Student:________________________
TA:____________________________
A major theme in this class is how humans have transformed the earth and its environmental systems. This exercise turns you into the analyst of this process. Your goal is to assess a case of the human transformation of the earth by describing anthropogenic changes of a place or ecosystem with which you are familiar (a neighborhood, town, a particular acre of land, a national park, a particular biome, etc.). Report on this in short answers:
(1) Identify the place, and describe the "baseline" conditions (e.g., land cover, bio-diversity; other physical attributes), and identify at least two systems (e.g., energy cycle; hydrological cycle; nitrogen cycle) that were altered.
(2) What system attributes (fluxes, storages, composition) 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? Were there some especially negative or positive unintended consequences?
(4) Explain why humans made those changes—what were the driving forces: the type of economic, consumption, or other goals that were being met?
Recitation discussion questions: 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?