Climate Change: The Reefs and Waterways of Australia
Dr. David J. Rutherford
Department of Public Policy Leadership
University of Mississippi
The seminar in which I participated provided a tremendously rewarding experience that has already begun to benefit the educational experiences for students in my courses and will keep on enhancing those courses as I continue to incorporate additional information from the seminar. In addition, the seminar has provided excellent material to present at professional meetings and for preparation of manuscripts for publication in professional journals. Moreover, I intend to incorporate the material in lesson plans for K-12 educators.
Throughout the seminar and my independent travels, I wrote substantive notes, photographed illustrative images, and collected pertinent literature. I have already begun incorporating material from these sources into two classes that I teach at the University of Mississippi – Global Environmental Issues, and World Regions: Geography and Policy. These materials have improved teaching about the variable impacts that aquatic and coastal ecosystem changes exert on peoples, cultures, and economic livelihoods in diverse local places along with the effects that diffuse more broadly around the world. Moreover, the materials have provided concrete examples that illustrate the role that globalization itself plays in ecosystem change, particularly how human actions that occur around the world and are often considered benign or neutral can have powerful impacts on aquatic and coastal ecosystem change in faraway local places. I have also begun development of lesson plans on these same themes that can be distributed to K-12 educators throughout Mississippi through the Mississippi Geographic Alliance. Finally, I have developed outlines for manuscripts to submit for publication in two appropriate professional journals – the Geographical Review and Focus on Geography.
The seminar and associated travels provided many examples of the ways in which globalization in our contemporary world continues to increasingly and more closely link the peoples, places, and environments in distant locations together into one interconnected world. I look forward to further incorporation of this theme into my communications with students and others.