Leopold Discussion

My viewpoint on Leopold's piece will be coming from a Christian perspective. Leopold's central point is that humans must develop a code of ethics between man and the land on which we live and grow. Leopold states, and I agree, that we must have more respect for the land on which we reside, and that we must treat the land and its resources with greater care. In Genesis 1:26 God says "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." So I believe that God has given man dominion over the earth, and that God wants us to use the gifts within the earth to our benefit; but with this privilege I believe God has entrusted to us the responsibility of maintaining and protecting the earth from being destroyed.
I did not agree with Leopold that we should become members and citizens of the earth, coexisting with animals and plants, because I believe that man is a higher form of life than the animals and plants, and- going back to the scripture- we have dominion over these things, therefore we cannot be their equals but are required by God to be their superiors. To sum up my point of view, I believe that God has given man a responsibility to the world to cultivate it, take advantage of its resources, and to maintain and protect it.

Dichotomous Key

Thursday in BHC (Biology and Human Concerns) our lab consisted of going outside and finding different branches of leaves from the various species growing here on campus and finding ways to differentiate each species from the others. This tasked at first seemed near impossible, because none of the class, myself included, new much of anything about the distinctive characteristics that made each species of tree unique. Once Dr. Adkins found enough samples for the class lesson he gave my classmates and I various combinations of three or five different samples and told us to create a Dichotomous Key. I should preface that statement by telling you that Dr. Adkins did not just throw us into the fire, he first explained a Dichotomous Key and then gave us a few distinguishing visual traits of different trees to go by. Using our visual observations of the samples and a sheet of different characteristics found in trees, these characteristics consisted of blade type, vein position, leaf arrangement, and number of leaves per bud. By simply observing these plants we were able to distinguish each sample from the others. At first We thought this task immeasurable but by the end if you asked anyone in the class, they'd say we were all professionals. Following that lab, I am amazed by how many different species of tree there are in just one block of a college campus in downtown Lexington! Now, I seem to observe various trees and think to myself what blade type it has or maybe observe that the tree has compound leaves, or maybe its leaves alternate.

Tectonic Plates, Coal, and Mining- Blog Post #1

In Biology lab on Thursday, we watched a video about how the Appalachian Mountain Range formed and how anthracite coal came to be as well as how mining operations are run in today's world. First, let me say that I had no idea how big the Appalachians actually are... I thought they stretched from maybe southern Pennsylvania, to north Georgia, but after watching that video I learned that these mountains stretch all the way to Newfoundland, Canada! According to the video we watched, the Appalachians formed from the crashing together of two continental Tectonic Plates, these plates were under what we now call North America and Africa, when these to plates converged the land was forced upward creating this mountain range. The video also provided an explanation for how coal was created, ancient trees were covered by loads of sediment and under incredible pressure over millions of years these trees became modern day coal. Thirdly, this video showed from a distance what a surface mine operation looks like as well as what a shaft mine looked like when they were the norm. Surface mines replaced shaft mines as the norm because surface mines are genuinely safer for workers as well as require less workers to manage. The video's main beef with surface mines was that the mines strip away trees and other vegetation in order to mine coal, even though the mining companies replace the vegetation whenever they move on from the area, it still takes the area several years to return to the form that it had before the mining began.