Geography 2412: Environment and Culture ...€¦ · Geography 2412: Environment and Culture ......
Transcript of Geography 2412: Environment and Culture ...€¦ · Geography 2412: Environment and Culture ......
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Geography 2412: Environment and
Culture
http://www.colorado.edu/geography/
class_homepages/geog_2412_f09/
An introductory survey of the ways that
people and nature interact.
One of the three main tracks of academic
geography:
• Physical
• Human
• Environment and society
Academic/Research Geography
Physical
• Climatology
• Geomorphology
• Bio-geography
Human
• Cultural
• Int’l Development
• Demography/
migration
• Political
• Urban / economic
Academic/Research Geography
Environment and
Society
• Human and Political
ecology
• Human dimensions of
global change
• Natural resources
• Natural hazards
Tools and Techniques
• GIS-cartography
• Remote sensing
• Spatial and inferential
statistics
Course Structure:
• Lecture and Recitation
• No Textbook, Content Sources:
• Lecture Notes on website: recap of key concepts, facts, and arguments (no substitute for your own notes)
• Readings: Specific content areas linked to lectures, two sources:– Articles
– Web reports (links on syllabus)
• Recitations: discussion, expansion and exercises
• http://www.colorado.edu/geography/class_homep
ages/geog_2412_f09/
• What's New?
• Syllabus (with links to readings)
• Lecture Notes
• Recitation Exercises
• Teaching Assistants and Recitations
• Sample First Exam Questions
• Sample Second Exam Questions
• Study guide and sample FINAL EXAM questions
• Further Reading, Background, Links, etc.
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• Recitations: small group discussion/exercises,
led by a TA, 6 written exercises (print from class
website). Attendance, exercises, and participation
in discussion count toward recitation grade. (50%
of final grade)
• Exams: Three “quizzes” during class and at final
time” Dec. 18. 1:30 pm. 40 minute multiple
choice, matching, and true-false computer-graded
exams. (50% of final grade)
• 10% grade increments with +/-, may be “curved”
after first and second quizzes
What’s going on in this photo?
Where taken?
When taken?
Nature–Society Models:
Ways of Thinking about the
Relationship
• Anthropological
exceptionalism: the
paradigm we’ll use in this
class; obvious on its face,
best descriptive view.
– Technology, language, awareness,
etc.
[What about beavers, dolphins,
dogs? Discuss in recitation: are
we Part of or Apart from
nature?]
•Descriptive vs. prescriptive concepts
Environmental Determinism and
Natural Limits models
•Determinism:
Environmental factors
determine cultural
characteristics and
fates ---- from early
Greek scholars to 20th
Century American
and European
Geographers.
Fredrich Ratzel:
Anthropogeographie
(1882 & 1891)
Ellen Churchill Semple:
Influences of Geographic
Environment (1911)
Natural Limits, or “Limits
to Growth” ---a
Neo-environmental
Determinism (1960s---)
Mostly biologists, especially Paul
Ehrlich, The Population Bomb 1968.
Biafra, 1967
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The Malthusian Dilemma (Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798): pop tends to grow faster than
resource output. Ehrlich: a crash
is inevitable.
“Tragedy of the Commons” (Garrett
Hardin, 1968): too many people will
degrade the global commons,
bringing down even those who were
below local carrying capacity.
But also in the 1960s
and 70s………
Techno-Optimism, or “Cornucopian” views
• Dominion models / Techno-optimism:
humans have dominated and can / should
shape nature--a “techno-optimistic” or
“cornucopian” view: technology and human
ingenuity trumps limits
Julian Simon,
The Ultimate Resource, 1981:
“Resources are becoming cheaper and
more abundant, not scarcer, and over the
longer term the environment and the human
condition grow steadily better, not worse.”
(James P. Hogan.com)
Interaction models: human, cultural and
political ecology: nature offers options,
people transform nature, and economic
systems adapt to limits and changes.
Precautionary models / Sustainable Development / Sustainability: humans should develop; meet needs and desires, but must recognize limits and mitigate environmental problems.
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“Peak Oil”
I wish I had his
PowerPoint ©
technician!
Global Warming as ultimate
threat: Maybe there is plenty
of fossil fuel (carbon) still in
the earth, and the problem is
we might use too much of it?
Who does this conceptualizing?
• Collective, institutionalized, and personal
“models”
• Academics: economists, sociologists,
anthropologists, geographers, natural
scientists, etc.
• Interest groups, advocates, policy analysts,
writers, commentators, clerics, etc.
• Every individual
• Why? Intellectual pursuit; beliefs; advocacy;
persuasion; politics; greed; etc.
Three Themes
1: Perception of the Environment, and of Our Role in It.
2: The Human Transformation of the Earth.
3: Interacting with the Environment as Resource and as Hazard
And now, for the first our three themes
Theme 1: Perception of the Environment,
and of Our Role in It.
• How do we perceive nature?
–Analytical: process, events; cause/effect
–Affective: good/bad, healthy/unhealthy, threat/resource, etc.
• How do we see our role? good/bad, part of, or apart from; steward/improver,
destroyer; transformer.
Principles: Individual Perception
• Mental images of environment formed through:
– Experience / information
• Filtered through:
– Attitudes
– Culture (e.g., Beliefs and Values)
• Affected by limits on information and cognitive
information processing
• Observed through: self-reporting, surveys, overt
behavior
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Problems with Env. Perceptions• Often wrong!!!!
• Selective and flavored by attitudes and beliefs----cognitive dissonance (disagreement between information received and beliefs or values)
• Deformed by cognitive limits
• Damiel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, Amos Tversky– See patterns in randomness
– Attribute cause/effect with little justification
– Base perceptions on short windows of observation
– Fix or “anchor” perceptions on notable events and take them as exemplars of whole genres (one hurricane or wildfire used on what to expect from future cases)
• See Kahneman’s Nobel Prize lecture (2002): nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2002/kahnemann-lecture.pdf
• How do we measure WRONG???
• Scientific monitoring (climate records, wildlife behavior and demography studies, soil erosion calculations, all the rest of env. science)
• There are different “Ways of seeing” nature---here’s an example from wildlife studies in which the researcher compares the perceptions of hunters and ranchers to park officials and wildlife biologists in the emotionally-charged issue of elk and wolves in Yellowstone Nat’l Park (and does it with a catchy phrase):
“The politics of barstool biology: Environmental knowledge and power in greater Northern Yellowstone” Geoforum 27 (2006): 185-199.
Paul Robbins , Department of Geography and Regional Development, HarvillBuilding, 437A, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, United States
Census counts, Elk, YNP Northern RangeRobbins compared responses to a survey among hunters and outfitters, who “know”
elk through their actually hunting as well as through their advocacy for keeping elk
numbers high and keeping land available for public hunting, vs. wildlife managers
who “know” elk thru studies of population and impacts of things like drought and
wolves. The phrase “barstool” biology is the managers’ informal term for the
criticism offered (sometimes in the bar in Gardiner, MT where they all see each
other) by hunters of the managers’ census counts, and other scientific ways of
measuring and managing the elk herd.
Lowenthal’s Themes
• Historical beliefs about environment, env.
change and the impact of humans
• Evaluation and Explanations for change
• Turn to more negative assessments of
change
• Attitudes in recent times--environmentalism
Lowenthal
• He fixes the roots of modern awareness of human transformation (degradation) of environment in mid-19th century observations by naturalists and others.
• But they do go back further, in most ancient religious traditions environmental events were divinely ordained, but linked to (brought on by) human foibles and behaviors (the biblical flood; Luther: Adam’s fall caused decay of nature—the loss of Eden).