Population and Sustainability – Fishing for Resources!

 Today we learned about populations and sustainability of shared resources!

The main points of our activity today:

1. Understanding just how much earth’s population has grown over the past several hundred years.
2. Thinking about how population growth can affect shared resources such as: food, natural resources, etc.
3. Learning about the Tragedy of the Commons, or when a shared resource is exhausted because of overuse by the population.
4. Gaining an appreciation for the sustainability of shared resources and only taking what we need from them to preserve shared resources.

Our activity:

The students participated in an activity where they all shared one common resource (a lake). The lake possessed a fish population which was their sole source of food. The students “fished” in the lake to survive, but most students over-fished their lake. These students realized how this can result in catastrophic consequences for their population! The students realized the value of only taking what is necessary to survive from the environment and not becoming “greedy”. While all of the students enjoyed fishing in their lakes, none of them enjoyed starvation!!

After discussing how to prevent the tragedy of the commons that had occurred, the students restarted the activity. All of the students successfully took only what they needed from the shared resource the second time!! They also found that the fish population grew exponentially when they didn’t take so many fish from the lake. This allowed for the fish population to be larger than ever!! All of the students left with an appreciation for sustaining shared resources and knowledge on how to prevent the Tragedy of the Commons.

In Summary:

The students left with an appreciation for sustaining shared resources and knowledge on how to prevent the Tragedy of the Commons. We learned about exponential growth in a population and how to preserve resources when a population is small or large!