Focus on an Issue Sunday, September 23, 2018 What is an Issue? Focus on an Issue Sunday, September 23, 2018

What is an Issue? This course is called "Canadian and World Issues: A Geographic Analysis." When you chose to take this course, you undoubtedly expected to learn about issues. What is an issue? More specifically, What are Canadian issues and what are world issues? Are they similar or different? By completing the following activity, you should gain a better understanding about the concept of an issue, which issues are primarily Canadian in nature, which are primarily global, and which ones span both geographical perspectives.

We should notice that when it comes to issues there are 4 types The Nature of Issue We should notice that when it comes to issues there are 4 types

Important and Interesting Issues By their nature, issues in this group, like climate change, should and do get a grea deal of attention. Unimportant but Interesting Issues Because they are highly interesting issues, like the seal hunt, get a great deal of attention. Unimportant but interesting issues tend to detract attention from the ones that are more important. Unimportant and Uninteresting Issues How often you clean your room is of little importance and interest to the rest of the world U and U issues usually get the amount of issues they disserve – none! Important and uninteresting Issues Falls into the category of affecting billions of people, yet they get little attention

Answers to how an issue may be interrelated. All Issues can be interrelated the following ways Political Environmental Social Economic The next four slides will define each of the above and how they affect an issue. To better understand the complex implications of global warming, let's use a "framework" and group these implications into the four areas described.

Political: Politics is about power and control. Any organization (for example, a government or a multinational corporation) that designs, administers, and makes judgments about rules or control, has power. When there are global problems, it is necessary to identify who controls the situation. However, when there is no clear controlling power, solutions become more complex.

Environmental: Environmental features are those that impact both the natural environment (for example, a rain forest) and the environment within which people interact with nature (for example, a village or city). Environmental considerations can either be localized (such as a water shortage in a village in India) or they can be global (such as the impact of global warming on the earth's oceans).

Social: Social factors are those having to do with interpersonal relations or the relations among communities, and include cultural factors. "Culture" describes the customs, values, and other forms of human endeavor characteristic of a particular community. Our lifestyles - the way we work, the way we learn, what we eat, where we live, what we do in our free time, the way we dress, the music we listen to, and even the way we relate to our friends and families - are part of our culture and our social systems.

Economic: In discussing economic impact, we should consider an issue's financial costs. These financial costs would take the following into consideration. the cost of having a problem in the first place and the cost of its remedy and the financial benefits resulting from proposed solutions.

Because most issues have political, environmental, social, and economic implications, it is helpful to organize an issue into these four basic areas Take the piece of paper I just handed you. Fold the paper into four sections. Unfold the paper and label each section into either a political, environmental, social, or economic section Political Environmental Social Economic

Political Environmental Social Economic Use this chart to help you interpret all issues that we deal with this year. Each issue we will deal with will belong to each category in some way but will always lean more strongly with one box.