Study Guide: Midterm 2, Geog 2412, Fall 2011

This is an outline of what was covered, week by week, since the last midterm. Some material covered prior to the last midterm may also be on this exam, though the majority of the material will come from the weeks listed below.

This should be used as a guide for you to review your lecture notes. You should also refer back to the keywords given in each lecture and make sure you know what they mean and how they relate to the material covered either in class, in your reading, or both. You should also use you textbook to study. You can do this by: reviewing key words (bolded and boxed throughout the chapter), reviewing the section at the end of each chapter titled, “Thinking with…,” and making sure you can answer the “Questions for Review” at the end of each chapter.

Week 6 – Risks and Hazards

  1. Hazards and Risks
  2. Are risks natural or social?
  3. Gilbert White
  4. Risk Perception
  5. Culture Theory
  6. Precautionary Principle
  7. Political Economy of risk
  8. Externalities
  9. The Bhopal Gas Disaster
  10. Vulnerability as a function of knowledge and power
  11. Decision-Making and Adaptation

Week 7 – Political Economy

  1. WangariMaathai
  2. Lawrence Summers
  3. Institutional (environmental) racism
  4. Karl Marx and some Key Terms:
  5. Commodity
  6. Means of Production
  7. Conditions of Production
  8. Surplus Value
  9. Primitive Accumulation
  10. Exchange Value
  11. Relations of Production
  12. Over accumulation
  13. First Contradiction of Capitalism
  14. James O’Connor and the Second Contradiction of Capitalism
  15. Environmental justice – Definition and main principles
  16. Role of gender in environmental movements
  17. Eco-feminist movement
  18. Rachel Carson
  19. Love Canal
  20. Superfund sites
  21. Uneven development
  22. Digital divide and computer waste dumps
  23. Production of Nature
  24. Commodification
  25. Spatial Fix
  26. Political economy critiques of:
  27. Market environmentalism
  28. Ecosystem Services

Week 8 – Social Construction of Nature

  1. What is Nature?
  2. The National Park Ideal
  3. Wilderness
  4. Indigenous people
  5. London Convention of 1933
  6. Yellowstone Model
  7. Constructivist
  8. Race (as a social construction)
  9. Discourse, Narrative, Ideologies
  10. Impacts of environmental discourses
  11. Policies
  12. Knowledge/power
  13. Desertification
  14. Cronon: “The Trouble with Wilderness”
  15. Co-production of nature and society
  16. Disneyification of Nature
  17. Movie, “A Place Without People”
  18. Limits of Social Construction approach

Week Ten: Carbon Dioxide (chpt 9)

  1. Characteristics of CO2 and the carbon cycle
  2. The science of Climate change and the links with Carbon
  3. Earth’s energy Budget
  4. Milankovitch Cycles
  5. Greenhouse effect
  6. Solar Radiative Forcing
  7. Feedback loops
  8. Evidence and impacts: glacier retreats, sea level rise, ice melt
  9. How to deal with Carbon and Global Warming?
  10. Institutions
  11. The Carbon Prisoner’s dilemma
  12. Kyoto and post-Kyoto: Mitigation, Adaptation , carbon sequestration
  13. Market Perspective
  14. Carbon markets and Cap and trade
  15. Political economy Perspective
  16. Problems with the market approach
  17. Climate justice
  18. Uneven distribution of risks and costs.