Study Guide: Environment

 

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Readings:

 

Instructor Presentation:

Ecology

Glossary:
 

entropy exponential growth carrying capacity
ozone depletion dependency theory desertification
environment  ecosystem  eutrophication
greenhouse effect Green Revolution acid rain
deforestation solid waste air pollution

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Please Note:
bullet Mechanics behind infrastructural intensification
bullet Technological Fix
bullet Environmental Fit
bullet Global 2000 Report to the President
bullet Intensification and the environment

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Practice Quiz

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Essay Questions:

  1. Why is time so important in Rachel Carson's (The Obligation to Endure) view?

  2. According to Carson, what problems arise from single-crop farming, and why does this technique create these problems?

  3. According to Carson, why are so many people unaware of the nature of the threat we face from chemical pollution?

  4. What is the "commons" that Garret Hardin (The Tragedy of the Commons) is referring to?

  5. One of the basic issues underlying Hardin's thesis is the relationship between individual and collective interests?  How does this relationship affect population growth?

  6. What is the Greenhouse effect?  What are its primary causes? What consequences does it predict? Discuss the confidence you place in the theory.

  7. What is ozone depletion?  What are its primary causes?  What consequences does it predict?  Discuss the confidence you place in the theory. 

  8. Discuss the relationship between economic and population growth and environmental problems.  

  9. Define the strategies of "Technological Fix" and "Ecological Fit." Illustrate each strategy with an example.

  10. Discuss the concept of environmental constraints on human societies.  How does the environment limit sociocultural systems? 

  11. Can environmental limits be stretched? Can these limits be overcome?

  12. According to Rosset, Collins, and Lappe (Lessons from the Green Revolution) what is the "Green Revolution"? Why hasn't it ended hunger?  

  13. What does it mean that Green Revolution farming is petroleum dependent?  How has this dependency created new social problems?

  14. Describe "superfarms."  Why do they thrive while other farms go under?

 

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Links:

World Watch

Henry David Thoreau, “Walking.”
 http://www.ecotopia.org/ehof/thoreau/walking.html

John Muir, “A Perilous Night on Shasta’s Summit,” in Mountaineering Essays.
http://www.yosemite.ca.us/john_muir_writings/steep_trails/chapter_4.html

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1-29, 56-61,104-110. Ch. 1-4, 10, 17.
http://docsouth.unc.edu/twainlife/twain.html

Aldo Leopold, (from A Sand County Almanac) “The Land Ethic”
 http://www.tipiglen.dircon.co.uk/landethic.html

Aldo Leopold, “Thinking Like a Mountain”
 http://www.eco-action.org/dt/thinking.html

Edward Abbey, (from Desert Solitaire) “The First Morning” http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/catalogs/dlg_show_excerpt.php?id=1&title=Desert+Solitaire&subtitle=&author=Edward+Abbey

Cadillac Desert (a synopsis of film)http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~martins/hydro/case_studies/cadillac_desert.htm

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Bibliography:

Barney, Gerald O. (study director).  1980.  The Global 2000 Report to the President, 3 vols. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing office.

Berry, Wendell.  1977. The Unsettling of America.  San Francisco: Sierra Club.

Brown, Lester R. Nicholas Lenssen, and Hal Kane.  1995.  Vital Signs:  The Trends That Are Shaping Our Future 1995-1996.  The WorldWatch Institute.

Cohen, Mark.  1977.  The Food Crisis in Prehistory:  Over Population and the Origins of Agriculture.  New Haven: Yale University Press.

Cole, H.S.D., et al., eds.  1973.  Models of Doom: A Critique of "Limits to Growth." New York: Universe.

Cardoso, F. H. and Faletto, E.  1979. Dependency and Development in Latin America.  Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.

Flannery, Tim F.  1994. The Future Eaters. Port Melbourne: Reed Publishers

Hardin, Garret.  1973.  Exploring New Ethics for Survival:  The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle. Baltimore: Penguin.

Hardoy, J. E. and Satterthwaite, D.  1989.  Squatter Citizen: Life in the Urban Third World. London: Earthscan Publications.

Heilbroner, Robert.  [1974] 1980.  An Inquiry Into the Human Prospect, Updated and Reconsidered for the 1980s.  New York:  W.W. Norton.

Kaub, George H.  1974. "National Geographic, the Doomsday Machine,"  The Journal of Irreproducible Results 20, no. 3 (March): 22-23.

Meadows, Dennis, and Donella Meadows, eds.  1973.  Toward Global Equilibrium: Collected Papers.  Cambridge: Wright-Allen Press.

Meadows, Dennis, William W. Behren III, Donella Meadows, Roger F. Naill, Jorgen Randers, and Erich K.O. Zahn. 1974. Dynamics of Growth in a Finite World.  Cambridge: Wright-Allen Press.

Meadows, Donella, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William H. Behren III.  1972. The Limits of Growth.  New York:  Universe.

Rifkin, Jeremy.  1980.  Entropy: A New World View.  New York: Bantam.

Sklair, L.  1991.  Sociology of the Global System.  Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Wilson, Edward O.  2002.  The Future of Life.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

 

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Continuously updated. ©Frank Elwell