United States Department of Education
The United States Department of Education referred to as the ED for Education Department, is a Cabinet-level department of the United States government. It began operating on May 4, 1980, having been created after the Department of Health and Welfare was split into the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services by the Department of Education Organization Act, which President Jimmy Carter signed into law on October 17, 1979; the Department of Education is administered by the United States Secretary of Education. It has an annual budget of $68 billion; the 2019 Budget supports $129.8 billion in new postsecondary grants and work-study assistance to help an estimated 11.5 million students and their families pay for college. Its official abbreviation is "ED" and is often abbreviated informally as "DoEd"; the primary functions of the Department of Education are to "establish policy for and coordinate most federal assistance to education, collect data on US schools, to enforce federal educational laws regarding privacy and civil rights."
The Department of Education does not establish colleges. Unlike the systems of most other countries, education in the United States is decentralized, the federal government and Department of Education are not involved in determining curricula or educational standards; this has been left to state and local school districts. The quality of educational institutions and their degrees is maintained through an informal private process known as accreditation, over which the Department of Education has no direct public jurisdictional control; the Department of Education is a member of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, works with federal partners to ensure proper education for homeless and runaway youth in the United States. Opposition to the Department of Education stems from conservatives, who see the department as an undermining of states rights, libertarians who believe it results in a state-imposed leveling towards the bottom and low value for taxpayers' money; the U. S. Department of Education oversees the nation's education system.
The Department sets uniform standards which are applied nationwide. “Since the Department of Education began operations in fiscal year 1980, its mission has included promoting student achievement and ensuring equal access to educational opportunity. To do so, Education partners with state and local governments, which provide most of the resources to school districts for K-12 programs". Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity is one of the most forefront issues, discussed about within the U. S. Department of Education’s four walls; the goal of this agency is to make sure that every student in primary and secondary education has the tools that they need to succeed. Not all of their ideas always work out in the best favor of the students. Throughout recent history, the educational system has not always been focused on furthering the development of all students. However, coming out of the 20th century this ideal has been turned around and many new legislations have been put in place to break down these invisible walls that were surrounding the people who were affected by this hindrance.
“The U. S. like other countries in the 21st century, is operating in an interconnected world. New structures require that teachers and our next generations of students prepare and expand ideas about their responsibilities as citizens". For 2006, the ED discretionary budget was $56 billion and the mandatory budget contained $23 billion. In 2009 it received additional ARRA funding of $102 billion; as of 2011, the discretionary budget is $70 billion. A previous Department of Education was created in 1867 but was soon demoted to an Office in 1868; as an agency not represented in the president's cabinet, it became a minor bureau in the Department of the Interior. In 1939, the bureau was transferred to the Federal Security Agency, where it was renamed the Office of Education. In 1953, the Federal Security Agency was upgraded to cabinet-level status as the Department of Health and Welfare. In 1979, President Carter advocated for creating a cabinet-level Department of Education. Carter's plan was to transfer most of the Department of Health and Welfare's education-related functions to the Department of Education.
Carter planned to transfer the education-related functions of the departments of Defense, Justice and Urban Development, Agriculture, as well as a few other federal entities. Among the federal education-related programs that were not proposed to be transferred were Headstart, the Department of Agriculture's school lunch and nutrition programs, the Department of the Interior's Native Americans' education programs, the Department of Labor's education and training programs. Upgrading Education to cabinet level status in 1979 was opposed by many in the Republican Party, who saw the department as unconstitutional, arguing that the Constitution doesn't mention education, deemed it an unnecessary and illegal federal bureaucratic intrusion into local affairs. However, many see the department as constitutional under the Commerce Clause, that the funding role of the Department is constitutional under the Taxing and Spending Clause; the National Education Association supported the bill, while the American Federation of Teachers opposed it.
As of 1979, the Office of Education had an annual budget of $12 billion. Congress appropriated to the Department of Education an annual budget of $14 billion and 17,000
Integrated geography
Integrated geography is the branch of geography that describes and explains the spatial aspects of interactions between human individuals or societies and their natural environment, these interactions being called coupled human–environment systems. It requires an understanding of the dynamics of physical geography, as well as the ways in which human societies conceptualize the environment. Thus, to a certain degree, it may be seen as a successor of Physische Anthropogeographie —a term coined by University of Vienna geographer Albrecht Penck in 1924—and geographical cultural or human ecology. Integrated geography in the United States is principally influenced by the schools of Carl O. Sauer, whose perspective was rather historical, Gilbert F. White, who developed a more applied view. Integrated geography is the branch of geography that describes and explains the spatial aspects of interactions between human individuals or societies and their natural environment, called coupled human–environment systems.
The links between human and physical geography were once more apparent. As human experience of the world is mediated by technology, the relationships between humans and the environment have become obscured. Thereby, integrated geography represents a critically important set of analytical tools for assessing the impact of human presence on the environment; this is done by measuring the result of human activity on natural cycles. Methods for which this information is gained include remote sensing, geographic information systems. Integrated geography helps us to ponder the environment in terms of its relationship to people. With integrated geography we can analyze different social science and humanities perspectives and their use in understanding people environment processes. Hence, it is considered the third branch of geography, the other branches being physical and human geography
Biophysical environment
A biophysical environment is a biotic and abiotic surrounding of an organism or population, includes the factors that have an influence in their survival and evolution. A biophysical environment can vary in scale from microscopic to global in extent, it can be subdivided according to its attributes. Examples include the marine environment, the atmospheric environment and the terrestrial environment; the number of biophysical environments is countless, given that each living organism has its own environment. The term environment can refer to a singular global environment in relation to humanity, or a local biophysical environment, e.g. the UK's Environment Agency. All life that has survived must have adapted to conditions of its environment. Temperature, humidity, soil nutrients, etc. all influence any species, within any environment. However life in turn modifies, in various forms, its conditions; some long term modifications along the history of our planet have been significant, such as the incorporation of oxygen to the atmosphere.
This process consisted in the breakdown of carbon dioxide by anaerobic microorganisms that used the carbon in their metabolism and released the oxygen to the atmosphere. This led to the existence of the great oxygenation event. Other interactions are more immediate and simple, such as the smoothing effect that forests have on the temperature cycle, compared to neighboring unforested areas. Environmental science is the study of the interactions within the biophysical environment. Part of this scientific discipline is the investigation of the effect of human activity on the environment. Ecology, a sub-discipline of biology and a part of environmental sciences, is mistaken as a study of human induced effects on the environment. Environmental studies is a broader academic discipline, the systematic study of interaction of humans with their environment, it is a broad field of study that includes the natural environment, built environments and social environments. Environmentalism is a broad social and philosophical movement that, in a large part, seeks to minimise and compensate the negative effect of human activity on the biophysical environment.
The issues of concern for environmentalists relate to the natural environment with the more important ones being climate change, species extinction and old growth forest loss. One of the studies related include employing Geographic Information Science to study the biophysical environment. Biophysics subject to the context List of conservation topics List of environmental issues Lists of environmental topics Miller, G. Tyler. Environmental science. California: Wadsworth. ISBN 0-534-21588-2. McCallum, Malcolm L.. "Google search patterns suggest declining interest in the environment". Biodiversity and Conservation. Doi:10.1007/s10531-013-0476-6. Media related to Environment at Wikimedia Commons
State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry
The State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry is an American, doctoral-granting institution based in Syracuse, New York. It is adjacent to Syracuse University, within which it was founded, with whom it maintains a special relationship. ESF is a part of the State University of New York system. ESF operates facilities in the Adirondack Park, the Thousand Islands, elsewhere in central New York, Costa Rica; the College's curricula focus on the understanding and sustainability of the environment and natural resources. ESF is considered by Peterson's to be the premier college in the U. S. for the study of environmental and natural sciences, engineering and management of natural resources and the environment. The college has expanded its initial emphasis on forestry to include professional education in environmental science, landscape architecture, environmental studies, engineering in addition to distinguished programs in the biological and physical sciences. ESF is ranked at 43rd in the 2017 US News & World Report rankings of the top public national universities.
It commemorated its centennial in 2011. The New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University was established in 1911 through a bill signed by New York Governor John Alden Dix; the previous year, Governor Hughes had vetoed a bill authorizing such a college. Both bills followed the state's defunding, in 1903, of the New York State College of Forestry at Cornell. A unit of Syracuse University, in 1913, the College was made a separate, legal entity. Syracuse native and constitutional lawyer Louis Marshall, with a summer residence at Knollwood Club on Saranac Lake and a prime mover for the establishment of the Adirondack and Catskill Forest Preserve, became a Syracuse University Trustee in 1910, he confided in Chancellor James R. Day his desire to have an agricultural and forestry school at the University, by 1911 his efforts resulted in a New York State bill to fund the project: the aforementioned appropriation bill signed by Governor Dix. Marshall was elected president of the college's Board of Trustees at its first meeting, in 1911.
The first dean of the College was William L. Bray, a Ph. D. graduate from the University of Chicago, plant ecologist and Professor of Botany at Syracuse University. In 1907 he was made head of the botany department at Syracuse, in 1908 he started teaching a forestry course in the basement of Lyman Hall. Bray was an associate of Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief of the United States Forest Service. In 1911, in addition to assuming the deanship of forestry, Bray organized the Agricultural Division at Syracuse University, he remained at Syracuse until 1943 as chair of botany and Dean of the Syracuse Graduate School. In 1915, the same year that Dr. Bray published The Development of the Vegetation of New York State, he became one of the founding members, along with Raphael Zon and Yale School of Forestry's second dean, James W. Toumey, of the Ecological Society of America. In 1950, the 1917 "activist wing" of that Society formed today's The Nature Conservancy. Most of the professors, in the early years of the College of Forestry at Syracuse and the Department of Forestry at Cornell's New York State College of Agriculture were educated in forestry at the Yale School of Forestry.
The forestry students at Syracuse but not at Cornell were referred to as "stumpies" by their classmates. Fifty-two students were enrolled in the school's first year, the first 11 graduating two years in 1913. One of the hallmarks of the College, its research, dates back to 1912, beginning with a study on what firms were using lumber in the state of New York as well as the wood species and quantities. In 1912, the College opened its Ranger School in New York, in the Adirondacks; the College began enrolling women as early as 1915, but the first women to complete their degrees—one majoring in landscape engineering and two in pulp and paper—graduated in the late 1940s. In January 1930, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, recommending an allocation of $600,000 towards construction of the college's second building, in honor of Louis Marshall deceased, noted that: "under leadership and the leadership of its late dean, Franklin Moon, the School of Forestry made giant strides until it became recognized as the premier institution of its kind in the United States".
The cornerstone of Louis Marshall Memorial Hall was laid in 1931 by former Governor and presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith, elected to assume the presidency of the college's Board of Trustees. With the formation of the State University of New York in 1948, the College became recognized as a specialized college within the SUNY system, its name was changed to State University College of Forestry at Syracuse University. In 1972, the College's name was changed yet again to State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Unlike other state-supported degree-granting institutions, created at private institutions in New York State, the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University was an autonomous institution not administratively part of Syracuse University. In 2000, SUNY System Administration established ESF's "primacy" among the 64 SUNY campuses and contract colleges for development of new undergraduate degree programs in Environmental Science and Environmental Studies.
ESF's main campus, located in Syracuse, New York, is where most academic and administrative activity takes place. The campus is made up of nine main buildings: Baker Laboratory: Named after Hugh P. Ba
Environmental racism
Environmental racism is environmental injustice that occurs in practice and in policy within a racialized context. In 1982, the term was coined by Benjamin Chavis, the executive director of the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, in response to the dumping of hazardous PCB waste in a town in Warren County, North Carolina; the UCC and US General Accounting Office reports on this case in North Carolina brought public attention to the strong association between locations of hazardous waste sites and poor minority neighborhoods. Early activists in environmental racism and Robert Bullard pointed out institutionalized racism stemming from government and corporate policies that led to environmental racism. Practices like redlining and colorblind adaptation planning, factors that inhibit residents from preventing these practices include their low socioeconomic status, lack of political representation and mobility that all contribute to environmental racism. Environmental racism can be explained through a number of ways and in most cases include four unique patterns.
The first one includes exposure to hazardous waste. It can be identified by determining how vulnerable a community is to issues like flooding; the accessibility of potable water can help in measuring environmental justice. A discriminatory waste management program can be considered a case of environmental injustice; some social scientists have argued that some causes of environmental racism are intentional, for example, the dumping of hazardous waste in a minority community. Apart from intentional reasons, this kind of racism can be caused by structural and institutional elements. Chavis defined environmental racism in five categories. First, he termed it as racial discrimination in defining environmental policies, he stated that this occurs when these regulations and laws are being enforced. He further stated that it is the deliberate targeting of communities of color as far as dumping of toxic waste is concerned, he referred to this term as the official sanctioning of dangerous poisons and pollutants in the minority communities.
He termed it as the history of exclusion of people of color from attaining leadership positions in the ecological organizations. Other activists like Robert Bullard had their own definition for the term claiming that it refers to any policy or directive that differentially harms people, groups, or communities based on their color; the acknowledgement of environmental racism prompted the environmental justice social movement that began in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. Although environmental racism has been tied to the environmental justice movement, throughout the years the term has dissociated more and more from the environmental justice movement. In response to cases of environmental racism, grassroots organizations and campaigns have brought more attention to environmental racism in policy making and emphasize the importance of having input from minorities in policymaking. Although environmental racism was coined in the US, it occurs on the international level. Examples include the exportation of hazardous wastes to poor countries in the Global South with lax environmental policies and safety practices.
Marginalized communities that do not have the socioeconomic and political means to oppose large corporations are at risk to environmentally racist practices that are detrimental and sometimes fatal to humans. Economic statuses and political positions are crucial factors when looking at environmental problems because they determine where a person lives. People who do not have those privileges are the ones who suffer from environmental problems. Environmental racism crosses the boundaries of countries and is addressed below in the context of environmental racism that has occurred outside of the US, where the term was coined. In the United States, the first report to draw a relationship between race and risk of exposure to pollutants was the Council of Environmental Quality's "Annual Report to the President" in 1971, in response to toxic waste dumping in an African American community in Warren County, NC. After protests in Warren County, North Carolina, the U. S. General Accounting Office issued a report on the case in 1983, the United Church of Christ commissioned a report exploring the concept in 1987 drawing a connection between race and the placement of the hazardous waste facilities.
Thus, the outcry in Warren County was an important event in spurring minority, grassroots involvement in the environmental justice movement by addressing cases of environmental racism. One activist, Benjamin Chavis, who at the time was the executive director of the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ coined the term environmental racism 1982 in response to the case. From the groundbreaking reports on environmental racism in Warren County, NC, the accumulation of studies and reports on cases of environmental racism and injustices garnered increased public attention in the US, led to President Bill Clinton's 1994 Executive Order 12898; this was a historical step in addressing environmental injustice on a policy level within a predominantly white-dominated environmentalism movement. Although the Order directed agencies to develop a strategy that manages environmental justice, not every federal agency has fulfilled this order to date. Congress never passed a bill making Clinton's Executive Order law.
The issuance of the Order propelled states into action as many states began to require relevant agencies to develop strategies and programs that would identify and address environmental
Human impact on the environment
Human impact on the environment or anthropogenic impact on the environment includes changes to biophysical environments and ecosystems and natural resources caused directly or indirectly by humans, including global warming, environmental degradation, mass extinction and biodiversity loss, ecological crisis, ecological collapse. Modifying the environment to fit the needs of society is causing severe effects, which become worse as the problem of human overpopulation continues; some human activities that cause damage to the environment on a global scale include human reproduction, overexploitation and deforestation, to name but a few. Some of the problems, including global warming and biodiversity loss pose an existential risk to the human race, overpopulation causes those problems; the term anthropogenic object resulting from human activity. The term was first used in the technical sense by Russian geologist Alexey Pavlov, it was first used in English by British ecologist Arthur Tansley in reference to human influences on climax plant communities.
The atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen introduced the term "Anthropocene" in the mid-1970s. The term is sometimes used in the context of pollution emissions that are produced from human activity but applies broadly to all major human impacts on the environment. David Attenborough described the level of human population on the planet as a multiplier of all other environmental problems. In 2013, he described humanity as "a plague on the Earth" that needs to be controlled by limiting population growth; some deep ecologists, such as the radical thinker and polemicist Pentti Linkola, see human overpopulation as a threat to the entire biosphere. In 2017, over 15,000 scientists around the world issued a second warning to humanity which asserted that rapid human population growth is the "primary driver behind many ecological and societal threats." Overconsumption is a situation where resource use has outpaced the sustainable capacity of the ecosystem. It can be measured by the ecological footprint, a resource accounting approach which compares human demand on ecosystems with the amount of planet matter ecosystems can renew.
Estimates indicate that humanity's current demand is 70% higher than the regeneration rate of all of the planet's ecosystems combined. A prolonged pattern of overconsumption leads to environmental degradation and the eventual loss of resource bases. Humanity's overall impact on the planet is affected by many factors, not just the raw number of people, their lifestyle and the pollution they generate are important. In 2008, The New York Times stated that the inhabitants of the developed nations of the world consume resources like oil and metals at a rate 32 times greater than those of the developing world, who make up the majority of the human population; the effects of overpopulation are compounded by overconsumption. According to Paul R. Ehrlich: Rich western countries are now siphoning up the planet’s resources and destroying its ecosystems at an unprecedented rate. We want to build highways across the Serengeti to get more rare earth minerals for our cellphones. We wreck the coral reefs and put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
We have triggered a major extinction event A world population of around a billion would have an overall pro-life effect. This could be supported for many millennia and sustain many more human lives in the long term compared with our current uncontrolled growth and prospect of sudden collapse If everyone consumed resources at the US level –, what the world aspires to – you will need another four or five Earths. We are wrecking our planet’s life support systems. Humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants The world’s chickens are triple the weight of all the wild birds, while domesticated cattle and pigs outweigh all wild mammals by 14 to 1; the applications of technology result in unavoidable and unexpected environmental impacts, which according to the I = PAT equation is measured as resource use or pollution generated per unit GDP. Environmental impacts caused by the application of technology are perceived as unavoidable for several reasons. First, given that the purpose of many technologies is to exploit, control, or otherwise “improve” upon nature for the perceived benefit of humanity while at the same time the myriad of processes in nature have been optimized and are continually adjusted by evolution, any disturbance of these natural processes by technology is to result in negative environmental consequences.
Second, the conservation of mass principle and the first law of thermodynamics dictate that whenever material resources or energy are moved around or manipulated by technology, environmental consequences are inescapable. Third, according to the second law of thermodynamics, order can be increased within a system only by increasing disorder or entropy outside the system. Thus, technologies can create “order” in the human economy only at the expense of increasing “disorder” in the environment. According to a number of studies, increased entropy is to be correlated to negative environmental impacts; the environmental impact of agriculture varies based on the wide variety of agricultural practices employed around the world. The environmental impact depends on the production practices of the system used by farmers; the connection between emissions into th
Middlebury College
Middlebury College is a private liberal arts college in Middlebury, Vermont. It was founded in 1800 by Congregationalists, making it the first operating college or university in Vermont; the college enrolls 2,526 undergraduates from all 50 states and 74 countries and offers 44 majors in the arts, literature, foreign languages, social sciences, natural sciences. The college is the first American institution of higher education to have granted a bachelor's degree to an African-American, graduating Alexander Twilight in the class of 1823. Middlebury was one of the first all-male liberal arts colleges in New England to become a coeducational institution, following the trustees' decision in 1883 to accept women. In 1886, May Belle Chellis was the first woman to graduate, she was the valedictorian. Middlebury was listed as tied for the fifth-best liberal arts college in the U. S. in the 2019 U. S. News & World Report rankings. Middlebury's 31 varsity teams are known as the Middlebury Panthers and compete in the NCAA Division III's NESCAC conference.
The school is known for its graduate programs that focus on literature, political science, entrepreneurship. Middlebury received its founding charter on November 1, 1800, as an outgrowth of the Addison County Grammar School, founded three years earlier in 1797; the College's first president—Jeremiah Atwater—began classes a few days making Middlebury the first operating college or university in Vermont. One student named Aaron Petty graduated at the first commencement held in August 1802; the College's founding religious affiliation was loosely Congregationalist. Yet the idea for a college was that of town fathers rather than clergymen, Middlebury was "the Town's College" rather than the Church's. Chief among its founders were Seth Storrs and Gamaliel Painter, the former credited with the idea for a college and the latter as its greatest early benefactor. In addition to receiving a diploma upon graduation, Middlebury graduates receive a replica of Gamaliel Painter's cane. Painter bequeathed his original cane to the College and it is carried by the College President at official occasions including first-year convocation and graduation.
Alexander Twilight, class of 1823, was the first black graduate of any college or university in the United States. At its second commencement in 1804, Middlebury granted Lemuel Haynes an honorary master's degree, the first advanced degree bestowed upon an African American. In 1883, the trustees voted to accept women as students in the college, making Middlebury one of the first all-male liberal arts colleges in New England to become a coeducational institution; the first female graduate—May Belle Chellis—received her degree in 1886. As valedictorian of the class of 1899, Mary Annette Anderson became the first African-American woman elected to Phi Beta Kappa; the College's centennial in 1900 began a century of physical expansion beyond the three buildings of Old Stone Row. York and Sawyer designed the Egbert Starr Library, a Beaux-Arts edifice expanded and renamed the Axinn Center, Warner Hall. Growth in enrollment and the endowment led to continued expansion westward. McCullough Hall and Voter Hall featured gymnasium and laboratories adopting Georgian Revival styling while confirming the campus standard of grey Vermont limestone and marble.
The national fraternity Kappa Delta Rho was founded in Painter Hall on May 17, 1905. Middlebury College abolished fraternities in the early 1990s, but the organization continued on campus in the less ritualized form of a social house. Due to a policy at the school against single-sex organizations, the house was forced to coeducate during the same period as well; the German Language School, founded in 1915 under the supervision of then-President John Martin Thomas, began the tradition of the Middlebury College Language Schools. These Schools, which take place on the Middlebury campus during the summer, enroll about 1,350 students in the Arabic, French, Hebrew, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish Language Schools. Middlebury President Paul Dwight Moody began the American tradition of a National Christmas Tree in 1923 when the College donated a 48-foot balsam fir for use at the White House; the tree was illuminated when Calvin Coolidge, a Vermont native in the first year of his presidency, flipped an electric switch.
The Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury's graduate school of English, was established at the College's Bread Loaf Mountain campus in 1920. The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference was established in 1926. In 1978, the Bread Loaf School of English expanded to include a campus at Lincoln College, Oxford University. In 1991, the School expanded to include a campus at St. John's College in New Mexico, to the University of North Carolina, Asheville, in 2006; the C. V. Starr-Middlebury Schools Abroad began in 1949 with the school in Paris; the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies was founded as an educational charity in 1975 by Drs John and Sandy Feneley in Oxford, establishing a facility at St. Michael's Hall in 1978, including the Feneley Library, close links with Keble College, Oxford. S. undergraduates Middlebury Museum Studies in Oxford. In
