Audrey Stuart, Liza Tugangui, Blake Slattengren Introduction The notion of “wilderness” holds vastly different meanings for different people as shaped by our cultural influences. In recent years the concept of wilderness has been criticized by various environmentalists for lacking any scientific basis. For example, in the days of the American frontier the term used to […]
Archives for October 2015
ENVX Symposium – Elizabeth Demaray and Rock Graffiti
Elizabeth Demaray, the keynote speaker for the Environment Across Boundaries Symposium, blew me away with her unique and utterly fascinating ideas. She uses art to convey complex ideas about the boundaries between the built and natural world, the humorous and the serious, and the pragmatic and impractical. She described one of my favorite examples of […]
ENVX Symposium – Reactions
As this year’s symposium comes to an end, I am enormously proud of all the work I and so many others put in. I was really unsure of how it would work out and there was a lot of scrambling in the past couple weeks to finalize everything, but it was really rewarding to see […]
Social Network Lab
Liza Tugangui, Audrey Stuart, Blake Slattengren Background Social networks provide a myriad of information about a population of people. Social network analysis allows us to study the connections between people and ideas, of which we can then draw theories about the reasons behind these connections. In this lab, we collected data from the ENVS 220 […]
220 Midterm Reflections – New Experiences
The last expectation for ENVS 220 I have yet to talk about is giving new experiences a try/ some time. This has been immediately much more evident than cultivating a growth mindset or asking questions. Right from our first lab meeting we were in groups out on campus asking people to answer a few questions on […]
220 Midterm Reflections – Asking Questions
One of the responsibilities outlined in the syllabus for ENVS 220 is to know your questions. Originally, I was confused as to what exactly this meant outside of the context of our concentration, but now I see that it applies to everything we do in this course. Knowing questions does, however, come in very important […]
220 Midterm Reflections – Growth Mindset
Throughout ENVS 220 I have began to cultivate more of a sense of a growth mindset. Scholar Robert Sternberg describes that in a growth mindset, “people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point.” A growth mindset has been shown through the […]
The World Without Us Reflections
Skimming Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, I found it it to be a fascinating yet problematic book. Its premise is incredibly intriguing; it asks, what would the world look like if humans suddenly disappeared? And Weisman’s answer? The world would, more or less, be better off without us. This is a depressing sounding conclusion, and it […]
Environmental Literature Lab
Audrey Stuart, Liza Tugangui, Blake Slattengren Background With the massive amounts of environmental literature being published that analyze the condition of the world today, there is a lot said about global conditions and local, more situated conditions. Many of the ideas portrayed in this literature situated environmental issues in the terms of the common expression, […]
GIS Reflections
After using GIS for the past two labs, I finally think I can call myself proficient at ArcGIS. Not good, but good enough to get by. ArcGIS has proved itself to be a super useful program, but also not super intuitive. It has a lot of techie features that would be almost impossible to figure […]