Week 12

This week we had a couple of speakers come and speak with our class: Jeff Anderson and Matt Lindstrom and they had great information to share with our class. I found it especially interesting what Matt Lindstrom discussed with our class. The focus of Matt's speech was on the tragedy of the commons which I found to be very interesting points and ideas in which I had never thought of in such detail. He talked about problems with no technology solutions and discussed how some problems cant be solve by merely using science along, and how there are often times other factors that need to be considered to solve certain problems that could potentially affect groups of people. He defined the idea of the "traditional commons" as common land available to all for grazing animals, gathering wood etc and several other topics of commons in general were discussed which I really enjoyed learning about. He also made it clear that freedom must limited to three things. He said that freedom must be limited to regulation - top down regulations, bottom up regulations, and federalism. He also included that freedom must be limed by privatization and hybrid: cap and trade which can serve as climate markers. Finally to get a hands on approach Matt divided the class into groups in which each group was given a topic in which in theory we created all forms of regulation related to the topic and we were assigned the task of implementing a from of policies and regulations related to the issue which I found to be a great way to grasp the new concepts that we were learning about.