Graphs students can get excited about.

Yes really!!!

Have a look at Hans Rosling's Gapminder World. The link goes to a cgraph about CO2 emissions form 1820. It shows all the countries, how their level of emissions per person changed over time, diff colours for diff. continents and the size of the circle is overall emissions. You can click on each circle to see which country or select different countrires to look at their trajectory. Income per person is on the x axis.

• Where does Australia end up?
• What happens to China and India after about 1980?
• Which country led the way with emissions?
• Whats the correlation between wealth and emissions?
• When did the US become the biggest producer per person? Why did the figure fall in the 1930s?

Or watch the overall emissions on a map for a really stark vision of where the emissions are coming form.

You can project it at full screen, pause it at different points or back track by draggin, hover over circles to find out who it is. You can choose different cgraphs for all sorts of global measures. All UN statistics.

The picture above is just a screen grab, the interactive is so so so much better.

Climate Cartoon

I was looking for cartoons to illustrate some lessons I am doing on climate change. This one made me laugh and summed up really what we believe here. Whatever you think about climate change the move to more sustainable living has so many benefits in so many areas. Why wouldn't you want to try?

Coincidences & landscape

Wow, isn't it strange how things happen.
Yesterday in the car on the way back from Perth I was having a conversation with Dave (he'd just come back from a surveying job in Newman, yes we contrast a bit on sustainability here!), about how mining so radically alters the landscape. How we dig up and totally alter the surface of the earth. Concreting over the earth to create cities is also pretty major but I think for me mining seems even more shocking as we are changing natural erosive processes which have taken millions of years and the material taken out is not going back. We are manufacturing (and quickly) a new altered landscape.
Here's where the coincidence come in..... Today in my inbox i got a news letter from the Green Pages magazine and one of the articles was about photographer Edward Burtynsky. His picutres are about exactly this subject, how industry transforms nature and landscape. Here's what they are about in his own words:
Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.

These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire - a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.

Edward Burtynsky

Here are a couple of examples of his pictures from Australia. They're taken from his website.


These pictures are of kalgoorlie and Lake Lefroy in Western Australia.

If you were doing a geography module on consumption these would be great pictures to use as 'Landscapes of Consumption' to compare with the end Shopping Mall 'Lanscape of Consumtption' that we would more often think of. They show quite shockingly the direct affect our consumer choices have on landscapes (i was going to say our landscapes but are they really ours to do this with, often they are other peoples' and always the plants and animals which would have lived here before this).

EDIT
Richard was just saying imagine how the water table and everything is affected all around, probably not just the mine itself but the ecosystems surrounding it for miles will also be changed by it.

Sustainability starters - great vids

Here are some great sustainability starter videos produced by ANZ and IBM. They cover smarter water, energy, transport and cities. They're Australian too!









I came across them on Richard Allaway's site www.geogalot.com. He has a fantastic resources site for geography teachers www.geographyalltheway.com. He teaches IB but the resources cover most geography topics. Its now a subscription site but well worth it.

Enjoy the vidoes and have a good weekend. Lucy

Great Starter Pictures - Chris Jordan Consumption

My post yesterday was all about consumption and then I came across this artist Chris Jordan. The statistics of consumption can sometimes seem a bit arbitrary but his photos really help get across the scale of our waste and the rate a t which we are using resources. They are in a series called 'Running the numbers', click on the link to see all the images and the stastics behind tham. e.g. 'Paper Cups' an image of 410,000 paper cups the number of disposable hot drink cups used in the US every 15 (!yes 15) minutes, 'Plastic bags' 60,000 plastic bags the number used int he US every 5 seconds or 'Toothpicks' which depicts 100 million toothpicks, the number of trees cut down every year in the US to provide the paper for junk mail.

Thought provoking stuff. I think these would make great images for a starter. Get students to guess what they are showing (on his website you can then zoom the image to get a close up) and the numbers involved. It makes the unimaginable scale of our consumption and waste somehow imaginable (and quite horrifying).