch up with where we're at now.
PRESENTER: Poverty can intensify the impacts from climate change.
PETRA TSCHAKERT: Living at the margins of society and being highly exposed, like living in the flood plain or being homeless, makes people vulnerable to climate change-- not the floods or a drought or heat stress per se. So it's about these inequalities that exist in every society, both in the north and the south, that make people vulnerable. And often they're associated to gender, to age, well-being, health, class, race, ethnicity, and whether or not people have access to resources a stake in decision making processes.
CHRIS FIELD: Risks from climate change really emerged from the overlap between three very different kinds of factors. One factor is hazard-- how much does the climate change, what is the extreme events. The second is exposure-- what kinds of assets are at risk, property, investments, economic values. And the third is vulnerability. What's the sensitivity to harm, the potential to be harm for people in ecosystems? And if they're going to be damages from climate change, risk, they really emerge from the overlap between these three-- the overlap between the climate hazard, the exposure, and the vulnerability. That's what produces climate-related risk.
Risk-- are we prepared for the challenges we face now? Are we prepared to deal with the challenges in the future? I'd like each of you to think about, not only climate change, but also changes in governments, in finance, in national security.
PRESENTER: It's important to consider regional and local settings to understand the risks associated with climate change.
DEBRA ROBERTS: When you look at the risk aspect of climate change, it almost seems that climate change is the only thing brings risk. But if you work and live in an African city, our day to day existence is about risks. So what climate change brings is another layer of risk, and the question is, how do we look at this new risk in relation to existing risks.
LEONARD NURSE: Risk is conditioned, for example, by people's worldview, what level of damage or loss that a community or a nation is willing to accept. And risk is also important from the point of view of the choices that you make. So a key aspect of climate risk management is making choices under conditions of uncertainty.
PRESENTER: Future greenhouse gas emissions and land use change will determine the magnitude of future climate change. Risks for people, societies, economies, and the environment increase with further warming. Mitigation can reduce risks. Adaptation to climate change is also important for reducing risks.
LEONARD NURSE: One of the key messages from the working group is that adaptation and mitigation are complimentary activities.
CHRIS FIELD: One of the real challenges we face is establishing the understanding that the benefits of adaptation and the benefits of mitigation play out on different time scales.
LEONARD NURSE: Sure.
PRESENTER: The effects of adaptation can be more near-term and immediate. But mitigation actions implemented early can make it easier to adapt more effectively in the long term.
CHRIS FIELD: Investments in mitigation in the short term really lead to an era of climate options in the long term.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
PRESENTER: Adaptation to climate change is starting to occur-- flood barriers and improved drainage reduce the risks from flooding in large cities. Farmers are managing their lands differently, for example, changing their planting times or using different varieties.
New climate-smart buildings makes cities more resilient. Green roofs decrease the risk of flooding during heavy rainfall and keep buildings naturally cooler during heat waves.
So what we have here is a new technology that's being implemented. It's effective, and it's attractive.
DEBRA ROBERTS: And I agree. I think the real challenge is this is an experiment in a resource rich environment. So the question is, how do we find something similar lessons that we can scale up in places in the global south.
The global south is already dealing with so many challenges. They can't afford for climate change adaptation to be a new agenda. So what we need to do is find ways of using existing resources, existing workstreams, and existing people to tackle this new challenge.
PRESENTER: Durban's most ambitious climate adaptation project is the reforestation in the [INAUDIBLE] landfill site. The project combines carbon sequestration and restoration of ecosystem services with community upliftment. The local community is paid to grow the trees, plant the trees, and manage the future forest.
[villager 1] The project helps the community to change their livelihoods and also to improve the environment that we are living in.
[villager 2] For them it's not only to come here and work and earn money, but to learn and go out to other communities and be like the ambassadors.
DEBRA ROBERTS: It's the fact that we can draw together quite simple things-- trees and people-- in a way that creates a bit more cohesive community, a cleaner community, and a more functional city. That's the exciting thing.
[Man]: There are a range of response options, both mitigation and adaptation, at our disposal to manage the risks associated with climate change. Now regardless of which option we want to pursue, there's a common set of ingredients we need to facilitate implementation. So we need resources. That might include knowledge. It might include finance. We need governance and institutional arrangements to facilitate coordination. And we need effective leadership from the top down and the bottom up.
CHRIS FIELD: In facing a future with climate change where there's uncertainty, we need to view it as a challenge in managing risks. The way I look at it is that adaptation in response to these risks, some of which are well-known and some of which are not, is trying to find a way to build a society that's more vibrant, more secure, richer, and fundamentally more resilient.
[Woman:] So then the question is, how are we going to achieve that.
CHRIS FIELD: The how involves a wide range of future steps that need to be taken at every level in society.
One of India’s leading physicists, Dr. Vandana Shiva is also a prolific author, world-renowned environmental activist, and eco-feminist whose work focuses on the fundamental connection between human rights and protection of the natural world. A fiery critic of globalization and the WTO, Shiva is a controversial crusader for biodiversity, women, and the world’s poorest and most populous nations.
In her book, Soil Not Oil, Vandana Shiva connects the dots between industrial agriculture and climate change. Shiva shows that a world beyond dependence on fossil fuels and globalization is both possible and necessary.
Condemning industrial agriculture as a recipe for ecological and economic disaster, Shiva’s champion is the small, independent farm: their greater productivity, their greater potential for social justice as they put more resources into the hands of the poor, and the biodiversity that is inherent to the traditional farming practiced in small-scale agriculture. What we need most in a time of changing climates and millions hungry, she argues, is sustainable, biologically diverse farms that are more resistant to disease, drought, and flood. In her trademark style, she draws solutions to our world’s most pressing problems on the head of a pin: “The solution to climate change,” she observes, “and the solution to poverty are the same.”
(Registered students can access a copy of this reading in Canvas)
This week we have learned about the transformations currently underway around the globe as a result of human-induced climate change, and about the future risks to humans and their environment. We have also learned about some possible ways forward to a more just and sustainable future.
All assignments will be submitted in Canvas, check the calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
The links below provide an outline of the material for this lesson. Be sure to carefully read through the entire lesson before returning to Canvas to submit your assignments.
In Week 12 there is no new material. You will need to hand in your 4th and final Current Event Essay, and really buckle down to work on your Final Paper.
Check the calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
By now, you should have a solid outline of your final essay, and should have received feedback from your classmates and instructor. There is no new course material this week; the final week of the course should be used to complete the final essay.
Consider reading the Essay Tips [30] page for a list of things to consider while drafting your essay.
Please contact me early if you have any questions. It is important to be upfront and communicative about any questions or issues you may have.
The final document should be 3000-3500 words that engage with a topic related to human-environmental geographic relationships. Your final essay should be posted to the Final Essay Due assignment in Canvas as a Microsoft Word document (.dox or .docx). Remember you must cite course materials as well as external sources. You must include at least 10 references and use proper citations (in-text citations and a reference page), although you are welcome to use more references. The strongest papers will find a healthy balance between using the course material and scholarly sources, as well as primary sources, like news articles.
This is one of the biggest mistakes that students make, and can result in severe grade reductions. Make sure to revisit the course Quick Guide to Citations and References [77] page if you have further questions.
Please note that your works cited page does NOT count toward your word limit. And, Images, graphs, etc. do NOT count toward your word limit.
I expect that your ideas and resources have probably changed a lot throughout the course of the semester, so you do not need to feel pressured to stick to the outline or bibliography that you have already submitted. These assignments were only to encourage you to continue thinking through and developing your ideas.
Lastly, while you have shared your final essay components with the rest of the class thus far, you will not be sharing your completed final essays. You are welcome to share your work with each other individually, but in the interest of keeping everyone’s hard work private, you will be submitting your final essay to an anonymous dropbox, located on Canvas.
Submit your Word document (.doc or .docx) to the Final Essay Due assignment in the Lesson 12 module in Canvas.
Your Final Essay is due next Thursday by 11:59 pm Eastern Time.
Check the calendar in Canvas for the specific due date.
All assignments will be submitted in Canvas, check the calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
After you submit your final essay, you are finished! Congratulations on completing Geography 430!
Well done!
Links
[1] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/syllabus
[2] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/orientation
[3] https://psu.instructure.com/
[4] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/syllabus#Assignmentoutlinesinstructions
[5] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/syllabus#quiz
[6] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/syllabus#q&r
[7] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/syllabus#reflect
[8] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/syllabus#essay
[9] http://handbook.psu.edu/content/academic-integrity
[10] http://www.ems.psu.edu/current_undergrad_students/academics/integrity_policy
[11] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/node/44
[12] https://login.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fdigitalcampus.swankmp.net%2Fpsu279437%2Fwatch%3Ftoken%3D9174c072eaf9a3273189d5054f5110b7ba15f9dbeec533a4fd3ead54a964922a
[13] https://www.beforetheflood.com/screenings/
[14] https://www3.epa.gov/carbon-footprint-calculator/
[15] http://www.nature.org/greenliving/carboncalculator/index.htm?intc3=nature.climate.lp.r2c1
[16] http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/director.php
[17] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/283
[18] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/node/329
[19] https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/interior-secretary-ryan-zinkes-statement-end-monuments-review-public-comment-period
[20] https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-nevada/zinke-completes-review-of-2-more-national-monuments-leaves-them-as-is/
[21] http://www.salon.com/2017/08/08/trump-and-ryan-zinke-may-want-to-shrink-national-monument-boundaries-but-history-points-the-other-way/
[22] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/11/climate/doi-monument-review-five-to-watch.html
[23] http://www.idahostatesman.com/news/state/idaho/article166759842.html
[24] http://williamcronon.net/
[25] http://michaelpollan.com/
[26] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/book/export/html/111
[27] http://video.pbs.org/video/1283872815/
[28] http://www.pbs.org/thebotanyofdesire/
[29] https://libraries.psu.edu
[30] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/266
[31] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/node/280
[32] http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPop.html
[33] http://overpopulationisamyth.com/
[34] http://persquaremile.com/
[35] https://persquaremile.com/2012/08/08/if-the-worlds-population-lived-like/
[36] http://menzelphoto.photoshelter.com/gallery/Hungry-Planet-Family-Food-Portraits/G0000zmgWvU6SiKM/C0000k7JgEHhEq0w
[37] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/315
[38] http://www.ecoliteracy.org/article/wendell-berry-pleasures-eating
[39] http://vimeo.com/58736941
[40] https://cat.libraries.psu.edu/uhtbin/cgisirsi/0/0/0/5?searchdata1=^C11574778
[41] http://www.nrdc.org/food
[42] http://www.nrdc.org/food/wasted-food.asp
[43] https://news.vice.com/article/nutellagate-french-minister-apologizes-after-speaking-out-against-the-hazelnut-spread
[44] https://mic.com/articles/165970/what-s-in-a-jar-of-nutella-a-viral-image-shows-the-hazelnut-spread-is-mostly-sugar#.uxj036Xi3
[45] http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/makingwaves/nutella-palm-oil-deforestation/blog/53269/
[46] http://blog.cifor.org/39085/zero-deforestation-in-indonesia-pledges-politics-and-palm-oil?fnl=en
[47] http://blog.cifor.org/44089/living-in-a-toxic-haze?fnl=en
[48] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/world/asia/indonesia-orangutan-borneo-fires.html?_r=0
[49] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-indonesia-security-palmoil-idUSKBN1AP0MT
[50] http://apps.npr.org/tshirt/#/title
[51] http://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2010.522615
[52] http://toxtown.nlm.nih.gov/
[53] https://www.epa.gov/tsca-inventory#backgroun
[54] http://rachelcarson.org/
[55] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs313/en/
[56] http://www.ted.com/talks/tyrone_hayes_penelope_jagessar_chaffer_the_toxic_baby
[57] http://www.who.int/heli/risks/toxics/chemicals/en/
[58] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/380
[59] http://www.ejnet.org/ej/twart.pdf
[60] http://www.ejnet.org/ej/principles.html
[61] http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8043.pdf
[62] http://www.bostonfairhousing.org/timeline/1934-1968-FHA-Redlining.html
[63] http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
[64] http://drrobertbullard.com/
[65] http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Social_structure
[66] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/06/29/climate-change-in-the-u-s-could-help-the-rich-and-hurt-the-poor/?utm_term=.d2ea3f9f302f
[67] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/11/climate-change-refugees-grapple-with-effects-of-rising-seas.html
[68] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/us/resettling-the-first-american-climate-refugees.html?_r=0
[69] http://www.theroot.com/color-of-climate-is-climate-change-gentrifying-miami-s-1797516942
[70] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2015/mar/17/pacific-islands-losing-way-of-life-to-climate-change-in-pictures
[71] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/world/asia/climate-change-kiribati.html
[72] http://pittsburghquarterly.com/pq-commerce/pq-energy/item/20-workers-wanted.html
[73] http://pittsburghquarterly.com/pq-commerce/pq-energy/item/1075-marcellus-shale-tricky-situation.html
[74] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYGMnG2hRsc
[75] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYGMnG2hRsc
[76] http://www.post-gazette.com/local/2013/12/19/Pennsylvania-Supreme-Court-declares-portions-of-shale-drilling-law-unconstitutional/stories/201312190254
[77] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/280
[78] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/348
[79] http://www.geog.psu.edu/people/king-brian
[80] https://gss.fiu.edu/people/faculty/roderick-neumann/
[81] http://alias.libraries.psu.edu/eresources/proxy/login?url=http://www.docuseek2.com/v/a/gt6
[82] http://ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/login?url=http://www.docuseek2.com/v/a/gt6
[83] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yiTZm0y1YA
[84] http://www.climatechange2013.org/
[85] http://www.ipcc.ch/docs/UNEP_GC-14_decision_IPCC_1987.pdf
[86] http://www.ipcc.ch/docs/WMO_resolution4_on_IPCC_1988.pdf
[87] http://www.ipcc.ch/docs/UNGA43-53.pdf
[88] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMIFBJYpSgM
[89] http://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/
[90] http://www.see.uwa.edu.au/contact/staff?type=profile&dn=cn%3DPetra%20Tschakert%2Cou%3DSchool%20of%20Earth%20and%20Environment%2Cou%3DFaculty%20of%20Science%2Cou%3DFaculties%2Co%3DThe%20University%20of%20Western%20Australia
[91] http://www.navdanya.org/campaigns/soil-not-oil