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THURSDAY, APRIL 17 ENVIRONMENTAL MODELING We will start off today with a discussion of what you wrote on the Environmental Crisis Paper and also go over the assignment for the Scale and Sustainability paper assignments. Environmental studies is as tempting for the modeler as anything can get. The modeler, as Richard Levins explains in a classic article, is someone who reduces reality to a few measurable or convenient variables, and therefore enables systematic thinking about something. The Ecological Footprint, which you should finish reading about for today in chapters 2 and 3 of Wackernagel and Rees's Our Ecological Footprint, is one kind of environmental model. Others are scattered all across your readings and assignments for the quarter. Today, we will concentrate on the idea of modeling in itself, not only how it works, but sometimes how it fails. So you should also read the delightful first two chapters of Orrin H. Pilkey and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis's Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can't Predict the Future. |