AP Seminar Performance Task: Individual Research Based Essay and Presentation
ANNOTATIONS/ Important Lines in Text
Vanishing Voices:
Seventy-eight percent of the world’s population speaks the 85 largest languages, while the 3,500 smallest languages share a mere 8.25 million speakers.
Thus, while English has 328 million first-language speakers, and Mandarin 845 million, Tuvan speakers in Russia number just 235,000. Within the
next century, linguists think, nearly half of the world’s current stock of languages may disappear.
More than a thousand are listed as critically or severely endangered—teetering on the edge of oblivion.
In an increasingly globalized, connected, homogenized age, languages spoken in remote places are no longer protected by national borders or natural boundaries from the languages that dominate world communication and commerce.
Increasingly, as linguists recognize the magnitude of the modern language die-off and rush to catalog and decipher the most vulnerable tongues, they are confronting underlying questions about languages’ worth and utility.
The most cherished Aka possession is the precious tradzy necklace—worth two mithan—made from yellow stones from the nearby river, which is passed down to their children.
The yellow stones for the tradzy necklaces can no longer be found in the river, and so the only way to have a precious necklace is to inherit one.
“It alters your thinking, your worldview”
Different languages highlight the varieties of human experience, revealing as mutable aspects of life that we tend to think of as settled and universal, such as our experience of time, number, or color.
In Tuva, for example, the past is always spoken of as ahead of one, and the future is behind one’s back.
“We could never say, I’m looking forward to doing something,” a Tuvan told me. Indeed, he might say, “I’m looking forward to the day before yesterday.”
The disappearance of a language deprives us of knowledge no less valuable than some future miracle drug that may be lost when a species goes extinct.
Small languages, more than large ones, provide keys to unlock the secrets of nature, because their speakers tend to live in proximity to the animals and plants around them, and their talk reflects the distinctions they observe.
When small communities abandon their languages and switch to English or Spanish, there is a massive disruption in the transfer of traditional knowledge across generations—about medicinal plants, food cultivation, irrigation techniques, navigation systems, seasonal calendars.
The Life of the Peasants
The everyday lives of medieval peasants were extremely harsh and taxing. The majority of peasants worked as farmers, and their lives were primarily dictated by the growing seasons.
Peasants typically lived in small dwellings referred to as cruck houses, which comprised a wooden frame plastered with a mixture of mud, straw, and manure. The roofs were thatched and the floors were typically lined with straw.
These houses would have had very little insulation and would have been incredibly cold in the winter and hot in the summer. There would have been minimal furniture in a cruck house—families would cook, eat, live, and sleep in the same room on mattresses filled with straw (as well as fleas and lice).
Peasants used the same water supply for cooking, cleaning, and dumping waste, leading to contaminated water and widespread disease.
Many peasant children died during their infancy from disease, and those who survived endured an incredibly difficult and labor-intensive upbringing.
Children were expected to help in any way possible around the house until they were considered old enough to work in the fields with their parents.
Although the life of a peasant was incredibly exhausting and grueling, there was a vibrant tradition of pageants and festivals that reflected a rich medieval-peasant folk culture.
The Catholic Church overwhelmingly shaped medieval peasant culture. A primary example of this can be seen with Carnival, an enormous festival that occurred every year on the days leading up to Lent. Public celebrations, parades and overindulgence in food and drink marked the highlights of Carnival in places throughout Western Europe, particularly in Catholic Italy, Spain, and France.
Other festivals and celebrations occurred throughout the year, commemorating particular saints or seasons. These pageants were typically a combination of religious and local customs.
The Secret Life of Plants
Now closer inspection has revealed that fungal threads physically unite the roots of dozens of trees, often of different species, into a single mycorrhizal network. These webs sprawled beneath our feet are genuine social networks.
By tracing the movement of radioactive carbon isotopes through them,Simard has found that water and nutrients tend to flow from trees that make excess food to ones that don’t have enough.
One study published in 2009, for example, showed that older Douglas firs transferred molecules containing carbon and nitrogen to saplings of the same species via their mycorrhizal networks. The saplings with the greatest access to these networks were the healthiest.
As well as sharing food, mycorrhizal associations may also allow plants to share information. Biologists have known for a while that plants can respond to airborne defence signals from others that are under attack.
When a caterpillar starts to munch on a tomato plant, for example, the leaves produce noxious compounds that both repel the attacker and stimulate neighbouring plants to ready their own defences.
Yuanyuan Song of South China Agricultural University in Guangzhou and colleagues investigated whether similar chemical alarm calls travel underground.
They exposed one group of tomato plants to a pathogenic fungus and monitored the response in a second group connected to the first via a mycorrhizal network.
The diseased plants were sealed inside airtight plastic bags to prevent any communication above ground.
Nevertheless, the healthy partners began producing defence chemicals, suggesting that the plants detect each other’s alarm calls via their mycorrhizal networks
A Letter to My Nephew
Being treated with equality depends on a person in today’s society. Some may blame a group or background but I feel that the upraising of the individual is to blame. There are some examples of this in the letter.
I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother.
I have known both of you all your lives and have carried your daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed him and spanked him and watched him learn to walk.
Here you were to be
loved. To be loved, baby, hard at once and forever to strengthen you against the loveless world.
Remember that. I know how black it looks today for you. It looked black that day too.
The limits to your ambition were thus expected to be settled.
You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity and in as many ways as possible that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence.
To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case the danger in the minds and hearts of most white Americans is the loss of their identity.
Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shivering and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature.
The Struggle to Govern the Commons
Devising ways to sustain the earth’s ability to support diverse life, including reasonable quality of life for humans, involves making tough decisions under uncertainty, complexity, and substantial biophysical constraints as well as conflicting human values and interests.
Devising effective governance systems is akin to a coevolutionary race.
A set of rules crafted to fit one set of socio ecological conditions can erode as social, economic, and technological developments increase the potential for human damage to ecosystems and even to the biosphere itself.
Furthermore, humans devise ways of evading governance rules. Thus, successful commons governance requires that rules evolve.
The characteristics of resources and social interaction in many subsistence societies present favorable conditions for the evolution of effective self-governing resource institutions.
Hundreds of documented examples exist of long-term sustainable resource use in such communities as well as in more economically advanced communities with effective, local, self-governing rights, but there are also many failures.
As human communities have expanded, the selective pressures on environmental governance institutions increasingly have come from broad influences.
Commerce has become regional, national, and global, and institutions at all of these levels have been created to enable and regulate trade, transportation, competition, and conflict
Delegating authority to environmental ministries does not always resolve conflicts satisfactorily, so governments are experimenting with various governance approaches to complement managerial ones.