Final Project

Guiding Question for the Course

• How can teachers use digital resources, community resources and effective teaching methods, integrating Alaska Native ways of knowing with Western scientific methods to create greater student interest in, and understanding of, the geosciences?

Key Question for the Final Project

• Why do people make the decisions they do, even when they know that the effects will be negative, and what can be done to change this?

Rationale

We have spent a lot of time in the class looking at the science of climate change.  I recently finished up teaching a semester of Alaska Studies that looked at the over exploitation of natural resources in Alaska that continues on a daily basis.  The question that keeps coming up in my mind (and the minds' of my students) is why?  Why does this keep happening?  This lesson will investigate that question.

This lesson is loosely designed to be used in a history class - such great places to integrate science!

Objectives

At the end of the lesson students will be able to 

• describe the tragedy of the commons.
• explain examples from the real-world that deal with tragedy of the commons.
• evaluate proposed solutions to real-world tragedy of the commons problems.

Plan

I will use this lesson next semester in my US History class.  We will have just finished studying the changes in industry in the United States before and immediately following the Civil War.  This lesson be used as an introduction to the upcoming unit on the rise of industrialism in the early 1900s.  The text tackles a number of major changes that were happening in the United States.  Among those were changes in how business was organized and what corporations' obligations were to the environment and to their employees.  The theory of "tragedy of the commons" can help play an important role in understanding the decisions made at the time.

Introductory Activity - "Everybody Can Win"

The lesson will begin with a game designed by the textbook.  The game deals with unionization - where students in the class are employees at a factory considering unionization, however, those connections come after the game.

The class is split into 4-6 teams.  Each team is given an envelope with a green and a red card.  The game takes place over six rounds, and in each round each team plays either their red or their green card.  Scoring depends on the what cards other teams play.  If all teams play green then each team earns points.  However, if there is a mix (e.g. one red and three green) only the teams playing the red card earn points with the other teams losing points.  The third option, with all teams playing red, results in all teams losing points.

I played this game last year and I was surprised with the results.  If I remember correctly, only one team had positive points at the end.  I was sure that they would have worked together, all playing green cards, but it only took one round of a team exploiting the situation before all trust was broken and it was each team for itself.  

After the game is over, debrief with the following questions:

• What emotions did you experience while playing the game? 
• For those of you who played a green card every time, why did you do that?
• For those of you who played a pink card even once, why did you do that?
• Why was (or wasn’t) the class able to play the game so that everyone won?
• Can you think of something from history or real life that has a similar dynamic to this game?

What's nice about this game is that it sets up discussion for the upcoming chapter on labor organizing, and also offers an explanation of a theory to help understand previous and upcoming chapters about environmental calamities.

Activity (Cultural Connections)

Independent investigation of historical events.

Students spend time searching for historical events in history that the theory of tragedy of the commons can be applied to help understand what happened.

Sources or ideas to look into...

• Alaska History Course
• sea otter hunting
• Seal hunting
• Whaling
• Salmon fishing
• Other commercial fishing
• Oil drilling
• Gold and other precious metal mining

Activity (What can be done?)

After playing the game at the beginning of the lesson and investigating a number of examples from history, students will have the benefit of hindsight.  How can this new knowledge be used to alter the future.

Students will listen to a podcast from NPR with an interview of Nobel laureate and political scientist, Elinor Ostrom.  Ostrom discusses ways that populations have bucked the "tragedy" through working together on a local scale.  She emphasizes that solutions to tragedies of the commons do not need the backing of a federal government, and in most cases, bottom-up solutions are preferable to large top-down solutions.

After listening to the podcast debrief with a series of discussion points.

• How does Ms. Ostrom recommend that such problems are solved?
• How realistic do you think her recommendations are in problems that plague Alaska (overfishing, mining)?
• Can you think of any other solutions to a tragedy of the commons problem?  Can people work together, keeping everyone's best interests in mind?  

Final look at history...

Salmon politics - how does this reflect a solution to tragedy of the commons?  

   

       

Module 9 - The Terrestrial Cryosphere

Explain:
Right off the bat I want to get some definitions down that I think are important to know... 

• ice age/glacial age - a generic geologic term related to a long-term reduction of global temperatures and the growth of continental ice sheets.
• glacial periods - colloquially referred to as ice ages, these are periods within glacial ages marked with even colder temperatures than the overall glacial age.  During this time, continental ice grows covering more of land with ice.
• interglacial periods - periods of time, still within a glacial age, that is marked by above average temperatures.  Continental ice may fluctuate during this period, but because of the large amount of continental ice still around, it is still within the glacial age.

I was not familiar with these differences and found them necessary to discussions later in the module. 

After following the Wikipedia trail about glacial ages I got stuck on the collapse of the Larsen B Ice Shelf mentioned in one of the TD videos.  From there I went to back to Wikipedia.  There I found that the "B" in the shelf's name differentiates it from the other two Larsen shelves - "A" (the smallest), and "C" (the largest).  What is shocking is that the three Larsen shelves were stable for thousands of years (B, the one that collapsed for the previous 12,000 years).  In a matter of weeks, Larsen B calved and disintegrated into the sea.

Explore:
I was quite interested in those three shelves, so I went a bit further in researching them.  I think that this would make a very interesting exploration with my class as well, because it combined the four resources in the class that I find myself using a lot - the class blog, Teachers Domain, Wikipedia, and Google Earth.

The orange represents the missing ice shelves

In Google Earth I spent some time looking at the area of Antarctica that the shelves are located on.  The Larsen Ice Shelf runs along the eastern edge of the Antarctic Peninsula. 

Of the three shelves, only the largest, C, remains.  Larsen A collapsed in 1995 and Larsen B disintegrated in 2002.  After looking at recent satellite images in Google Earth I found a button there that I wasn't aware existed - one that allowed me to look at historic images.  Amazing.  I could follow the collapse of Larsen B over those critical weeks in 2002.  I captured those images below and created a little movie.



Evaluate:
I enjoyed this module.  What struck me over and over was that in all the talk about climate and geologic time, this area of science stuck out as being able to buck all that thought.  Of course, terrestrial cryosphere systems take place on those time scales, but they are also visible in human lifetimes, and as the Larsen Shelf shows - even months.  These are important things to keep in mind.  Global warming may not raise sea levels to historic levels (tens of meters) in my lifetime.  Global temperatures may not rise high enough to turn my home state of Minnesota into a tropical jungle.  Polar bears may not go extinct.  But I don't want to find out that these predictions are wrong.

There seem to be so many examples in these past two modules about catastrophic "burps" as one scientist called them.  The release of methane and CO2 from thawing permafrost.  The change of oceanic currents as melting sea ice and continental ice change ocean temperatures and open sea routes.  Small things that will bring about monumental change.

I guess time will tell.

Three Colleagues:
I visited the following classmates' blogs... 

• Dan Adair's posts were very nice to read and full of images and links and all that good stuff.  I was interested is his intro to the module with a discussion about Captain Vancouver and his explorations around the area.  
•  Alicia's Science Explorations blog was also a good read.  I enjoyed reading the facts she learned about the cryosphere in a prelearning activity - it was nice because I too felt the need to get some prelearning in prior to starting the module.
• Last stop was Amy's Explore Alaska Blog.  She was struck by the $35 million permafrost damage figure mentioned in one of the TD videos.  It is an alarming amount of money.  In my village I have seen the result of melting permafrost as our school was recently reinforced because it was sinking.  These fixes are incredibly pricey, especially in rural regions where getting heavy machinery in an out is so complicated. 

 

Module 8 - The Cryosphere

Explain:
With two modules on the cryosphere I found that I needed a better understanding of what the cryosphere was.  Wikipedia to the rescue.  I hadn't realized that the cryosphere included all frozen water - not just sea ice and glaciers, but it included snow, lake and river ice, and permafrost.  The cryosphere is a lot of water.  And some of that water has been locked up as ice for a long time - up to one million years.  And that locked up in the ice is a considerable amount of carbon dioxide and methane - powerful members of the greenhouse gas gang. 

As I was watching the TD videos, I began to make some interesting connections.  The Earth's Cryosphere video was very helpful.  The connection between increased sea temperatures leading to increased sea ice melting leading to less global cooling leading to more permafrost melting leading to the release of more carbon and methane that had been captured for hundreds of thousands of years is terrifying, and another great example of a perfect feedback loop.


Extend:
This module has a lot of possible teaching opportunities - especially as the cryosphere around Tununak is rapidly growing at the moment.  In fact, I was just asked to go cryo-fishing.  Okay, I'm not sure if that's grammatically correct, but the opportunity was not available to me a few weeks ago, so it supports my "cryosphere is growing" claim.

This is also an area where my students can teach me a lot about the cryosphere.  They have intimate knowledge of the sea ice of the past decade and their relatives over the past decades.  Talking to them it seems that the snow fall is in the biggest flux.  Snow has come later, left earlier, and been less as a general observation.

It may not happen this year, as we just covered the topic, but the shrinking sea ice offers a wonderful data set for finding a line of regression and to make some meaningful predictions based on the found equation.  Algebra II - so helpful in real life.  It sure beats the cost per square foot of office space example in the book.

I will be teaching Government next semester and so have been making a collection of interesting things to talk about this spring.  The 2009 Indigenous Peoples' Global Summit on Climate Change and the declaration were intriguing examples of citizenship in rural areas of the globe.  In such a small, isolated community, making connections to the larger world is very important, and this document ties together a number of indigenous communities from around the world.

Evaluate:
This module was important to me in a few ways.

The first way was that it provided more fuel for my campaign against climate change deniers.  I can't decide what worries me more - climate change or the attitude that it isn't happening and that scientists are lying to them.  I feel that the more information out there in easy to digest formats (like the graph of shrinking sea ice).

That image is from the National Snow and Ice Data Center's website.  It offers a considerable amount of interesting information.

I also think that this module is meaningful to my students.  I will be leaving Alaska sometime in the future to head back to the lower 48.  My students, in most cases, will not.  They will be the ones adapting to living in a world with a dramatically different cryosphere than the one we live in now unless things take an incredible turn in the very near future.  They will benefit from understanding the nuts and bolts of how these things work.

Three Colleagues:
Three colleagues this week...

• Tyler's Alaskanwisdom blog was a nice read.  Of particular interest was his metaphor for a positive feedback loop:  a snowball rolling down a hill...picking up more snow and more speed as it goes.  A wonderful, appropriate example.  
• Next stop:  Chena Lakes Farm's blog.  On the blog was an interesting discussion about how forest fires distribute ash and soot to surrounding snow covered areas, affecting the areas albedo, thus increasing melt rates.  Snowball to start the positive feedback loop less, then apply that knowledge to this example.
• Last stop:  Matthew's Alaskan Knowledge blog.  Matthew discussed some examples of humans using properties of albedo to manipulate their environment - one example in farmers covering the ground with black plastic to warm the ground in the early spring, and one of scientists wrapping glaciers in white plastic to reflect more of the sun's energy hoping to reduce melting.