Wednesday, November 13. 2019

Today's schedule is BADC

B Block Human Geography - Today you'll be back in your groups, you'll get chart paper and smelly felts to continue work on your religion poster. Don't forget, you may also use the website adherents.com or the website religionfacts.com or the BBC links on yesterday's blog entry. After you finish and display your posters to the class, we'll go through the key question "Where Are Religions Distributed?"in the week 11 package. In addition to the religions for your presentations we'll look at Confucianism, Taoism, Bahá’í, Shintoism, Zoroastrianism, Cao Dai and Jainism.  To end you'll have the following questions to work on:

1. How are the differences between universalizing and ethnic religions similar to the differences between folk and popular culture? List several similarities.  
2. Refer to the small pie charts in Figure 6-3. Which regions have enough adherents of each of the three universalizing religions that all three appear on the pie charts?
3. What are some similarities and differences between Buddhism and Chinese ethnic religions?

A Block Physical Geography - Today we're continuing our look at water by focusing on coastal processes and land forms. We will look at how water erodes, shapes, and creates coastal landscapes by focusing on long shore current & drift. We'll analyze the differences between an erosional coastline

and a depositional coastline


 We'll try to make sense of the hazards of living along depositional coastlines (think Cape Hatteras, North Carolina). Some facts:

1. More than 155 million people (53 percent of the population) reside in U.S. coastal counties comprising less than 11 percent of the land area of the lower 48 states.
2. Roughly 1,500 homes are lost to erosion each year.
3. Nearly 180 million people visit the U.S. coast every year, and coastal states account for 85 percent of U.S. tourism revenues. The tourism industry is the nation’s largest employer and second largest contributor to gross domestic product.
4. 71 percent of annual U.S. disaster losses are the result of coastal storms.
5. Close to 350,000 homes and buildings are located within 150 meters of the ocean.Within 60 years, one out of every four of those structures will be destroyed.

For additional information and help on questions 8, 11, 13, & 14 in your Geosystems text go to:

University of Regina Geomorphology Class notes
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Geomorphology from space site
USGS Coastal & Marine Geology program
NOAA: Pressures on Coastal Environments
AGI Interactive Map of Coastal Hazards

There's a great article on the dangers of people moving to coastlines at National Geographic 

There's a great web page on the Graveyard of the Atlantic: Sable Island Nova Scotia. Check out more on Sable Island here 

You can also find some very good before-after photos of the destruction caused to coastal land forms and human infrastructure by Hurricane Sandy at ABC News

D & C Blocks Environmental and Social Sciences - In D Block you're with Young in room 115. Today we'll focus on what the Tragedy of the Commons is.

Now the man who wrote the "Tragedy of the Commons" in the journal Science (in 1968) was University of California professor Garret Hardin. Hardin was a biologist, but above all an advocate of neo-Malthusianism. His paper was primarily intended to condemn the urge that causes people to reproduce indiscriminately, to the point of depleting their natural resources. The conclusion to his argument is clear: communal ownership of a resource is harmful to its sustainability. To avoid its destruction, Hardin insists, there are only two solutions: either divide it into individually owned lots or turn its management over to a higher authority. The only options are private property or the State.

There are many who would argue Hardin's ideas are outdated and wrong
The Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons
Debunking the Tragedy of the Commons

So lets take a moment and consider Hardin's idea with pollution (plastic) in the commons (the ocean). Hardin would argue that since the oceans are a commons then people will over tax its resources and pollute it unless one of two things happens...it is owned individually (private property so perhaps countries) or it is controlled by a higher authority (the United Nations). So who owns the ocean?

Oceans are technically viewed as international zones, meaning no one country has jurisdiction over it all, there are regulations in place to help keep the peace and to essentially divide responsibility for the world’s oceans to various entities or countries around the world.

A "territorial sea" is defined by the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas as 12 nautical miles, or 22 kilometers, away from a coastal baseline point. The nation in question can regulate use of this space as they deem fit. The contiguous zone is considered to be 12 kilometers beyond the territorial sea and is used to enforce a nation’s laws regarding customs and immigration, pollution, and for taxation purpose. The EEZ, or exclusive economic zone, is 200 nautical miles from a host nation’s coastline that allows them access to all natural resources within that zone. The "high seas" or "international waters" refer to anything outside of the 200 nautical mile radius of any sovereign nation.

The UN Convention on the Law of the Seas, created in 1982 and ratified in 1994, is the higher authority for policing of international waters, creating nautical policies, and more. Part XII deals with the protection and preservation of the marine environment and specifically section 5, Article 207, that states:

Pollution from land-based sources

1. States shall adopt laws and regulations to prevent, reduce and control pollution of the marine environment from land-based sources, including rivers, estuaries, pipelines and outfall structures, taking into account internationally agreed rules, standards and recommended practices and procedures.

2. States shall take other measures as may be necessary to prevent, reduce and control such pollution.

So...technically the United Nations regulates the use of the high seas but from the ICUN

However, because they are beyond the remit of any single government to protect, they are subject to over exploitation, pollution and habitat degradation, which together are undermining vital Earth support systems. Known also as Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ), these areas are notoriously difficult to manage with few laws to promote their protection. The laws that are in place are often weak and poorly enforced.
These remote areas of the ocean are, however, rich in biodiversity and resources and play a critical role in ecosystem services such as oxygen production and carbon storage.  Since ABNJ make up nearly two thirds of the global ocean (that’s 45% of the Earth’s surface), this is of particular significance to the health of the planet.

AND

Legal efforts have been made at the international and national levels to address marine pollution. The most important are the 1972 Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping Wastes and Other Matter (or the London Convention), the 1996 Protocol to the London Convention (the London Protocol), and the 1978 Protocol to the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL). However, compliance with these laws is still poor, partly due to limited financial resources to enforce them. 

So...long story short. The high seas, open ocean, international waters, areas beyond national jurisdiction whatever you want to call them are not individually owned. There are regulations and laws in place to stop their degradation. The enforcement of those laws and regulations is at best weak.

So if we take Hardin's hypothesis as valid, then we see that using the United Nations as a higher authority to control the pollution (plastic) of the commons (the oceans) hasn't worked. Sigh...

So what can we do? Let's brainstorm some ideas together


I'll also have you fill in a chart on the seven types of plastic (PETE/HDPE/PVC/LDPE/PP/PS/Other) and we'll see if they are recyclable and if there are any alternatives.

With Benton, we'll look at samples from your plankton nets that you created last week.