Questioning Our World

For Environmental Science class this week I was asked to go to a place in nature and form twenty questions about the surrounding environment. I chose to go to in the woods across the street from my house to get a clearer view or just how much the environment even a few feet away from my can affect my life. From those twenty questions I was asked to choose one of these questions and form hypotheses that could answer it. The question I chose was, “what determines how fast a stream flows?”. From that question I formed several hypotheses. These included that rain would make a stream flow faster, that rocks would make a river flow slower, and that a river’s speed depends on how shallow it is. As it turns out, the latter one is partly correct. Part of what influences a stream’s speed is how much water there is per square unit, however there are other environmental factors such as things obstructing the stream’s flow, whether or not it is going downhill, and wind speed that can affect a stream’s speed. After creating these hypotheses I had to form ideas based on them. So for instance, because rivers flow slower if they have to cover a larger area, they might not flow as fast in deep rocky crevices as in flat grasslands. The exercise was essentially a way to force me to question the world around me and try to learn about how it works just via quietly reflecting on it. As a whole this class has been an interesting experience and has caused me to question many things about how humans interact with their environment. It is good to know that at the very least there are steps people can take to help correct the environmental disturbances in the world, and I think exercises like this are a good first step to attempting to understand just how important certain elements of our environment can be.