Concept Caching: Shennong River, China

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

The Shennong River is one of the tributaries to the Yangtze River in China. It is a sleepy river valley with farm houses nestled along the valley floor and its surrounding mountains. Farmers in this community must terrace the surrounding hills to have sufficient acreage to cultivate. This means laborious work by hand, bringing buckets of water up and down the mountains every day to make sure their precious crops are sustained.

This image submitted by Vicki Drake offers a picturesque visualization for some of the rural landscapes of the Chinese interior.  The Shennong River, or Shen Nong Stream, is one of the tributaries to the Yangtze River just miles upriver from the Three Gorges Dam.  The Shennong valley blends from agricultural landscape to geological landscape as its stream grade cuts one of the lesser gorges leading to the Yangtze in this high relief area.  The image can suggest the “sleepy” quality of the area, but can also foster recognition of the potential for natural disasters and difficulty in providing emergency services in such relatively remote, but populated area, as mentioned in the post Chinese Environmental Problems and the Potential for Change.

Chinese Environmental Problems and the Potential for Change

Over the past month there has been much in the news about catastrophic natural disasters and anthropogenic environmental woes plaguing the vast Chinese landscape.  This is certainly not “news” for its novel or exceptional nature.  Yet, the extent of these events does raise questions about the future of China’s environment and of the choices that its government will make to secure or squander that future.

Some of the biggest news stories focused on the July 16^th oil spill in Dalian.  Two oil pipelines ruptured and exploded leaking thousands of barrels of oil into the sea near this northernmost warm water seaport in the Yellow Sea.  In the days that followed, there were many reports questioning the Chinese government’s account of the size of the spill and documenting the improvised nature of the “grim task” that was its clean-up.  This event showed the lack of preparedness in mitigating or responding to such a disaster.

Long before the oil spill, the southwestern countryside had been experiencing a record drought dating back to October of 2009.  The drought was then ended by heavy rains that touched off landslides and swelled the waters of the Yangtze River and tested the limits of the Three Gorges Dam.  Days later, reports followed of the worst flood in a decade along the Yangtze that killed at least 273 people as of July 22^nd.  More rains and deadly landslides hit the north-central county of Zhouqu killing 127 people in early August.  And more rain is forecast for the area, thwarting clean-up, rescue and aid efforts.  Such crises require resources and planning to respond to such national emergencies in providing for citizens’ basic needs.

Amid such devastation, one of the most interesting discussions has focused on the power of these events and on assessing their role in affecting the Chinese governments’ current policy toward its environment, its people, and its economic livelihood.  A Reuters blog speculates if this is China’s “Minamata moment”, referencing Japan’s Minamata Bay long plagued by industrial pollution that poisoned large numbers of local fisherman and their children with high levels of mercury.  The “moment” led the Japanese government in the 1970s to prioritize pollution reforms.  A staff writer for the Natural Resources Defense Council attempts to provide some answer to the speculation by highlighting two lessons learned from these and other events.  First, “You can only solve the problems you know about,” referring to the slow reporting of industrial-related accidents.  Second, “Social stability comes from fixing the problem,” recognizing that social stability is ultimately one of Chinese national priorities and to best secure that priority, China needs to find big picture solutions for these types of problems.  A writer from the Atlantic introduces yet another possibility.  The article is skeptical of recent events’ role in bringing about a largely transformative moment, instead seeing it as a “recalibration” that will attempt to find a new balance between status quo economic interests and the need for more responsive environmental needs.

Discussion Questions:

1. Pick one or more of the recent Chinese environmental problems mentioned in any of the articles.  What do you think should be expected of the government in mitigating and/or responding to such an event or events?
2. Think about the vast scale of the Chinese national landscape.  What challenges do you think are inherent in dealing with the diverse and changing environments in this area?  Can you make any suggestions for such a scale dilemma?
3. What do you think that these events will mean for the future of the Chinese environment and its people?  How do you think the Chinese government will weigh the interests of its industries and economy against that of its peoples’ and lands’ well-being?

No Impact Man

For the first several years after  my family moved to Massachusetts in 1997,  New York became a place we passed through as we drove between our new home in Bridgewater and our relatives in Maryland. Sometimes these trips would include a stay near the scenic Hudson with our geographer friend Jeff, who is a planner for, well, Scenic Hudson. In more recent years, we have spent a lot more time exploring the center of the state, as we take our daughter to and from a camp in the Adirondacks. One of those outings, in fact, led me to post a Concept Cache about a coffee shop in rural central New York.

During all of this time, our visits to New York City have been relatively few, though we have enjoyed the visits when we have enjoyed The City (as it is often known) immensely when we have made the effort. The “effort” has to do with two main factors: expense and transportation. Both of these barriers can be lowered with a bit of ingenuity and experience, of course, but so far our visits have been very special treats. Recently, I watched the film No Impact Man as part of my wife Pamela’s Celebrating the States blogging project, and it led me to think critically about the role of New York City — and cities in general — in human-environment interactions.

In my course on the geography of environmental problems, I use Andrew Goudie’s Human Impact Reader anthology to help my students examine the spatial aspects of a variety of impacts humans have on the environment. In simple terms, the impact of humans on the environment can be summarized as I=PCT, which is to say that the human impact is a function of population, per-capita consumption, and the technology used for that consumption. As we read the anthology’s seminal scientific articles on a wide variety of human impacts — from coastal erosion and soil degradation to flash floods and climate change — I emphasize the spatial dimensions of each of these impacts.

No Impact Man — which should really be called No Impact Family — is the story of one year in the life of Colin Beavan, his wife, and their young daughter. As the title implies, the goal of the family’s year-long approach was to reduce their net impact on the environment to zero, by a combination of reducing negative impacts and increasing positive impacts, with an emphasis on pursuit of the former. Their effort leads to some important findings about the spatial dimensions one the other side of the equation. Specifically, how might high density mitigate or enhance the relative contributions of population, consumption, and technology?

In my earliest thinking about the environment, I viewed cities mainly as sources of environmental problems, given the high density of some sources of air and water pollution.  I have since learned that low density can also be problematic, as  suburban sprawl tends to increase the use of private vehicles, among other effects. From an environmental-impact perspective, the clearest advantage of urban density is the ability to reduce or eliminate automobile dependency and thereby eliminate a major source of climate-changing greenhouse gases. The Beavan family gave up airplanes and automobiles for the entire year, used trains only for long distances, and used walking and biking for almost all of their transportation needs. To do this while still enjoying access to many cultural, educational, and employment opportunities, it is almost essential to live in an urban place, where a great number of such opportunities can be found within a short travel distance.

In reducing their impact, the Beavins also focused a lot of their effort on food — growing some of their own and buying from nearby sources. The spatial dimensions of this are a bit more complicated. Food that is grown locally does not have to be transported very far, reducing the use of fossil fuels for transportation. Food that is grown organically does not require chemical inputs (and therefore eliminates chemical waste streams). Eating low on the food chain — that is, vegetarian or vegan — further reduces the use of both energy and chemicals. An advantage of pursuing these goals in an urban setting is that a critical mass of like-minded consumers can be found, creating enough demand for farmers from the region to supply urban farmers’ markets. Whether such efforts could ever be scaled up to supply the entire food needs of major metropolitan areas, however, remains to be seen.

Colin Beavan hopes to have an impact beyond the one-year experiment. His No Impact Man blog is an effort to build on the experience.

Exploring the Gulf Coast Oil Spill with AGXOnline

Exploring the Gulf Coast Oil Spill with AGXOnline
Submitted by Chris Bunin, The Virginia Geographic Alliance

http://edcommunity.esri.com/arclessons/lesson.cfm?id=536

This tutorial provides a quick and easy introduction to ArcGIS Explorer Online (AGX). Using the Gulf Oil Spill as the presentation topic, students learn to build an AGXOnline project by adding a base layer, adding content to the map (layers, points, and hyperlinks), and by capturing and editing slides into a classroom presentation.

Concept Caching: Haiti and Dominican Republic political boundary

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all  Geography classes.

This image submitted by Harm de Blij reveals a striking landscape of deforestation and hints at the differing impacts of local politics and governance that is behind such a difficult global problem.  The image provides a pertinent partner for the discussion of deforestation in the post, Hopes for World Forests.

Hopes for World Forests

Deforestation has long been a troubling global trend that has affected most of Earth’s arboreal environments.  Discussions of this topic may often focus on the economic and agricultural reasons for the destruction of forestlands.  Juxtaposed are the greedy corporations and illegal loggers against indigent subsistence farmers desperate for land.  Either way, the discussion ends as so many talks of 21^st century environmental problems often do: disheartened and despondent.  However, there has been much recent buzz in the media related to deforestation, and some of it actually hopeful.

A Newsweek article believes that Haiti’s economic recovery may be contingent upon the recovery of its forest lands.  Haiti’s trees have long been mowed down by colonizers, plantations, industry and locals alike.  It is hoped that reforestation will ultimately help to minimize the impact of natural disasters, like hurricanes and floods, and to restore nutrients to overworked agricultural lands.

On a global scale, recent policies of developing countries have made a concerted effort to remove illegally logged wood from world markets.  The New York Times Green blog reports on the European Parliament’s bill cracking down on timber from illegal logging.  Other countries from the developing world like Nigeria and Ghana to the developed world like the United States have previously contributed to fining or banning wood logged illicitly.

In particular, it is the Amazon that many environmentalists lay their hopes on.  The New York Times Dot Earth blog reports on the optimism that comes with Brazil’s current demographic and economic development trajectories and with restoration and preservation efforts of environmentalists on the ground.  The Amazon has also been the subject of a year-long study conducted by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (also reported with accompanying images at Surrey Satellite Technology LTD’s Space Blog).  They analyzed satellite images of the region which revealed a slowing of deforestation rates as compared with previous years.

The link between the world’s forests and possible climate change should also be discussed in any deforestation dialogue.  Earth scientists have long been studying the carbon cycle and tracking the ways that carbon is found in active and inactive stores throughout the biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere.  One of the global scale puzzle pieces to this study has now been provided by NASA satellites as they mapped world tree heights.  CNN argues that this will aid in tracking world forest carbon and study the ability of world forests to continue to take up atmospheric carbon. This map will also help to produce models to understand forest fires, ecosystems, and more.

A succinct article provided by the New York Times Green blog titled, “Is the tide turning on deforestation?” is suitable for most undergrad students and sums up these hopeful developments well.  Combine that with a recent BBC News article that reports the findings of the London-based think tank Chatham House observing a marked decline in illegal logging and discusses the major contributions to that trend.

However hopeful, this deforestation discussion should also end with a sobering dose of reality:  reiterating that deforestation, especially at the hand of illegal logging, is still a harrowing global problem.

Discussion Questions:

1. How might economic recovery connect to reforestation in the example of Haiti?  Explain the benefits of reforestation and how they will contribute to economic gains.

2. Suggest comparisons or contrasts of the policies against illegal logging between the developing world and developed world.  Think about production/consumption and source/destination streams, as well as underlying motivations at various scales.

3. How will the mapping of world tree heights help scientists to track carbon and understand climate change?

4. What hopeful trend countering deforestation do you think will make the most difference and why?  Do you have any other suggestions for what the global community can do to help save the world’s forests?

WWMKD?

For those of us who teach very large classes (my Intro Environmental Science course has about 650-700 students each year, and my Natural Hazards class is bursting at 150 students), it can be a constant challenge to think of each student as an individual. I think we can agree that everyone in academia is big on maintaining a mutually respectful environment in the classroom. But how this can be done effectively, if we know our students as a nameless, faceless mass?

Professors use a wide variety of tricks to get past this problem. I know of someone who teaches courses with hundreds of students (Intro Biology), and has the students make name-plates that stand on their desks at each lecture session. She then attempts to learn all of their names, and connect them to their faces…! At my age, I’m sorry, but I am way past being able to learn several hundred names and faces each term. That simply won’t work for me.

Instead, I try to focus on always being conscious of the HUMANITY of each individual student. I actively remind myself that “students are people, too.” Each of them has a mother and a father, and some of those moms and dads are pressuring their kids in not-always-healthy ways. Each of my students has a work schedule, health issues, family stresses, assignments for other courses, trouble sleeping, relationship problems – whatever it may be that takes their attention away from my course, or clouds their thinking from time to time.

It is probably MOST difficult to remember that “students are people” when you are answering the same stupid question for the 10^th time. Yes, I said “stupid question,” even though it’s not politically correct. In my opinion, contrary to popular belief, there ARE stupid questions in this world. For example, consider the following: I use i-clickers in my class (I’m not a complete fan of them; more on that in a future posting, perhaps), and one of my students once asked me, “Can I use my i-clicker at home?”

Let the full weight of that question sink in for a minute, and I think you will agree that it IS possible to ask a stupid question.

I answered that particular question with extreme patience; that is my practice. After all, what do I know about this student’s life…? Maybe he didn’t get any sleep last night because he works a graveyard shift. Or maybe he’s got a lot on his mind because he just got kicked out of his house, or his mom is dying of cancer. There are many reasons why people ask not-very-brilliant questions from time to time. I make sure that my answer doesn’t make my students feel that THEY are stupid, although I might gently hint that the question itself could have been better thought-out.

To help me remember the life pressures and humanity that lies behind each student’s classroom face, I carry around in my head a screening tool that I call WWMKD?, which stands for, “What Would My Kid Do?”. For those who don’t have kids, or those whose kids are still little, this will obviously be difficult to apply. But my oldest is now 21, so for the past five or more years she has been a pretty good analogue for my students. This does not mean that I treat my students like children, nor that I think of them as if they were my own kids (please, no!). It just reminds me that each one of them is an individual young person (for the most part), with the same types of pressures and concerns that my own children are facing.

So if my TAs and I take more than a week to hand back marked work, in my head I can hear my kid (and therefore my students) saying, “Mom, why hasn’t my prof posted our marks yet? I’m so worried about my grade – I won’t be able to sleep until I find out what I got on that paper.” I think about how I would feel, as a parent, to know that my kid is losing sleep over this, and I try to hustle our processing of the papers as much as possible.

If I am tempted to give a very weighty assignment at a time when I know students will have other course work due, I can hear my kid saying, “Mom, I can’t stay up any more to finish this assignment – I’m just too exhausted.” And I think about tweaking my scheduling just a bit.

If I am losing patience with answering yet another of those not-so-brilliant questions, I remember how complicated and daunting this institution looked to my own child when she first started as an undergraduate. I try to give them just a bit of leeway, since I know that they are still working at conquering the complexities of university life.

I don’t think this WWMKD approach harms my “bottom line” in terms of maintaining high academic and behavioral standards in my courses. Just as for my own kids, I never pass up an opportunity to remind my students that clearer thinking, better efforts, and higher-quality work is always desirable, and pretty much always possible no matter what pressures you are facing. But it helps me to remember that none of us is perfectly brilliant or brilliantly perfect all the time, and we all – even students – have burdens to carry.

Barbara Murck is a Geologist and Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science at the University of Toronto, Mississauga as well as a Wiley author.

Investigating 3 Hazards of 2010

Investigating 3 Hazards of 2010:
Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill, Eyjafjallajokull Volcano in Iceland, and the Haiti Earthquake
Submitted by Joseph Kerski

http://edcommunity.esri.com/arclessons/lesson.cfm?id=537

Investigating Three Hazards of 2010: The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill, Eyjafjallajokull Volcano, Iceland, and the Haiti Earthquake This 30-question lesson invites exploration of three 2010 hazards using GIS as the investigative tool. Each hazard uses progressively more robust GIS tools and invites deeper exploration. (1) What is the difference between natural hazards and human-caused hazards? What are three hazards that caused much devastation and destruction in 2010, and why? Which of the three were natural hazards, and which were human-caused? What are the “gray areas” between natural and human-caused hazards? (2) What are the geographic components of hazards? How can GIS help us understand the causes and impacts of hazards? (3) What were the chief causes, impacts, location, movement, and spatial pattern of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Eyjafjallajokull Volcano in Iceland, and the earthquake in Haiti?

Joseph Kerski is a Geographer and Education Industry Curriculum Development Manager at the Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI).

Weather riddle: Canada, radar, and which geography?

Weather is a staple of every physical geography course, it is the theme for entire courses on its own, and it even anchors the entire discipline of meteorology.  Weather is also mentioned in regional and human-environment contexts, as a catalyst for many natural disasters that afflict human societies.  Yet, is weather ever conceived of as a socio-cultural product?  Surely a natural phenomenon, but when studied is altered by human knowledges and activities?

An author from the Atlantic has become recently smitten with the unique weather patterns expressed in radar images from our North American neighbors to the north.  Introducing the subject with a touch of refreshing humor, “A Weather Anomaly I love” and “Those Wacky Canadians and Their Oddball Weather” offers some very interesting alternatives for our sections on atmospheric weather systems.  The twist comes with why these weather systems appear the way they do on radar images – it actually has little to do with atmospheric systems after all!

Discussion Questions:

1. First impressions:  any guesses or suggestions to what is behind these summertime compact, discrete circular systems?
2. What might be particular about the regional and physical geography of Canada in July to produce these types of weather systems?  Think about latitudinal influences on air temperature, masses, the position of the jet stream, topography, etc.
3. What implications does the placement of radar stations have on the ultimate patterns and perceptions of weather systems?

NatGeo photos of UNESCO’s newest natural World Heritage sites

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, known ubiquitously as UNESCO, has recently added 21 new ‘natural’ landscapes to its World Heritage List.  As tribute, National Geographic has created a slideshow of stunning photos of these ‘natural wonders.’

Enjoy.

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