A major them in this class is how humans have transformed the earth and its environmental systems. This exercise turns you into the analysts of this process. You goal is to assess a case of the human transformation of the earth by describing anthropogenic changes of a place or ecosystem that you know (a neighborhood, town, a particular acre of land, a national park, biome, etc.). Do so by providing short answers to:

1. Identify the place, the "earth systems" that were changed, and describe the "baseline" conditions (e.g., land cover, bio-diversity; other physical attributes).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. What system attributes were changed (e.g, radiation balance, runoff, biodiversity), how did they change (e.g., reduced biodiversity), and what human actions brought about the change)?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recitation Exercise 4 Continued

3. Which changes were purposeful and which were inadvertent?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Explain why humans made those changes—what were the driving forces: the type of economic, consumption, or other goals that were being met?

Would different cultural, political, and economic systems yield different types of transformations? Does ownership regime (private vs public) matter? What about de-transformation, where people restore wetlands and re-introduce species.