The first case study I chose was done in Indonesia. The source of the information comes from “Cash Crops, Foods Crops, and Sustainability: The Case of Indonesia. This case study focuses on how Indonesia’s desire for food sufficiency in rice compromised its ability to address the issue of sustainable agriculture. Agriculture in Indonesia has been primarily concerned with self-sufficiency. Unfortunately, this goal came at a cost of unsustainable agriculture development. This program in achieving self-sufficiency had significant external environmental costs such as the depletion of natural resources. This case study relate to the module because it’s an example of how sustainable development can be hard to reach. For sustainable development you need to meet the needs of the present without compromising for the future, which Indonesia failed to do. This article also relates to the development downsides part of the module. Development can increase health and quality while it can also decrease health in quality, which can be seen in this case study. Indonesia achieve self-sufficiency, but failed to consider the environmental impacts.

The second case study I read took place in India. The case study was trying to implement a plan to lessen India’s environmental impact. Current environmental issues they were dealing with were deforestation, soil erosion, and overgrazing. These problems were due to over development of certain parts of India. They called this plan “Empowering People for Sustainable Development”. The main goals of this plan were to set environmental standards, and conserve natural resources. This relates to the module because once again it’s a plan for sustainable development. It’s taking into consideration the needs of the future. It also relates to the module because it’s an example of how there is continuum of development around the world, with no gap in the middle. Another key point in the article that relates to the module is environmental determination. The article talks about how the development in India is focused in certain spots due to the environmental factors. This article talked about how India failed in sustainable development at one time, and what they did to change it.

I live in Pittsburgh where development can be seen every day. An example of unsustainable development happen in my back yard. They were putting in office buildings, but didn’t take into effect the environmental damage they were causing. After these offices were built soil erosion increased drastically. It actually became such a problem that they had to go back and fix. This relates to my case studies because the development was aimed to be a good thing such as Indonesia’s rice development. However, just as in the first case study it appear to have some sustainability kinks. Although, once they realized this would be a problem the developers went back and created a plan to fix the erosion. This relates to the second case study where India knew they had a problem and implemented a plan to fix it. From these case studies we can learn that sustainable development can be hard to achieve, but there’s always improvements. It’s important to examine geography because you don’t want to create an unsustainable development and harm future needs.

Case study 1 http://personal.colby.edu/personal/t/thtieten/ag-ind.html

Case study 2 http://www.iisd.org/pdf/2004/measure_sdsip_india.pdf