GEOG 325: Conservation and Resource Management: Installment 2: Who? What? Where?

Installment 2: Who? What? Where?

--determine what resources your identity conserves, exploits, uses, buys, sells, steals, preserves, extracts, processes or manipulates in some fashion or other.

1. Who are people that comprise your identity and how do you find those people?  Phone book, Ouija board, prison rolls, local contacts, newspaper reporters, law firms, census tracts, retail or tax records, police? Military? Where are they?  Warning: the internet is often not ‘real people’ so don’t be fooled.

Use of the internet should be as sparing as possible— AND NOT A PRIMARY SOURCE OF YOUR INFORMATION. 

You have to move beyond the delusion that all information that is useful must be accessible from the internet. If you need more blunt warning:

WIKIPEDIA IS NOT A LEGITIMATE SOURCE FOR YOUR BIBLIOGRAPHY!!

2. What resources dominate the thinking and viewpoint of your identity?  Choose one or two and prioritize them.  What do you know about those resources in terms of global, regional, local amounts…accessibility…reserves…economic applications etc.?
3. Do some thinking on scale and where your identity can claim a sense of control or autonomy, where your identity can exert power over either the environment, or the decision-making process related to its own well being.  To show this type of analysis can take many forms.  Geographers classically use maps to show this, but don’t limit your thinking.  You might include population information; demographics in transition as areas urbanize or shrink; rates of access (or not) to limited resources such as fisheries or oil or clean air.  Legislation, international treaties and local regulations all serve as proxies to explain access or not by different stakeholders.

There is no place better than the US Census to find out information about our population and demographics!