A skill that my concentration in particular has helped me to develop is to “give it a try”. It is difficult to be planning in advance something as significant as the next two and a half years of my schooling, so the process could have very easily shut me down without letting me figure out what […]
Blessed Unrest Literature Analysis – Jay, Maya, Tasha
Background Popular environmental literature often acts as an important bridge between the scientific world and the world beyond. This genre of literature brings much-needed context to scientific writing, which can be too narrowly focused on one single experiment or problem. This context is also useful for “connecting the dots” and drawing conclusions among individual scientific […]
The Big Words: Sustainability and Development
Urban Centers: An Assessment of Sustainability was one of the first articles that I read in preparation for my concentration. This article proposes a way in which sustainability should be used in urban planning and how it has or has not been successful in certain contexts. Surprisingly, I found that I disagreed with many of […]
Mapping Environmental Justice in Portland, Oregon
Air pollution is an increasingly prominent issue because of its implications on human health, among others. According to the State of Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) study of Portland’s air pollution and toxics concentrations, Portland’s air quality has increased in the past three decades, but certain pollutants are notably higher than both ambient benchmark […]
Maps, Maps, and More Maps
Using ArcGIS, Maya, Jay, and I were able to present the data from our last lab in a new way! We layered the information onto different maps as a way to compare individual data samples to the larger population, as well as one data set to another! This allowed us to look at whether or not our conclusion from […]
More Food Doesn’t Always Make You Healthier – Maya Bon, Jay Chu, Tasha Addington-Ferris
Background: In order to understand and utilize SPSS, a Statistics Datafile application, we decided to explore the correlation between the healthy average life expectancy and the NET agricultural output of any given country. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Environmental Data Explorer contains databases with more than 500 variables ranging from national, subregional, regional, […]