A1. Application: Interrelationships between People and the Physical Environment
Specific Expectations
A1.1
describe various ways in which people have responded to challenges and opportunities presented by the physical environment (e.g., building dams, levees, or dikes to contain water and/or reclaim land; building terraces or irrigation systems to permit farming on inhospitable land; designing buildings suited to local climatic conditions or natural events such as earthquakes; specialized economic development such as resource towns in areas rich with ore, or tourism in areas of natural beauty or with a desirable climate), and analyse short- and long-term effects of some of these responses (e.g., water pollution from industry and agriculture; loss of animal habitat and wilderness areas as human settlement expands; deforestation and its consequences; the development of provincial or national parks to protect wilderness areas)
- What are some strategies that people have developed to try to control flood waters? What effect can a dam have on a river system, both upstream and downstream?
- What types of climate and landforms lend themselves to the development of a tourism industry? What impact can tourism have on the environment?
- Why are different crops grown in different regions? What impact can specialized agriculture have on land?
A1.2
compare and contrast the perspectives of some different groups (e.g., Indigenous peoples living on the land, organic versus large-scale farmers, industrial and agrarian societies, owners of resource-extraction companies, environmental organizations, land developers) on the challenges and opportunities presented by the natural environment
- What perspectives might various groups have on issues surrounding the building of a new housing development on reclaimed land? Why would those groups have different perspectives?
- How might different groups view the construction of a large dam to increase irrigation to local farmland?
- What are some ways in which Indigenous values regarding living in harmony with the land inform Indigenous land use?
A1.3
assess the physical environment in various locations around the world to determine which environment or environments have the greatest impact on people (e.g., develop criteria for ranking the challenges and opportunities presented by physical environments such as deserts, tropical rainforests, mountains, volcanic islands, regions with cold climates, floodplains, coastal regions)
- What types of physical environments do you think have the greatest impact on people? What kinds of hardships can those environments present? How do people cope with these hardships? Are they always successful in doing so? Are there aspects of the environment that cannot be controlled or that can have a devastating impact? What are the positive aspects of life in these environments? Do they outweigh the hardships?
A1.4
assess ways in which different peoples living in similar physical environments have responded to challenges and opportunities presented by these environments, and assess the sustainability of these responses (e.g., land reclamation and flood control in low-lying areas such as the Netherlands, the Mississippi delta, the Mekong River; nomadic lifestyles of peoples in the Gobi or Sahara Desert versus extensive irrigation to create cities such as Las Vegas in the Mojave Desert; the development of ecotourism in the Costa Rican rainforest versus the clear-cutting of rainforests in the Amazon or Madagascar)
- How have people living in the tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia and Central Africa adapted to their environment? Have they been successful in responding to the challenges and opportunities it presents? Are their practices sustainable?
- How do traditional Inuit, Nenets, and Chukchi lifestyles reflect the challenges of life in Arctic regions? How do these people use available resources? Is their lifestyle sustainable? What types of factors might affect its sustainability?