The amount of resources individuals and countries need and use varies greatly around the world. To better understand and visualize this disparity, students in AP Environmental Sciences were given a rather unique task – pick a country and create a shoe that represents the country and its use of resources.
Students used their creative skills to create the shoes from either repurposed or meaningful materials that related to their chosen country. The length of the shoes were carefully and thoughtfully designed and built to scale according to the ecological footprint of an average individual living in that nation.
The results of their projects were visually surprising. Because students chose countries ranging in footprints from poor nations to well-developed, they could see the vast difference between countries; the shoes ranged in size from less than 1 cm to over 60 cm.
Katie's shoe is made of leaves. "We were challenged to choose a material that is meaningful to our particular country and preferably recyclable. I decided to try to make mine out of leaves. I also sewed the leaves together because part of the project was to use as little adhesives as possible. The size of the shoe was based on the ecological footprint per capita. My shoe for Bhutan was only about .8 cm."
Lessons gleaned from this activity were eye opening for Katie. "This project illuminated the enormous difference in size of ecological footprints between countries. Seeing the nearly over one million shoes representing the USA and United Arab Emirates next to a .8 cm shoe showed the issue in a way that was more powerful than for example a couple of sentences or graph."
AP Environmental Science is a college-level course that covers ecology, earth's systems, energy, biodiversity, population biology, natural resource use, pollution, climate change, and human impacts on the environment. The class includes discussions on the politics and economics of environmental issues and an emphasis on potential solutions to environmental problems. In addition, the course offers extensive fieldwork and laboratory investigations.