Module 1: Getting To Know You – Ben Ceci

Hi everybody! My name is Ben Ceci and I am a 3rd year Landscape Architecture student, minoring in horticulture, at University Park. I was born and raised in Greenwich, CT and hope to use my education to add an architectural branch to my dad’s landscaping / site development business. As a designer of the outdoors, I think that it’s very important to learn about the land, how it functions, and how I can design in the best possible way to preserve the land. With the landscape architecture department focusing on sustainability, it would also be beneficial to learn about how humans are directly affecting the environment and how I can design in a more sustainable way. Although I’m from CT, my whole family consists of die hard Steelers fans and whenever the Steelers have a home game in the playoffs, we rent a bus and 30 – 40 of us buckle up and spend the weekend in Pittsburgh. I love to travel as well so learning about the geography in different areas interests me as well.

A big issue in the world today is the increase in population and how to deal with it. Everyday more and more people are born and more and more farmland is being developed. This is a recipe for failure because eventually there will not be enough resources to feed all of these people. Once the agricultural soils are developed, they are basically destroyed and no longer ideal for farming. This has a lot to do with scale because the population is increasing both locally and worldwide while the farmland is decreasing locally and worldwide as well. It is our generation’s responsibility to plan out development and design sustainably in order to allow the future generations to live in the same way that we do now, if not better.

 

Anthony Russo Learning Activity: Getting to Know You

Hello everyone, my name is Anthony Russo and I am currently a sophomore at Penn State University Park. I currently live in downtown State College for school and I am from a small town about half an hour outside of Reading called Douglassville. For those not familiar with that area, it is about one and a half hours west of Philadelphia. The major I am currently studying is Security and Risk Analysis with the Intelligence Analysis and Modeling option. With this major I hope to work for either the government or a large corporation in the business sector. I am not very sure which route I want to pursue yet. Geography has always interested me when it came up in lesson plans of former courses. I wanted to learn about the subject more in depth. One fun fact about me is that I like to play golf and have scored a hole-in-one from 169 yards out.

After being introduced to the breadth of perspectives in the field of geography, a major issue that has come to my attention is that of global warming. This issue is important because there is a good chance it is responsible for the changes currently being witnessed on Earth. The influx in temperatures and the melting of the top of the planet are just a few examples. The scale of global warming is not just a small region, but the entire planet. This is very well suited for the subject of geography because a major contributor to this epidemic is human impact on the environment such as carbon monoxide produced from man-made cars. This leads to humans questioning whether we can sustain ourselves with other ecological systems. I would like to explore the ethics of humans and see how much we put ourselves over the ecosystem. What would be different if humans didn’t prioritize themselves over non-human ecological systems?