Your life and the environment

Assignment:

Your task is to create a mind-map, with your life at its centre, which conceptually links together aspects of your life, aspects of our modern society, environmental impacts, and the consequent impacts on you and society. At the very least it must include more than 50 nodes, and should cover the environmental aspects covered in the first two weeks' lectures and video shown in tutorials.

Below is an extract from a (very simple) mind-map that was put together for a similar purpose.

Your first step will be to identify a few diverse aspects of your life from which you can start tracing to environmental impacts from. Maybe it's your house or apartment; maybe your choices at the supermarket; or maybe it's flying home to Reykjavík each year to see your family; it's entirely up to

you.

If you get entirely stuck with what environmental impacts to consider, try revisiting the lecture slides, subject outline, or Living in the Environment (GT Miller).

Your mind-map must include at least some many-to-many connections. The interactions between modern life and the natural environment are so complex, with so many interdependencies and feedback loops, that you should have no problem finding some.

Consider the medium that you want to use to complete your task: different options have different limitations. Butcher's paper might let your ideas flow more freely, but what about if you need to re- organise your nodes or linkages? Keep in mind that some computer software won't allow you to make many-to-many connections (Inspiration® is one that does; you could also use Mindjet, Xmind, Coggle, Freemind or MindNode).