How do your daily actions affect the earth?

LifestyleBrainstorm

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Geographers study interrelationships and aim to understand how and why these complex relationships exist. We know that interrelationships exist all around us because we see them in our everyday lives. For example, often times there is a strong interrelationship between the amount of time you spend working at your part-time job and the amount of money in your bank account.

When studying geographic interrelationships we are looking at relationships that are either created by humans or are naturally occurring.  

GeographicInterrelationships

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How do we analyze information to determine interrelationships? How do we organize our thoughts and ideas?

There are five simple steps that geographers take to complete an interrelationship study. Check out this framework example to learn how we can organize our thinking into an interrelationship study.

HowStudyInterrelationships

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Gathering and Organizing our Findings

Our daily lifestyle choices and actions have environmental consequences on the Earth. At the beginning of this activity you brainstormed and grouped your actions. How did you choose to organize this information? Did you group your choices based on positive and negative impacts? Perhaps you organized your information based on the scale of the impact you felt the choice/action had. It’s important to start to give some thought to the way you gather and organize your data.  

As you learned in activity one of this unit, the Geographic Inquiry Model plays an important role in being a strong geographer. In activity one you learned about formulating good inquiry questions. Now, you move on to the second step which is gathering and organizing data. You have already given some thought to organizing data. Now, it’s important that you learn as a geographer that we can gather data from a variety of sources. 

 

A good detective will always use a variety of sources for their information and the same rule applies to a geographer. When gathering data, you should consider using both  primary sources (definition: Primary sources are first-hand accounts, original materials, oral histories, etc., created close to the time period you are researching. )  and secondary sources (definition: Secondary sources are articles, books, etc. that contain information that was created by someone who did not experience first-hand or participate in the events or issues you are researching. ). By using a variety of sources, our findings will be less-biased and more well-rounded. Next, we will be gathering our own primary data about our ecological footprints!

How do YOU influence the planet?

The term Ecological Footprint is used to describe the impact that we humans have on the earth. It takes into account the biologically productive land and water required to make the products we use, as well as the waste we produce.  

Watch this video to learn about the concept of The Ecological Footprint in more detail.

Another term, similar to the concept of ecological footprint is the Carbon Footprint.  Check out this next video to see how some of your daily actions lead to greater carbon emissions.  

In this activity, you have learned about geographic interrelationships, how to build on your inquiry skills and about the concept of ecological footprints.