ECO

For this assignment i was given the role of Theoretical, a role that primarily consisted of exploring the hypothetical in relation to our chosen area of exploration, Ecosystems. By observing the flow of information generated through Josh in his Quantitive role and Laura in her Practical role i developed a theory about how ecosystems relate to one another.

I was assigned the practical role for this assignment, which meant I had to actively do things to generate new understanding of our topic, ecosystems. I started by looking into the visible ecosystems around us such as Auckland City and my home garden. Both of these offered insight into what different things make up an ecosystem, and how they interact with each other. For example, looking into our urban ecosystem of Auckland City, I could see how the people and animals inhabiting the area interact with the non-living environment such as buildings/structures. Similar results were seen in my own garden, where evidence of life is obvious. I also looked into computer games based around building and living in your own ecosystem, Minecraft in particular. Playing this for a short period of time gave me a big enough look into how the game portrays different types of ecosystems, such as forests and marine. I think it could be quite educational for a younger audience as well as enjoyable, to see how people can personally interact with a virtual ecosystem and manipulate it to see different results.

I was assigned the quantitative role and at first I thought it would be a walk in the park because finding memorable data and turning into facts is easy, I mean it was at the beginning but when I wanted to find more data I just couldn't find anything that was accurate. I somewhat found my role of being quantitative was alright, I found it fun in the beginning and then before the deadline came up I started to stress out a bit due to the fact I didn't feel like I did enough. But what I do feel is that through my role I did manage to at least come up with some facts to help prove our point about natural and urban ecosystems. 

Process

In order to understand the underlying thoughts, motives and opinions towards “Ecosystem”, my approach is to understand the term, then research into other’s opinion and thoughts towards the term, then constructs my individual thoughts based on my research. Throughout the process I should also share my academic discipline with my crew in order to make sure our works fits together coherently then find out legitimizing knowledge by the end.

Starts off with the thinking looking into the term ecosystem. Meaning: A biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment. Big from the whole plant earth to the small of a fish tank with gold fishes and plants counts as a ecosystem. As that’s been said I decide to look into “The Aquarium Philosophy” in order to understand the thoughts of people observing a tiny ecosystem in a glass tank as I used to do. (Linkedincom, 2014)

Author uses his experience of seeing America’s ever-changing cultural and social landscape as a metaphor to an aquarium. Mentioned about “celebrate our differences is a benefit to everyone” and this rings the bell to one of the term I came across while researching ecosystem. It’s the “Biodiversity” of Amazon. We’ll get back to biodiversity later. Back to the aquarium idea, we humans society are basically identical to an aquarium, as a fish changes from one systems to another, some make it, some don’t. It’s interesting that in different circumstances the diversity of an individual sometimes it’s possible to fit in in a positive way and some got rebound by the native or the system itself and disappear. And some times the difference between the foreign and the natives can be as big as gold fish and whale sharks. swimming in a gigantic glass tank just fleshed through my mind, and then I found an aquarium in Japan with a whale shark tank that’s bigger than the one I’ve seen in Taiwan, take a moment and absorb this tiny ecosystem(Youtubecom, 2015).

Seeing these fish swimming in this scale of ecosystem with the keystone organism as human; One commented “Don't they get bored swimming in circles their whole lives? ”And the other replied “It's no different from a human beings life. It's quite sad.” These information causes me to think what really is this all about? Is it about life? Are we looking into the paradox of the meaning of life here? What is it sad about the fact us human’s living our life around circle? Or is that the mater of the size of the circle? Or maybe us human does not like the idea of having our life in a circle? Then what else do we want? Do we want We want to change the world into the way we wanted it to be? To create a utopia for our raise? But isn’t the world itself perfect already? How much do we want to change the world until it’s the ideal? Underlying thoughts thoughts popped out at this stage of researching; "Enough is enough".

In this stage I look back into my group’s work. Laura -  Practical - Looking at variety of ecosystem and the interaction between organisms and environments.    Joshua -  Quantitative - Basically about the pollutions how us human impacted the earth’s ecosystem. Also came up with the idea of using a city simulator to demonstrate how a ecosystem work. 

Wait a second, nearly all the researches are about how the ecosystem of planet earth are damaged and polluted by us human, but why? I mean there’s so many species on this planet and we’re the only species that’s able to unbalance this ecosystem? This kept me thinking for a few different possibilities besides the fact that we tent to think more then any other animals. I tried to look into how different our lives behave compare to all the other creatures through our life time and the con conclusion is “Death” works differently to our species compare to the others, I think that’s the biggest difference and that unbalanced the cycle of ecosystem. See, most of the creatures live the reason of producing the next generation, and for us human we made up the meaning of our life and live for it, some times the meaning, thoughts, will are way too big that it’s not possible to be accomplish in one’s lifetime, so we try to extend our life, or past them down to the next generation. Lives starts off with none and ends up with none as we leave. That’s how the system was designed, that’s the “Equilibrium” that maintains the ecosystem. But in the reality, the world didn’t work as perfect as it’s designed. It’s either us human are to smart to cheat our ways around the rule, or the animals are just smart enough to not mark around with the system.

And this leads up to the motives. What is the reason of ecosystem? why does it has to run this way? Ecosystem is what’s contradicted to human nature and it’s a lesson for us human to be humble and selfless, it’s about either giving up our nature of building on top of what is already there and completely reset our selves through death then let the mother nature take the wheel, or a challenge that’s been taken as what we’re doing now; take over what’s been done and in the past and integrate it up to the level that we can write above the system.

Conclusion

Overall conclusion I had the role of "Qualitative" Which is task to discover the underlying thoughts, opinions and motives of ecosystem. Underlying thoughts though my discovery is "enough is enough". Reason why we're the only species on earth that gets to impact the system is because our species doesn’t restore by death. One man’s life does not end simply because it’s flesh runs out of time, some thoughts, will, opinions gets carry over by another. Opinions towards ecosystem is about “equilibrium”. We broke the equilibrium of every life starts from zero and returns back to zero after it’s lifetime. We think of ways to extend our lives and leave our progress to the next generation in order to move our species towards to the ideal utopia. And the motives of the ecosystem is to fully understand the clearest way to sustainable development. By giving up our pride and needs, be selfless and see ourselves as part of the ecosystem. At last, accept and embrace the fact that we will and need be completely wash away in order to perfection the system to establish the real sustainable development.

Reflection

I started off with a insane amount of confusion about not knowing what I’m suppose to be looking at. I mean I don’t really have any feeling to wards the word ecosystem. And also under the idea of “transdiciplainary” I’m even more confused. After all the hesitating I decide to stick with the brief and do what I think I it is. So the goal wasn’t trying to not generate what’s already there, because I think I was a bit too abscessed with fully understand what to do and plan out what to do then do it. The word “Ecosystem” can have so many meaning; I was asking the group of if it’s about economic or ecology?  What kind of scale of the ecosystem are we looking at? It’s like a equation, a cycle what am I suppose to feel about it? I figure I starting to ask and concern about lots of things during and defiantly after this assignment. But the interesting thing is as soon as I start off and do whatever, early stage of looking at meaning of ecosystem “I thought I’m going to find lots of opinions about pollution and global warming or the relationship between the ecology and economy”. This kind of showed at the early stage of communicating works with my group in order to establish multidisciplinary since we kind of starts off with the same research. But then I starting to realize lots of common qualities towards the question above. Then I notice that if we’re looking into certain depth of anything, it ends up with philosophy which essentially leads to thoughts towards meaning of inner individual and life most of the time.  Things like what is the meaning of life? Well that’s annoying, the same phase of love and dream and passion just keep flashing through my brain until I stared at the aquarium then my thoughts took the wheel and I’ve entered the unknown circuits of my brain. Big fish, small fish, human...And then I understand it about giving up being selfless, completely selfless only then us as a small ecosystem can embrace the last stage of death, and then the big system of earth ecosystem can be perfection. Through out this point there’s so much more we can think about, for instance what is there to influence the ecosystem of the universe? And also there are other ways to perfection the system such as how cam be become a complete existence on earth to become a cycle that overtake the system base on our human’s knowledge? it’s like cancer in our body that eventually takes over control of everything, but this metaphor automatically see us at the perspective that will destroy the system, which isn’t fair but seems kind of true to me. I’ll leave my thoughts from now on cause it can goes on and on and on....

I matched up with my group’s work at this point and I figured that a few things is happening. First off, we starts of with the same material and nearly ended up with the same concept. Second, I accidentally crossed my roll of qualitative and moved into quantitative to look in facts and theory and the amount we can expand and then analyse those two with my qualitative and leads up to my final conclusion of “selfless”. Third, for my personal conclusion, the virtual city artifact isn’t gona be explain my result, but for most of the rest so...fortunately for the group and unfortunately for me...  

In this assignment multidisciplinary demonstrated that our group of people researched and experienced the alike material and information. But because of the roll we’re self aware of we tent to be more specialized to ensure the knowledge from the certain category was legitimized, and by the end base on the alike conclusion and evidence, we grew out a different integrated mindsets and result from out specialized perspective. And surprisingly/unsurprisingly the product of the multiple integrated mindsets leads back to the idea from the pre-lecture “Discovering the manifest of Colab”...And I’m going in circle again.

Reference

Linkedincom. (2014). The Aquarium Philosophy: A Diversity and Inclusion Tale for Modern Times. Retrieved 18 October, 2015, from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140623164230-31748295-the-aquarium-philosophy-a-diversity-and-inclusion-tale-for-modern-times

i propose that expansion of the urban ecosystems has as a result of an incredibly high cost of resources: consumed more and created more waste than other ecosystems have evolved to handle, as a result the overall worldwide ecosystem is becoming incapable of supporting further advancement and the urban way of life has over-shot it's own capacity for survival.

Reference                                                                                                      How are organisms in an ecosystem dependent on each other. (n.d.). Retrieved October 18, 2015.   

The graph wouldn't add another y-axis title so for the key

GREEN =  Estimated remaining forest cover in the Brazilian Amazon (sq. km)

RED = the population of the world

What is clear to see is that as the world’s population starts to increase by an average rate of 400 million every 5 years the Amazon has a decrease in size, although it isn't rapid it still is being destroyed by 100 hectares every 5 years.

REFERENCES 

Deforestation 

mongabay,  Calculating Deforestation Figures for the Amazon retrieved 18/10/2015

World population

For my practical approach, I would have liked to make my own little ecosystem and see how the living organisms interact with the non-living but I unfortunately ran out of time. Instead, I decided to look into my surrounding ecosystems such as my home garden. Gardens are part of an ecosystem as the plants attract insects such as bees, bugs, and worms. These may then attract larger predators such as birds and a cycle is created, much like a food chain. 

In my own garden, I have numerous plants and food growing. They have been living in their own ecosystem for months, interacting with the environment around them. I took a look at some parsley plants we have and noticed the other living things around them. When watered, exposed to sunlight, and tended to, new things emerge from the soil. I saw some leaves had small nibble marks on them, evidence of plant-eating creatures. Worms also pass through the soil underneath, increasing the amount of air and water that gets into it. They also leave behind a type of fertiliser and help keep the plants alive. I also saw a few bees taking interest in the flowers around the garden, another living thing interacting with the ecosystem. The sunlight, air, water, soil, climate, all contribute to this ecosystem, and it was quite interesting to see how different parts have different effects. I feel I could have understood ecosystems a bit more if I had created one from scratch, but even just taking a look at an existing one so close to me was very insightful.

The jungle in Disneyland's Jungle Cruise is now its own fully functioning ecosystem and no longer requires landscaping.

Just a fact I found awhile go and just remembered about.

For the first time in human history, more of the world’s 6.8 billion people live in cities than in rural areas. That is an incredible demographic and geographic shift since 1950 when only 30 percent of the world’s 2.5 billion inhabitants lived in urban environments.

The world’s largest cities, particularly in developing countries, are growing at phenomenal rates. As a growing landless class is attracted by urban opportunities, meager as they might be, these cities’ populations are ballooning to incredible numbers.

A May 2010 Christian Science Monitor article on “megacities” predicted that by 2050, almost 70 percent of the world’s estimated 10 billion people—more than the number of people living today—will reside in urban areas. The social, economic and environmental problems associated with a predominantly urbanized population are considerably different from those of the mostly rural world population of the past.

A megacity is an urban agglomeration (accumulation) with more than 10 million inhabitants. Sixty years ago in 1950, there were only two megacities—New York-Newark and Tokyo. In 1995, 14 megacities existed. Today, there are 22, mostly in the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. By 2025, there will probably be 30 or more.

Map by Geography in the News and Maps.com Map by Geography in the News and Maps.com Urbanization has been occurring in the developed countries of the West for 200 years. Since the Industrial Revolution, a period from the 18th to 19th century in which machine-based manufacturing grew tremendously, cities have grown rapidly. As technological innovations flourished, economies previously dependent on manual labor and draft-animals began to change. People moved into the cities to find work and relatively quickly, cities began to grow exponentially.

Today, the most rapid megacity growth is occurring in the world’s least developed and poorest countries—those least able to handle the political, social, economic and environmental problems associated with rapid urbanization.

In the most modern industrialized countries, on average, three out of four people already live within an urban area. In contrast, in the least-developed regions of the world, more than two out of three people still reside in a rural area. But that statistic is changing rapidly.

For people in developing countries, even the slums of cities like Mumbai, India, can offer more opportunities than their poor subsistence-based villages can. People gravitate to the cities because the potential for making money is greater there. While most of the economies in rural areas are agriculture-based with little cash flow, in the cities, people may be able to earn cash for work or retail sales.

The 10 largest cities in the world in 2010 and their projected populations by year 2025 are Tokyo, Japan (37.1 million), Delhi, India (28.6), São Paulo, Brazil (21.7), Mumbai, India (25.8), Mexico City (20.7), New York-Newark (20.6), Shanghai, China (20.0), Calcutta, India (20.1), Dhaka, Bangladesh (20.9) and Karachi, Pakistan (18.7).

According to the Christian Science Monitor, along with the masses come problems associated with providing necessary services like clean water, sanitation systems to remove the megatons of garbage and human waste and transportation systems to ferry workers. In addition, many cities have difficult times providing electrical networks, health care facilities and police protection.

Urbanization is not all bad news. According to the Christian Science Monitor, some see great promise in the trend, especially those companies that build roads and buildings. If a city is efficient, energy consumption can decrease by 20 percent. Transportation costs for goods and labor can fall considerably in cities because markets and workers are all close together. In essence, cities are where cash flows—they are where economic growth takes place.

As the world’s population increases at the rate of 134 million per year, the urbanization process is pushing more and more people into the cities. Such frenetic rates of urbanization and intense poverty of large urban populations strain resources. Nonetheless, to poverty-stricken, landless people, cities offer visions of opportunity. The resulting massive urban underclass, particularly in developing countries, represents one of the world’s greatest social and economic challenges.

The real question is, “What are the limits to urban growth?”

Deforestation is the practice of clearing the natural forests for the purpose of agriculture, logging etc. It is one of the numerous environmental issues which are threatening the basic existence of several plant and animals species of the world today. Even if you are not sure as to why does deforestation happen, a look at the deforestation statistics is good enough for you to understand how it can trigger a series of domino effects on the lifeforms of the planet.

It’s obvious that humans will bear the brunt of the same in the long term, but the effects of deforestation are bound to be much more prominent on the life forms endemic to the particular region.

Deforestation Statistics Worldwide

The statistics of deforestation reveal that seven countries of the world amount to around 60 percent of the total deforestation on the planet. These seven countries include Brazil in Latin America, Canada and the United States in North America, Indonesia and China in Asia, Russia in Europe and the Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa.

The data compiled by the World Resources Institute reveals that the planet has already lost 80 percent of its forest cover to deforestation, and going by the alarming rate at which the trees are being cut, it won’t take much time for that figure to reach the 100 percent mark. The West African region, which boasted of lush green tropical forests in the 19th century, has been stripped of 90 percent of its forest cover over the last century. The same trend of deforestation continues in the two remaining rainforest biomes in South America and Asia respectively.

Going by the statistics compiled by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), agriculture is the most important cause of deforestation on the planet. Whilesubsistence farming accounts for 46 percent of the total deforestation in the world, commercial agriculture is responsible for 32 percent. Other prominent causes of deforestation include logging at 14 percent, and fuel requirements at 5 percent.

Amazon Deforestation Statistics

Even though the vast area of Amazon Basin may make it look insignificant, the rate of deforestation in the Amazon is much higher than in any other part of the world. The Amazon rainforest which roughly account for about 2,488,642 square miles, has lost 15 percent of its forest cover since 1970 alone. For instance, Brazil, which is home to approximately one-thirds of the remaining rainforests of the world, has been experiencing an average loss of 21,536 square miles of forest cover annually, over the last few years. This, however, appears to be insignificant as it accounts to only 0.8 percent of the total forest cover of the country.

The rainforest deforestation statistics reveal that 60-70 percent of the deforestation in Amazon can be attributed to cattle ranches, while a significant part of the remaining 30 percent can be attributed to small-scale subsistence agriculture. Recent studies pertaining to the facts about deforestation have revealed that deforestation for the purpose of large scale farming is relatively low.

As far as the deforestation statistics for the United States are concerned, the country has lost 831 square miles of the forest cover between 2001 and 2005. Regeneration of depleted forest cover, new forest plantations, declaring forested areas as reserved etc. are some of the popular deforestation solutions being implemented around the world today. Even though the forest cover raised by these methods is inferior as compared to the primary forest cover, it can still keep the various problems associated with deforestation at bay.