Category: Social World

Conflict over water

One of the articles my students brought to our Environmental Science discussion was about the growing fears about wars over water. Even within the U.S.A. there are significant conflicts, as demonstrated by this NPR article.

Texas has tried to buy Oklahoma water from the state, its cities and towns, and its Native American tribes. But Oklahoma lawmakers have blocked those efforts with a string of laws restricting out-of-state water exports.

The view in Texas is that Oklahoma isn’t even using its full allocation of Red River water. Oklahomans respond that Texas hasn’t gotten serious enough about conservation.

“Our poor, poor thirsty people in Dallas, Texas,” muses state Sen. Jerry Ellis, a Democrat who represents southeastern Oklahoma. “There’s nobody thirsty in Dallas, Texas.”

— Wertz,J., 2013: Thirsty States Take Water Battle To Supreme Court on NPR.

The full article:

P.S. Lauren Markham has an article about environmental “refugees” forced to leave Ethiopia because of the changing rainfall patterns over the last eight years.

“The World has Improved Immensely in the Last 50 Years”

“It is only by measuring we can cross the river of myths.” — Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling explains, in wonderfully graphical form, how as child mortality has improved so has quality of life, which has in turn lead to fewer births and population stabilization.

More details on the general reduction in poverty in The Guardian.

↬The Dish.

Choosing Extinction

We talked about the Voluntary Human Extinction Project (VHMET) in Environmental Science, when we were covering issues related to overpopulation and the need for genetic diversity. While I’ve never been quite sure just how serious VHMET is, I just came across this 2007 article by Robert Krulwich on NPR about a tribe of pygmies in the mountains bordering China and Burma that chose extinction because of all the genetic problems that were being caused by inbreeding.

Rules for Group Work

The List: How you should act while doing group work.

It would be nice if the only rule in the classroom had to be something like, “Respect each other,” or alternatively, “Be excellent to each other,” but sometimes you have to go into the details to figure out what exactly that means.

During the last interim I had my middle school class come up with a list of rules about how to act while doing group work. There’s often someone who wants to slack off, and there are other times when people want to work but the other members of the group think they could do the work better without them. So we came up with these rules that try to balance the responsibility of the individual to actively participate, and the rest of the group to let them participate.

The List:

  • Actively work to find work,
  • Actively allow people to work,
  • Should be willing to work productively,
  • Include yourself in the group,
  • Work with others while respecting personal space,
  • Work without distracting the group,
  • Be focused on the specific project,
  • Invite other people to work.

Together with the house cup, the middle school groups are working well together for the moment.

Millennium Development Goal Tracker

Tracking international commitments and progress on the Millennium Development Goals via Health Intelligence.

We covered the Millennium Development Goals in Environmental Science this past quarter. However, the big outstanding question was how close have we come to meeting any of the goals. Health Intelligence hosts an excellent, interactive map for tracking progress on the Millennium Development Goals.

Influence Explorer: Data on Campaign Contributions by Politician and by Major Contributors

Influence Explorer is an excellent resource for assessing data about money in politics.

The website Influence Explorer has a lot of easily accessible data about the contributions of companies and prominent people to lawmakers. As a resource for civics research it’s really nice, but the time series data also makes it a useful resource for math; algebra and pre-calculus, in particular.

The Smog in Beijing

We talked today about the smog in Beijing.

Smog in Beijing. Image via NASA Earth Observatory.

[A]t the time of the image, the air quality index (AQI) in Beijing was 341. An AQI above 300 is considered hazardous to all humans, not just those with heart or lung ailments. AQI below 50 is considered good. On January 12, the peak of the current air crisis, AQI was 775 the U.S Embassy Beijing Air Quality Monitor—off the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scale—and PM2.5 was 886 micrograms per cubic meter.

–Carlowicz (2013): via NASA Earth Observatory

The pollution in Beijing seems to be a result of automobiles and construction, and not factories as you might think. One of my Chinese students (A.S.) pointed out that the Chinese government had moved a whole lot of factories out of Beijing about 10 years ago in preparation for the Olympics. Curiously, the factories were relocated to poorer areas as the cities have become wealthier; something we’ve seen at a global scale as well.

The relocation of factories out of Beijing is part of a mass migration of Chinese industry in recent years from wealthier cities, which have become environmentally conscious, to less-developed ones.

–Cha (2008): Relocation of Beijing factories only moved the problem in the Washington Post via the Seattle Times.