H SDSU Physics 180B
Spring PodCast Debate 2006
H
 
Biodiversity and Endangered Species – Based on scientific research - That we should prevent species from becoming extinct.
         
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Life on Earth faces a crisis of historical and planetary proportions. Unsustainable consumption in many northern countries and crushing poverty in the tropics are destroying wild nature. Biodiversity is besieged.
Extinction is the gravest aspect of the biodiversity crisis: it is irreversible. While extinction is a natural process, human impacts have elevated the rate of extinction by at least a thousand, possibly several thousand, times the natural rate. Mass extinctions of this magnitude have only occurred five times in the history of our planet; the last brought the end of the dinosaur age.
In a world where conservation budgets are insufficient given the number of species threatened with extinction, identifying conservation priorities is crucial. British ecologist Norman Myers defined the biodiversity hotspot concept in 1988 to address the dilemma that conservationists face: what areas are the most immediately important for conserving biodiversity?    		  
“The loss of biological diversity is the loss of a library that contains answers to questions we have not yet learned how to ask.”
Lynn Helena Caporale
    
 
    Biodiversity" is often defined as the variety of all forms of life, from genes to species, through to the broad scale of ecosystems (for a list of variants on this simple definition see Gaston 1996). "Biodiversity" was coined as a contraction of "biological diversity" in 1985, but the new term arguably has taken on a meaning and import all its own. A symposium in 1986, and the follow-up book BioDiversity (Wilson 1988), edited by biologist E. O. Wilson, heralded the popularity of this concept. Ten years later, Takacs (1996, p.39) described its ascent this way: "in 1988, biodiversity did not appear as a keyword in Biological Abstracts, and biological diversity appeared once. In 1993, biodiversity appeared seventy-two times, and biological diversity nineteen times". Ten years further on, it would be hard to count how many times "biodiversity" is used every day by scientists, policy-makers, and others. While the history of this term is relatively short (compare it to other terms covered in this encyclopedia), it already has raised important, distinctive, philosophical issues. Some of these are entangled in the very definition of "biodiversity", an issue treated in the first sections below. A challenge is the reconciliation of process-based and elements-based perspectives on biodiversity. Overall, the major issue for biodiversity is how its conservation may be integrated with other needs of society. Stanford    
 
   
 
                                       
2-Biodiversity and Endangered Species
Affirmative
TreeHuggers

TreeHuggers
-vs-
darWINNERS

Negative
darWINNERS
Cathy
Michelle
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Victoria
Mel
Becky
Cindy
Mia
Eric
Debate Scoring and Rules
Debate PodCast wma
April 21, 2006
Recording Instructions
1,2

a. Practice with a short recording to make sure everyone can be heard clearly.
b. Place the recorder in the middle of the debaters and begin recording the debate.
c. Don't pause the recorder or stop the recording. Let the recording continue for the entirety of the debate.
d. After you are finished recording the debate. Stop it and Lock it for safety.

  
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2-Biodiversity and Endangered Species
Affirmative
Team Captain Planet
Team Captain Planet
-vs-
Animal Lovers

Negative
Animal Lovers
 
 
Eric
Issac
 
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Mikala
Michelle
 
 
Melissa
Kelly
 
 
 
 
 
Meaghan
Ashley
Debate Scoring and Rules
Debate PodCast wmv
April 21, 2006
Recording Instructions
1,2

a. Practice with a short recording to make sure everyone can be heard clearly.
b. Place the recorder in the middle of the debaters and begin recording the debate.
c. Don't pause the recorder or stop the recording. Let the recording continue for the entirety of the debate.
d. After you are finished recording the debate. Stop it and Lock it for safety.
Example Debate Form 1,2,3
             
Only 32 students can evaluate this debate.

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