FINAL+EXAM

Sciences of Sustainability Cumulative Exam (contributes 20% to your final grade)

Respond to any **__eight__** of the following questions in a few short paragraphs, using 300-800 words for each response. When you quote from an article (and you should, often) you need only provide the minimum parenthetical citation of author, title of work, and page number [e.g., (Worster, //Nature’s Economy//, 277)]. A hard copy of your exam is due in class Monday, May 7.

1. Using at least 2 different authors, discuss their views on the importance of metaphor to ecology and other environmental sciences.

2. What was the International Biological Program, and why was it significant to the development of ecological science?

3. Using at least 2 different case studies from at least 2 different articles, explain why natural systems must be understood as coupled to human or social systems.

4. Discuss the introduction of the concepts of feedback and circular causal mechanisms into ecology – when and where does this happen? Who is responsible for it?

5. What is the importance of the Bureau of the Biological Survey in the history of ecology in the U.S.?

6. What is the noosphere, and why does a biogeochemist like Vernadsky think it is important to our understanding of our planet?

7. Is “control” something that a science of sustainability should strive for? Use several authors, or thinkers described by an author, to develop your argument.

8. Using at least two different articles, discuss the views of 2 or 3 key scientific figures in the history of the sciences of sustainability concerning the relationship between science or scientific thought, and religion or similar spiritual expression.

9. Narrate a brief history of the “ecosystem” concept – its key developers, its intellectual and social context – and its importance to the history of ecology.

10. What did Gregory Bateson mean by “an ecology of mind”?

11. Is Gregory Bateson more similar to Aldo Leopold, or to Arthur Tansley?

12. Biodiversity and climate change have both sparked scientific and social controversy. How are these two concepts or phenomena different or similar?

13. How does the historian Paul Edwards describe the relationship between models and data in climate science? Are his views closer to those of the “climate change deniers” or to those of the climate modelers themselves?

14. Why did James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis develop the “Gaia hypothesis,” and why was it so controversial?

15. What are the main features of “resilience thinking”? How is it different than and/or similar to previous ways of thinking about ecosystems?

16. Discuss at least three different ways that science and politics or policy are said – by an author, by a scientist or group of scientists described in one of the articles, or by an organization – to be related, or to need to be related in the future.