Week 6

What’s Your Consumption?
The article What’s Your Consumption brings up great pints to argue about why people in third world countries are much more likely to feel resentment towards first world countries and consumers. However, I do not agree with writer Jared Diamond when he insinuated that all third world countries want to have the first class lifestyle. Everyone wants a better lifestyle but to live as most of the first world is killing our planet. It is unfair to keep the undeveloped world in poverty while all the resources are greatly depleted by the developed countries. A good idea would be to keep consumption at a constant rate never increasing. As our population increases and developing countries start becoming more and more advanced our consumption must stay the same. This means new technologies have to be developed and should be developed in the already developed countries to solve consumption problems.
First world consumers should be decreasing to make up for developing countries that don’t yet have the resources for solar or wind technology. Coal is the cheapest source of power but one of the largest polluters. Since coal is so inexpensive many developing countries see it as a viable source of energy and power. Yet coal is still being burned for energy in the developed U.S. where they have the resources and the technology to use much ore efficient and eco-friendly forms of power. Consumption must decrease in order for life to be sustainable.
One line in this article really stood out to me. The fact that if the entire world was put upon a level playing field with all consumption that of the First World that it would translate to consuming enough resource for 72 billion people when the world only has about 6.5 billion people right now. This statistic alone should relate how piggish people are in the developed countries. I don’t want to sound as if I am not one of these first world consumers, because I am very likely as guilty as the next but it about a broader change, a change in perception and lifestyle that will precipitate throughout the world.

Consumer Culture

It does not surprise me that the middle 20 percent of people, blue collar workers mostly, had consumption that fell from 2 to 1 percent because these people are the hardest hit by taxes, loans, and credit. They make too much to get financial aid, they are charged more on loans because they don't make as much, and credit cards usually charge a lower waged worker more in interest rates. It does not make sense to me why our society punishes and heavily taxes the working class. Even many rich people are astonished at the tax breaks and loop holes that are provided for them. Consumption is consumtion, no matter if your rich or poor, in this country of playboys and Calvin Kleins their will never be a shortage of consumers. Credit cards will keep maxing out and bankruptcy will still keep plagueing the lower 40 percent of the economic population.

This article talks about the top 20 percent of incomes but what about the top 1 percent of the population that controls over 90 percent of the wealth in this country? You know the owners of Wal-Mart, the CEO's of Haliburton, what about those guys that are profiting off the ignorance of an uneducated people, that are only trying to get cheaper stuff to pile up in thier homes, apartments, and trailers.

Walter Prescott Webb

I admire most about Walter Webb was his extensive travels of the United States. He traveled again and again to review changes in the landscapes and the people. His questions about "man versus nature" and how westerners keep their sense of identity really open the door to examining people thouroughly in all parts of the west. I noticed, as he made his away around the west, that he noted specific land marks like the Great Salt Lake that give the people of Utah a World wide recognizable icon. What is most interesting is the fact that he calls the west "an oasis civilization" (Webb p.90). Going into depth about water shortages in the 1960s shows how far ahead Webb had been looking. I could only imagine the water problems in another 40 years.



Characterizing the West into three seperate sections: the Pacific west, middle desert, and right flank Great Plains is more then characterizing the land but it characterizes a large part of the people that you find living in these areas. It takes a special blend to endure the desert climates as well as for someone to endure the neverending boredom of rolling praire in the Great plains, but I don't for the life of me see why any one would want not to live in envigerating Northwest rain forests.

Air Apparent

"Air Apparent" started out, in my opinion, as a simple idea of predicting the weather then after each chapter and each new contributer a new piece of the meteorological puzzle comes out. The first need of course was for farmers, but farmers did not need a a day to day weather report as we find ourselves recieving today. They needed climate maps that would track weather and environments over a much longer period of time. This would enable farmers to plant their crops at the right time as well as the right places. In the early years of the United States, knowing these climate zones would be the difference between life and death.
It seems that meteorology came about bit by bit with different climatalogists as well as meteorologists contributing critiques that enhanced weather maps, as well as the science of weather. no one contibuted more then the Bjerknes, Vilhelm and Jacob, a father and son duo that basically made weather maps and cimate maps what they are today. Jacob discovered the rotations of cyclones and anticyclones as they occur in th southern hemisphere as well as the northern hemisphere, which eventually led to the dicovery of the Correalis effect. He even found that because a cold front became an omen for rain being able to recognize these storms would be a great benefit for farmers and herdsmen. Jacob found that the warm front just ahead of the rain giving cold front would rise causing cirrus clouds, these are the clouds that are high and whispy. These Cirrus clouds usually annouce the arrival of a cold front. As technology increased so did the complexity of understanding weather as well as predicting it.
Weather concerns many diferent aspects of our lives today, more then just the growth of food. In the world of today weather is examined for poisons, pollutions, as well as small scale time durations for jet traffic. Air Quality Control has developed an entire science on how pollutants are transported using prevailing winds. Time duration as well as concetration levels have been studied to design a warning system for the safety of the public. If a disaster did happen, ans for example a huge plume of chlorine gas is released into the atmosphere, it doesn't disipate, it moves and travels. and recognizing how pollutants travel with winds and weather could save millions of lives.
Jet traffic is much different to predict, then the weather for the next couple of days. Pilots only need to know the weather for a duration of hours instead of days as before. Such a small duration of time to predict the weather meant that new technologies had to be developed. Doppler Radar was the miracle invention that is still in wide use today. The radar beams out to catch rain falling from clouds effectively tracking active precipitation. This greatly enhanced the ability of pilots to safely avert danger as was associated with weather.
In closing I find that the last few lines of the book strictly pertain to GIS or spatial data analysis. The way Mark Monmonier forecasts that crime, disease, as well as other phenomena will be predicted just as weather has, is a direct call upon GIS. Statistics that can be tracked and mapped can alwasy be predicted. The thing is is that we already have the ability to forecast these anomallies, the problem is, they have about the same accuracy as the weather man's predictions.