Week 5 – Final Assignment

The Journey to Sustainability

[WLO: 4] [CLOs: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Prior to beginning work on this assignment, review chapters 9 and 10 of the Turk and Bensel’s Contemporary Environmental Issues textbook (2014).

During the first four weeks of this course, we explored sustainability issues relating to biodiversity, food production, water resources, and our atmosphere and climate. You researched different terms related to each week’s topic, explaining the term, and offering suggestions for how each of us might contribute to achieving sustainability in relationship to that particular concept, issue, or place.

For this two-part assignment, first you will pool your resources. Polish your written entries, and contribute them according to the instructions below to a single document, a Sustainable Living Guide, that will be emailed to everyone in the class a few days after the course ends. It is hoped that you will be able to make use of the guide and its recommendations for years to come.

In the second part of the journey, you will explore what a future sustainable world might look like, and in the process of doing so, extend your previous descriptions of selected terms and explain how they may play a role in aiding us in achieving environmental sustainability on a global scale.

Part 1: Sustainable Living Guide Contributions

For the first part of your assignment,

• Using past feedback from the instructor and your peers, you will revise your work on the four terms you previously selected. Use grammar and spell-checking programs to insure clarity (consider using Ashford University’s Grammarly (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. proofreading tool). Proofread carefully prior to submitting your work.
• Transfer your revised four terms to the Sustainable Living Guide.
  • Access the Sustainable Living Guide. This guide lists all of the terms from all four weeks, in alphabetical order by week.
  • Locate each of the terms you wrote about, click the “Edit” button so you can copy and paste the text for each term into the guide using the Sustainable Living Guide Contributions Template and into the online Sustainable Living Guide.
  • Ensure that you have submitted all of your items before clicking the “Save: button on the page to save your work.
• Proceed to the Sustainable Living Guide Submission Acknowledgement page to confirm your submission once you have completed all of Part 1.

Part 2: Living in a Sustainable World

Imagine a future in which human beings have achieved environmental sustainability on a global scale. In this second part of your final assignment, you will be describing what a sustainable Earth will look like in the future, providing examples throughout to support your descriptions. You will be including all the terms that you have researched during Week 1 through 4 of this class, underlining each term as you include it. In your paper, use grammar and spell-checking programs to insure clarity. Proofread carefully prior to submitting your work. Finally, you will submit the document to Waypoint.

Your paper will consist of seven paragraphs: an introduction, a conclusion, and one paragraph relating to each week’s topic. In your paper, use this format to address the following elements with the assumption that environmental sustainability has been achieved:

• Introduction:
  • Describe how our relationship to nature will be different from what it is at present.
  • Examine how we will cope differently with the ways that natural phenomena affect our lives.
• Week 1:
  • Describe what Earth’s biodiversity and ecosystems will look like.
• Week 2:
  • Examine how agricultural production will be different in the future.
• Week 3:
  • Differentiate between how we will manage our water resources in the future compared to how we do so right now.
• Week 4:
  • Examine how we will meet our energy needs in the future in a way that will enable us to maintain a habitable atmosphere and climate.
• Week 5:
  • Describe how waste management will be different in the future.
• Conclusion:
  • Summarize some of the major social, economic, political, and ecological choices and tradeoffs that will need to be overcome for this sustainable future to arrive.

The Part 2 of the Journey to Sustainability paper

• Must be 7 paragraphs in length (not including title and reference pages) and formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center’s APA Style resource (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site..
• Must incorporate all four of your previously selected terms.
• Must utilize academic voice. See the Academic Voice (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. resource for additional guidance.
• Can include, as an option, credible and/or scholarly sources in addition to the course text for each term covered.
  • The Scholarly, Peer Reviewed, and Other Credible Sources (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. table offers additional guidance on appropriate source types. If you have questions about whether a specific source is appropriate for this assignment, please contact your instructor. Your instructor has the final say about the appropriateness of a specific source for a particular assignment.
• Must document any information used from sources in APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center’s Citing Within Your Paper guide (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site..
•  (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.Can include, as an option, a separate references list that is formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center. See the Formatting Your References List (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. resource in the Ashford Writing Center for specifications.