Population-Environment

The Wecskaop Project
(What Every Citizen Should Know About Our Planet)

Open-courseware PowerPoints and PDFs

Biospheric Literacy 101

Six PowerPoints / Six Days

Population-Environment Executive Summary-PDFs

for Policymakers and Academia

Biospheric Literacy 101

Six PowerPoints/Six Days

Envision biospheric literacy for all students and first-year undergraduates of every major using six freely-downloadable PowerPoints and PDFs which are easily assimilated over a span of one or two weeks, or in comfortable one-day workshops for policymakers and academia.

Sample topics include - Global environmental issues... Introductory Ecology... Population-environment.... Food, water, and sustainability.... and Biodiversity and Conservation

Other topics: thresholds, tipping points, boundaries, demography, demographics, climate, education, ecology, environment, limits, limiting factors, overshoot, conservation, biodiversity, ecological services, climb-and-collapse, red-tides, poverty, hunger, governance, instability, international affairs, employment, sociology, wastes, pollution, STEM, oceans, sustainability, whole-systems ecology, J-curves, feedbacks, lag-times, inaction, deforestation, ecological release, life-extension, vast open-space suppositions, unintended consequences, science, and the functioning of natural systems

What Every Citizen Should Know About Our Planet

Consider for a moment the following question:

What should every student, educator, policymaker, citizen, and scholar know about our planet?

And then envision a short one or two week unit of open-courseware resources that target precisely such core concepts, principles, data sets, and under-standings.

The open-courseware resources are offered as two easy collections - One entitled Biospheric Literacy and Sustainability 101 - Six PowerPoints / Six Days for students and first-year undergraduates (of every major).

In addition, a second collection adds six high-prior-ity Executive Summary population-environment PDFs for policymakers and academia.hat makes you different from your competitors. Make your company stand out and show your visitors who you are.

Competencies and Understandings

In our Biospherics Literacy: Population - Environment- Sustainability pdf (pictured above and accessible on page three of this website) we list100 core biospheric and natural science principles, data sets, and understandings that students can master in 8 or 9 days, and which policymakers, journalists, and academics can assimilate in an easy one-day workshop.

How Galileo and science demolish seemingly-instinctive suppositions

The Captain of the Titanic; six repeated and specific warnings; mistaken suppositions; and inaction, followed by calamity and complete loss of the vessel

How large is a billion? (Hint: The answer is 38,461 years)

Humankind's vast open-space suppositions and the "vast open-space" delusion

Which information - and why?

We submit that there exists a specific and fundamental repertoire of scientific information that every citizen should know about our planet

and that this information includes thresholds, tipping points, and unintended consequences, carrying capacities, limiting factors, delayed feedbacks, and overshoot; exponential mathematics and J-curves; as well as, among other things, demographics and world population levels, past, present, and future.

In the past, humankind has always been able to take the functioning of Earth's biospheric life-support machinery for granted - as some sort of indestructible constant. As a thought-experiment, however, envision complex functioning systems of any sort (such as an automobile, a space vehicle, an aircraft, an elevator, a computer system, an animal's body, etc.) and imagine massive wastes and eradications inflicted upon component after component of any such systems.

No rational astronauts, for example, would ever dream of massive and ever-increasing eradication of the propulsion, navigational, and support systems that maintain their lives in space (think elevator, computer systems, aircraft, automobiles, human body, etc.). Why should we suppose that the Earth's planetary life-support machinery is invulnerable?