Prior to beginning work on this assignment, read Chapters 1 and 4 in the Turk and Bensel’s Contemporary Environmental Issues textbook (2014).

The purpose of this assignment is twofold: first, to enable you to explore a term (concept, technique, place, etc.) related to this week’s theme of sustaining Earth’s biodiversity and ecosystems; second, to provide your first contribution to a collective project, the Class Sustainable Living Guide. Your work this week, and in the weeks that follow, will be gathered (along with that of your peers) into a master document you will receive a few days after the end of the course. The document will provide everyone with a variety of ideas for how we can all live more sustainably in our homes and communities.

To complete this assignment, you will

• Select a term from the list of choices in the Week 1 - Term Selection. Reply to the forum with the term that you would like to research. Do not select a term that a classmate has already chosen. No two students will be researching the same topic.
• Download the Week 1 Assignment Template and replace the guiding text with your own words based upon your online research. Please do not include a cover page. All references, however, should be cited in your work and listed at the end, following APA format expectations.

In the template, you will

• Define the term thoroughly.
• Clearly relate the term to the week’s theme.
• Explain how the term affects living things and the physical world.
• Relate the term to the challenge of achieving environmental sustainability.
• Justify if the term represents an obstacle to that goal, or perhaps a technique or technology that might promote it.
• Suggest two specific actions we can take to promote sustainability in relationship to this term.
• Provide detailed examples to support your ideas.

Please do not include a cover page, or even place your name directly on the work. In addition to submitting this assignment to Waypoint, you will also be submitting it for anonymous peer review by classmates in Week 2.

The Sustaining Biodiversity and Ecosystems assignment

• Must be a minimum of three paragraphs in length (not including title, any quoted text, or references) and formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center’s APA Style (Links to an external site.) resource.
• Must utilize academic voice. See the Academic Voice (Links to an external site.) resource for additional guidance.
• Must use at least two credible and/or scholarly sources in addition to the course text. To receive optimal credit, use at least one scholarly source from a peer-reviewed academic journal. To aid you in your research, and particularly in locating scholarly sources via the Ashford Library or using Google Scholar, please review the following Ashford videos and tutorials:
  • Scholarly and Popular Resources (Links to an external site.)
  • Database Search Tips (Links to an external site.)
  • Research, Keywords, and Databases: An Overview (Links to an external site.)
  • Accessing Full Text and Citation in Google Scholar (Links to an external site.)
  • The Scholarly, Peer Reviewed, and Other Credible Sources (Links to an external site.) table offers additional guidance on appropriate source types. If you have questions about whether a specific source is appropriate for this assignment, please contact your instructor. Your instructor has the final say about the appropriateness of a specific source for a particular assignment.
• Must document any information used from sources in APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center’s Citing Within Your Paper guide. (Links to an external site.)
• Must include a separate references list that is formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center. See the Formatting Your References List (Links to an external site.) resource in the Ashford Writing Center for specifications.