Background and Rationale
The famed cosmologist and T.V. star, Carl Sagan, wrote “a little mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”,1 in reference to a dull pixel in a satellite photo taken on February 14th, 1990. He called it the Pale Blue Dot, and it was the planet Earth. We all inhabit this one blue planet. We all are completely dependent on the numerous natural systems that have evolved over billions of years, resulting in the incredibly diverse and complex systems that allow for life not only to exist, but also to thrive. As of 2015, over 1.9 million species have been named, another 8.7 million (+/- 1.3 million) are species estimated yet to be discovered.2
Humans are but one species in this magnificent collection of DNA-based creatures, but stand out in our ability to shape, impact and alter our surroundings. For thousands of years, what might have been a major change in a local setting, a human-induced forest fire, for example, was minimized by the locality of the fire, and globally by our small population. As human populations have grown, this impact is no longer measured on a local, but rather on a global scale, leading Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzer to coin the term for a new geologic Era, the Anthropocene Era.3 The suggested beginning of the Anthropocene Era, which is the era in which humans have the power for significant ecological change, is 1945 with the test of nuclear weapons. While the risk of total nuclear annihilation has been reduced, a new specter has arisen, that of climate change.
This unit will use the human tragedy of malaria to introduce students to the concepts of cells, human body systems, and disease transmission, which are all content standards for biology. Over the course of my unit, students will learn to interpret distribution maps, and predict future changes based on a warming planet. They will understand the nature of malaria, the lifecycle of the Plasmodium parasite, how the mosquito acts as an agent of transmission, and the affects malaria has on humans and the societies in affected areas.
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