Analytical Essay: Sustainability at Home.
In this assignment you are asked to conduct an energy audit in your home (using the personal energy audit form), and then use one of the approaches we discussed in class (economics approach (Week 3), social approach (Week 2 or Week 4), ethical approach (Week 5), or political economy approach (Week 5), to make an argument about the findings of your audit. You are encouraged to use the US Environmental Protection Agency calculator to make your kilowatt hours into more tangible equivalencies. https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator Process: 1. Complete the Personal Energy Audit by completing the form provided for you. You can also input the form into Excel to do the calculations for you. 2. Figure out what kind of argument you want to make about the amount of energy you and your family use. Would you like to justify your actions or discuss how you could change? Would you also like to conduct an ecological footprint analysis to compare your findings to those of other places? Think about what you want to say, and what approach we have studied would help you to say something interesting or important. 3. Collect some peer reviewed journal articles on the topic of sustainability, energy use, ethical environmental behaviour, cost-benefit analysis, etc. You should also collect some journal articles relating to the approach that you want to use (ethics, political economy, etc.). 4. Write an outline of your essay, and proceed to make your argument using a few sub-arguments, evidence from your audit, and the journal article findings. Incorporating geographical concepts and theories is integral! 5. Bring your essay to the peer review class(es) on October 28 and October 30. Discuss your work with a peer. 6. Hand in your peer review form for a partner (and their essay if conducted online) by October 30, at 5pm. 7. Make any amendments to your essay, changes suggested, or add further research to reinforce your argument. Take this time to review what you wrote and make sure it makes sense! The key part of this essay is to say something that you can justify! 8. Label the file with your lastnameGEO702Essay and save (print for Apples) as PDF. Part 2: Formatting The essay should be separated into parts. You can use headings to make it easier for your reader. 1. Introduction (around 200+ words) In this section, you give a brief introduction to your topic. Explain in a thesis statement what your essay will be about. It can be as simple as In this essay I will discuss the ethical importance for a suburban family to reduce their energy use. After the thesis, you should give an outline of the rest of the paper. One or two sentences per section should suffice 2. Literature Review or Background (around 500+ words) In this section you summarize and extend existing arguments drawing on 6 peerreviewed journal articles on your topic, including those from one of our perspectives: social, economic, ethical, or political. A literature review is where you find articles that are useful to your research and argument, and explain what these authors found that is relevant. You can include subheadings (heading 2) in this section to indicate the themes/subsections of your literature review 3. Findings and Analysis (around 500+ words) In this section, you highlight the sub-arguments you will use to support your thesis. What are your research findings? What do you think about them? How does the research you conducted help you to make your argument? Here think of the course concepts we have discussed in the first section and pick one perspective to apply (social, economic, ethical, or political). Include any definitions you think are useful. You can include subheadings (heading 2) in this section to indicate the themes/subarguments of your findings and analysis. 4. Conclusions (around 200+ words) In this section, you summarize your arguments that supported your thesis. You highlight in a different way than the introduction how your pieces come together to support your argument. You reiterate what you discussed in each section, and can elaborate what we can learn or do to further extend your project. 4 5. References (around 100+ words) I