Tag Archives: environment

Module 3:2 – Orion Magazine

As I was searching for resources about place-based education, Orion Magazine popped up. I was tempted to spend all day reading the articles – there are so many good ones. The focus of the magazine is nature and our moral responsibility to protect the environment. It includes an article about the use of a Native American stereotype in an ad in the 1970s (the Keep America Beautiful Crying Indian campaign) in service of the beverage packaging/bottling industry (see http://youtu.be/j7OHG7tHrNM for the original ad) as they diverted public attention about whether or not disposable packaging should be allowed in the first place, to the demonization of litterbugs (i.e. there is no problem as long as we pick up after ourselves). There is a short list of interesting articles about “Connecting Children to Nature” http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/5420/,  including one called “Charlotte’s Webpage” that discusses the risks of disconnecting students from real life and nature as they spend more time with computers and other media. Orion is a fantastic  source of information and inspiration for place-based education that focuses on environmental sustainability and connection to nature.

Module 1.4. A book: Guns, Germs and Steel

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies 
By Jared Diamond
 
In his book, Guns, Germs, and Steal, Jared Diamond gives a thorough and convincing explanation as to why the world’s great surviving civilisations have managed to do so, and how they’ve come to conquer others. Diamond stands against the idea that such civilisational success is the result of any kind of intellectual, moral or genetic superiority.
Diamond notes that many indigenous people around the world (e.g., Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, Sub-Saharan Africans, and New Guineans) have to a great extent been colonised, displaced from their places of habitation, and (at least in some cases) even exterminated and killed. Primarily, Diamond explains, this happened because of certain societies’s combative and political power, which is a consequence of the emergence of agriculture thousands of years ago. Agriculture, howerver, only emerged in geographic locations where there was one or a few species of plants and animals, which were suitable for domestication and herding. This, Diamond asserts, is a relative rarity in the world of flora and fauna, and was naturally limited to a very few geographic locations in the world (the Middle East, Ganges River Valley, China, and Central America). And consequently, everything else emerged from the advantage of the early rise of agriculture.
Therefore, the variance in wealth, power and technology in various human societies, Diamond writes, is the result of environmental differences. In other words, any advantage a human society has managed to achieve over others is due to the influence of geography on cultures and societies, and was never inherent in anybody’s genome.
Web links
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel
http://www.mcgoodwin.net/pages/gungermsteel.html