Youssef El Hamzaoui

10/21/2016
Environmental Essay

According to The City of Houston, Houston has a population of 2.1 million people
and is growing at an alarming rate of 150,000 every year. Sam Houston National Forest,
the location chosen to relocate our refugees, will face many difficult challenges during
their settlement. Some challenges they will face will include, food shortages, lack of
clean water, and housing spaces. Another major issue that will pop up during their
settlement is the difficulty of learning a new language in order to communicate and find
a job to be able to support themselves. As demographers, Houston can fit no more than
1 million refugees due to a significant amount of land in our location.
Before European contact with the natives, the Tonkawan and Attacapan tribes
inhabited the area of our site. The Tonkawan tribe's food diet primarily consisted of
buffalo, deer, fish, nuts, and fruits. The Attacapan tribes food diet was similar to the
Tonkawan. However, the Attakapas diet primarily focused on fishing rather than
hunting deer and buffalos. The first European contact was when Cabeza De Vaca's ship
was wrecked during a storm. He landed on the Galveston Bay shore where one of the
Native Americans saved one of them and spent the next eight years living with them.
During that time, he served as a slave, merchant, and eventually became known as a
great healer within the community before being saved by the Spaniards. Ultimately,
most of the Natives died due to disease, and violent wars with the Spaniards. Based on
this historical evidence, some recommendations that would be helpful for our refugee
group to survive is to take all shots needed to prevent diseases from spreading within
the camp. Due to their resettlement from Somalia to Houston, the changes that our

Youssef El Hamzaoui

10/21/2016

refugees will experience are the distinct culture and language in America compared to
their homeland.
Utilizing supportable improvement objectives that recognize the qualities and the
circumstances of our exile group, we plan to design a camp that can meet the healthy
and reasonable standards that will be able to meet their standards. For example, in
Dalia, ., Asta, M., & Ignas, M. article Comparative Assessment of Sustainable Energy
Development in the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Slovakia(2016), the authors talk
does a comparison about the sustainable consumption and production of these three
countries. Dalia, Asta, and Ignas have created this article to help show the countries
developments and what they can do for improvement. The authors also talk about each
countries consumption, which helps, determine how much energy an average person
uses. Historically, the lifestyle the people lived eventually led up to the amount of energy
utilized by the people. In general, depending on how much energy the population tends
to use, it helps the government understand what to do to improve the energy
development.
The hypothesis of demographic move depicts the change of populace over time.
For example, in Murtins article Long-Term Determinants of the Demographic
Transition, Murtin talks about how over an extended period, education is the primary
long-term determinant of the population development. He proves this by showing the
countrys GDP and economic level over time. So over time, if we have classes in the
refugee camps, the refugees will be more likely to be independent over time and will also
be able to support themselves. All in all, education is a primary factor in relocating one
million refugees successfully.

Youssef El Hamzaoui

10/21/2016

Many of our refugees are fleeing their country due to corruption and poverty. In
Miller, S. M., Tambling, C. J., & Funston, P. J.s GrowLS: Lion (Panthera leo) population
growth simulation for little reserve management planning. South African Journal Of
Wildlife Research, the authors explain the sigmoidal growth curve by using lions as an
example. This relates to our refugees because, over time, the population will gradually
increase as more and more people began to get comfortable with the environment. This
also refers to the article because of lions, like humans, are k-strategists, or in other
words, those who produce few offsprings and live in stable environments. Over time,
our refugees will soon look to produce offspring, and the offspring are more likely to
survive since they are k-strategists. In general, our knowledge of k-strategists and
population growth, coupled with our understanding of the demographic transition
theory, allows us to properly predict the needs of our refugees and accommodate those
needs accordingly.
Overall, the most amount of refugees our system can support is no more than 1
million. Our research indicates that the housing spaces and amount of energy that is
needed can only support that amount of number. However, no refugee can have more
than two children due to our very limited resources available to us. Houstons
population is significantly rising over the years; however, will Houston be able to fit all
the incoming refugees with the limited amount of resources?