1. Oregon Man Arrested for Collecting Rainwater

2. Based on your homework, please answer the following questions…
What is sustainable development?
What is cultural ecology?
Based on the video from yesterday, do you believe that a person has the right to collect rain water for his/her own use or should it be controlled by the state?

3. Sustainability and Resources
Environmental Pillar – conservation and preservation
What is the difference?
Wise usage vs non-usage
Economy Pillar – greater the supply, lower the price, higher the demand, higher the price (EX?)
Society Pillar

4. Cultural Ecology - geographic study of human-environment relationships
Environmental Determinism
Possibilism

5. Environmental Determinism
Goes back to Aristotle – related traits of people to climate
Human behavior is strongly affected by physical environment
Climate is critical factor in how humans behave
“ideal” climate is in the eye of the beholder

6. Possibilism
Natural environment merely serves to limit the range of choices available to a culture
BUT human cultures frequently push the boundaries of what is “environmentally possible” through advances in technology

7. Research Today
Focuses on how and why humans have altered environment and on sustainability of their practices
Cultural Ecology
Political Ecology
Culture as a system of adaptation and alteration of environment
Fundamentally concerned with environmental consequences of dominant political-economic arrangements and understandings (human societies are diverse & human will is too powerful to be determined by environment

8. Which one is environmental determinism, which one is possibilism?
The highlands environment of western China encouraged the development of a herding culture:
People migrated to the desert southwest in post WWII period in the United States with the help of technological advancement of air conditioning:
1 – environmental determinism
2 - possibilism

9. 2005 Hurricane Katrina
How is this disaster an example of how physical geography & human geography intersect?

11. New Orleans Before Katrina

12. New Orleans after Katrina 2005

13. Physical Geography & Katrina
Explains process by which hurricanes form in Atlantic during late summer & autumn and gather strength over warm waters of Gulf of Mexico
When it passes over land it can generate powerful storm surge that floods low-lying areas.

14. Why did Katrina cause such massive damage?
Made landfall near heavily populated areas like Biloxi & Gulfport, Mississippi; Mobile, Alabama, and New Orleans, Louisiana

15. Weren’t these low-lying cities protected?
Government agencies had constructed a complex system of levees, dikes, seawalls, canals and pumps
Katrina proved humans are not able to control and tame all forces of nature

16. What questions do these maps suggest?

17. Concerns with uneven impact of destruction
Victims primarily poor, African American, old
Lived in lowest-lying areas most vulnerable to flooding
Many lacked transportation, money, & info that would have enabled them to evacuate in advance

18. Concerns with uneven impact of destruction
Wealthy portions & tourist attractions like French Quarter were spared the worst because located on slightly higher ground
Slow & incompetent response by local, state, & federal emergency teams was blamed on victims’ lack of voice in political, economic, and social life of New Orleans