Tuesday, October 29. 2019

Today's schedule is CDAB

C & D Blocks Environmental and Social Sciences - Today we take part in our ReconciliACTION to honour the memory of Chanie Wenjack. A reconciliACTION is a meaningful action that moves reconciliation forward. ReconciliACTIONs aim to bring Indigenous and non-Indigenous people together in the spirit of reconciliation to create awareness, share, and learn. So we meet in room 115 and are then off to the Multi Purpose Room. After we'll be bused to the start of our walk on the Rotary Path next to the E&N Railroad. We hope that you take a moment to reflect on Chanie's story and do something towards true and meaningful reconciliation.

A Block Physical Geography - Today we continue our look at chemical weathering by focusing our attention on karst topography and caves (think Guangxi province in China, Ha Long Bay in Vietnam, and Arecibo in Puerto Rico). If you go to the Geoscape Nanaimo webpage you can find some really good graphic and information about Karst on Vancouver Island (on the left hand panel look at "Our Rock Foundations" and you'll find the subsection on caves and karst).


For work today you'll need to define: stalactite, stalagmite, flowstone, sinkhole/doline, and karst valley. You'll need to answer question 17, 20, 21, and 23 from page 443 in your Geosystems text and explain how tower karst (pagodas) forms and identify where it can be found. For cool pictures of solution cave formations check out The Virtual Cave. Also if you wish to see these features "live" you could travel 40 kilometres south and go to the Horn Lake Caves. We'll watch the Planet Earth Cave episode. This will help you with the week 8 questions on Karst topography and solution cave formation.

Check out the National Geographic article "Cave of the Crystal Giants" which is about Cueva de los Cristales, or Cave of Crystals, a limestone cavern with glittering selenite crystal beams discovered in 2000 nearly a thousand feet below ground in the Naica mine in northern Mexico.


B Block Human Geography - Today we'll try to answer the key question, "Why Do Folk and Popular Culture Face Sustainability Challenges?" The international diffusion of popular culture has led to two issues, both of which can be understood from geographic perspectives.

• First, the diffusion of popular culture may threaten the survival of traditional folk culture in many countries. 
• Second, popular culture may be less responsive to the diversity of local environments and consequently may generate adverse environmental impacts.

So we'll examine these two things today. We'll start with the potential loss of folk culture through assimilation which is a process of giving up cultural traditions and adopting social customs of the dominant culture of a place, acculturation which is a process of adjustment to the dominant culture of a place all while retaining features of a folk culture, and syncretism which is the creation of a new cultural feature through combining elements of two groups. To help think of:




Or the story of Chanie Wenjack set to the music of Gord Downie (the Tragically Hip singer who died of brain cancer last fall)

After we'll look at the creation of uniform landscapes, landscape pollution and resource depletion. We end with a big thinking question:

Placelessness and uniform landscapes …… With the spread of pop culture throughout Canada (specifically restaurants, gas stations, coffee shops, national chains), are cities throughout our country losing their local diversity?  Are we becoming a nation that looks the same no matter what city you are in?  Explain.

Consider this quote to help:

Stroll into your local Starbucks and you will find yourself part of a cultural experiment on a scale never seen before on this planet. In less than half a century, the coffee chain has grown from a single outlet in Seattle to nearly 20,000 shops in around 60 countries. Each year, its near identical stores serve cups of near identical coffee in near identical cups to hundreds of thousands of people. For the first time in history, your morning cappuccino is the same no matter whether you are sipping it in Tokyo, New York, Bangkok or Buenos Aires.

This is one example of many chains that populate many cities all across Canada...all where you can get the same product in a store that looks the same in a place that looks the same....same same same.