Mission 2014 Field Trip: Day 2: What is this "fieldwork" you speak of?

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Day 2: What is this "fieldwork" you speak of?

The Mission 2014 Professor, Sam Bowring, managed for quite a while to keep us in the dark about what our “fieldwork” in India would entail. It was nice to finally be briefed on what we would be looking at as the piece de resistance of our trip here- and it sounded as exciting as it promised to be.

The Earthwatch member Indu briefed us on the three primary components of the fieldwork we’d be doing: land use surveys, agro-forestry surveys and household surveys, in the neighboring village of Hallusarige. The names are self-explanatory: we would be carrying out analyses based on Indian Institute of Sciences guidelines. We would be divided into three teams (named after the three primary crops in the area), and go through three fieldwork allocations over the next three days. Another Earthwatch team member briefed us on some precautions we would have to take, including guidelines on how to deal with snakes, leeches, and other species that I would rather not encounter. The fieldwork seemed important, but hard.

Over the next few days we’ll be blogging about our experiences in the field: our struggles, our successes, our sojourns with the locals and the Earthwatch team. Stay tuned to see what results and experiences we come up with!

Signing off,

Anvisha

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About the Class

Mission 2014 is part of Terrascope, a learning program for MIT freshman. Each year the program begins with the class (12.000 Solving Complex Problems, Mission 201x). For this year their mission was to design a plan that will produce and distribute enough food to feed the planet over the next century, while ensuring that efficiency and equity are maximized with minimal disruption to the environment. With a world population of 9 billion expected by 2050 – and a billion people currently malnourished – we simply cannot continue with business as usual. An integrated cost-effective global strategy is needed to ensure sustainable and equitable food security. This must include a major re-thinking of agricultural practices as well as modifying the diets of much of the world's population. The students of 12.000 researched the problem and presented their solution in the form of a website as well as a public presentation followed by interrogation by a panel of experts. The website and presentation were a huge success.

About Terrascope

In the Spring semester many Terrascope students take part in one or more of three activities. These include: a hands-on class (1.016) where the students work on designing, building and implementing solutions to their problem; Terrascope Radio (SP360), where the students produce a series of radio programs on their topic including the field trip; and lastly the Terrascope field experience.

Each year alumni mentors play a very important part in the success of Terrascope. Many come to class and group meetings, communicate via email, and are generally extremely helpful if not a little bit jealous of being a MIT freshman! This year we are fortunate that three of our mentors are making the trip with us—Bob Gurnitz, Johnny Yang and Bhupendra Khetani

Acknowledgements

Many people have helped to make this trip possible. At Earthwatch the complex logistics have been coordinated by Grace Velardi and Alana Jones in the U.S. and the educational program by Rachel Batley in the U.K. At MIT our Terrascope administrator, Debra Aczel has spent countless hours guiding everyone through the acquisition of visas, answering many many questions, and remaining enthusiastic and upbeat. We all owe Debra a great deal of gratitude and hopefully the trip will go off flawlessly and she will be able to enjoy it and learn alongside the rest of us.

The trip this year is supported by the Baruch Foundation whose generosity ensures that another Terrascope class can take part in an international learning experience.