Environmental Events

I attended a few eco-events this semester. The first being the campus conversation on sustainability. We talked about making recycling simpler for students to participate in correctly. I was at the beginning of Bioneers and was able to listen to the beginning of the panel while everyone fretted about the technical difficulties.

Everything's Connected

Speth’s 6 transitions, which he outlines in his 8th chapter entitled “Attacking the Root Causes,”
causes one to ponder how the problems we are facing as a world today are all really connected and need to be approached as one issue. Population control, alternative fuel research, environmentally honest pricing, and eliminating mass poverty all, in some way, affect the other and it is certainly a daunting task to fix them all.
This being said, I believe one of the most pressing, and frightening problem we face today is the population. It is increasingly evident that we are reaching the earth’s carrying capacity and without change our planet will be unable to sustain us. The growing population will also exacerbate many of the other environmental problems we face, seemingly making it impossible to better our predicament. The road of empowering women does seem to provide hope that we can get out population under control. The continued education of developing nations about contraception and healthy sexual practices is a necessary step to ensure the progress noted by Speth does not reverse itself.
Creating environmentally honest prices is a great way to show the common citizen the environmental impact of the products they buy. People think with their wallets, and if someone has to pay $15 for a can of Lysol Disinfectant aerosol spray they may think twice and go with a product that is more environmentally friendly, and all the more important, cheaper. Same can go for gas guzzling cars. Families that don’t need that SUV will choose the more efficient sedan or hybrid if it costs them several thousand dollars less.
Moving from the previous example, the general population needs to have a basic education of environmental issues and practices. This is going to be the single most important aspect of the fight for the environment. Many humans, especially those pesky American ones, have grown accustomed to a comfortable lifestyle and enjoy not thinking about how their situation may very well drastically change in the near future. Making this change real for the common man will help to mobilize the public to call for environmental reform. Those who do have a base knowledge of environmental issues need to be vigilant in their pursuit of what is truly “green.” Businesses today all want to be “green” companies and many will lie to be considered so. Take ethanol for instance, there was a massive marketing campaign by fuel companies to promote it as an environmentally friendly product when in reality fuel derived from oil is the greener route. We cannot be accepting when companies tells us about their new green product or practices and must demand the truth.

Supermarket Pastoral

While reading this section of “The Omnivores Dilemma” I was struck by Michael Pollan’s foray into Whole Foods Market and how “supermarket pastoral” holds up under close research and investigation. Working at a Whole Foods myself give me somewhat of an interesting perspective on the matter.
Pollan concludes, and once he raises the question I think that it is obvious what the answer will be, that these “whole” foods do not necessarily hold up too well when looked at closely. The question now is, who will care about it? Having become acquainted with the Whole Foods customer over my time in the company’s employ it seems that they may be divided on that point.
I worked in the prepared foods section more or less the deli, serving up quarter pounds of egg salad and heaps of Vegan Kung Pao Tofu. There were a few different types of customers. There were those that wanted to taste everything before they bought it. They wanted to make sure it tasted good, or their kids would like it, before they spent a little extra on it. There were the visual shoppers who always look for new menu items or the most complex looking deli meat (spicy southwest turkey). They didn’t necessarily care about the price and just wanted to experience all Whole Foods had to offer. Then there were those who wanted to know everything about the product they were about to buy. When it was made, where it was made, what kind of meat/vegetables it was made with, things like that. I had the basic array of answers such as “none of our deli meats are made with hormones or preservatives,” or “our salmon is raised on Whole Foods farms, which have higher standards than normal salmon farms,” (I never found out what those higher standards were). These seemed to be shoppers who had fully bought into the idea of “supermarket pastoral” and it would be interesting to see how they would respond to hearing stories about how “free range” Rosie the chicken’s life actually was or how far their grass fed beef is shipped once it’s slaughtered.

Farmer's Dillema

After reading the first section of The Omnivore’s Dilemma I found much to think about in the section in which Pollan goes to speak with and learn from George Naylor in Greene County, Iowa. He learns of how his farm has gone from needing to carefully rotate corn and legumes so as to not use up all the nutrients in a given field to being able to plant corn whenever and on as much acreage as he wants, thanks to synthetic nitrogen/fertilizer.
I did not realize how much we are altering our environment by using Franz Haber’s process of “fixing” nitrogen. One effect already able to be seen in the population boom that would otherwise been impossible. It seems that we looked at earth’s limit on the amount of humans it could keep alive and only wanted to find a way around it. It seems that to keep a healthy, natural cycle, the earth could only have so much of its nutrients taken from the soil, but thanks to our ability to rip nitrogen from the air we can now run the earth to its agricultural limit.
It’s scary just how much oil and fossil fuels go into the farming process. What is promoted as good, natural food is no less synthetic than the detergent we use to clean our clothes. 1-calorie of fossil fuels for every 1-calorie of food produced is incredibly disconcerting. It would be, as Pollan says, more efficient to just be able to drink the oil directly.
The irresponsible use of farmers with their fertilizers is something needing to be addressed as well. It is understandable that they want to use more than enough synthetics to insure high yields; many of them are barely hanging on as it is. Unfortunately all that excess fertilizer has to go somewhere and it hurts natural systems as well as humans. Perhaps the government can offer incentives for farmers that use cleaner methods and have less effect on the surrounding ecosystems and water supply with no regard for their yield.
Again, as will almost all of the issues brought up, money is the main driver as to why these problems have not been fixed. If we can somehow look past the importance of the dollar we will finally be able to take positive steps, but as long we succumb to greed (and it’s hard not to) we will not better our natural state.

It's All Lies

In the movie “It’s All Cool” has some disturbing information on climate change and government censorship. There was however, something that I found even more troublesome as I watched the video. Both sides are vehemently opposed to what the other believes, in this case, climate change. Everyone cannot be telling the truth, which leads me to believe that someone is lying. It doesn’t matter who (even though I have an idea), but one of the sides in this argument is knowingly lying.
It’s troubling to think that this is happening. Why would those who don’t believe in climate change lie about it when they know we are on a dangerous path to a warmer earth? And why would environmentalists lie about global warming (yes, why would they do that?)? Are they just trying to create panic I order to further their radical agenda?
We need to take a look at what each side’s argument does. The anti-environmentalist argument causes people to feel safe, to go about business as usual, to help our economy. The environmentalists want us to re-evaluate how we use harmful products, our industry, and our waste methods. I don’t think that anti-environmentalists want our planet to be irreversibly damaged and for humans to die a slow and painful death, and I don’t think environmentalists want to create unnecessary panic. Then why do we have such polarized views on the matter? You would think that we might be able to get a straight scientific answer to let us know what is really going on. I know what I believe, but can’t help but have some little bit of doubt in my mind because the other side is so vehemently opposed. These seed of doubt are what arrest our progress and hurt the human race as a whole.
It’s troubling to think about because in this modern day humans can’t get on the same page in order to do something at important as figuring out what is best for our home planet. These organizations need to put their agendas, egos, and the thought of money aside in order for anything to ever get done. If we can’t do that then we don’t deserve earth.

I Like Snow

Let’s forget for a minute all the “likelys” “very likelys” and “medium confidences” and look at what this synthesis report is really telling us: The world’s climate is getting warmer, and it’s changing things. Slowly but surely we have seen changes in global surface temperature, sea level, and northern hemisphere snow cover. Earth is here to sustain life, and for the past few millions of years it has done a pretty good job. Now is not the time for humans to be meddling in the inner workings of our planet and bringing about these effects.
Right now these things are just that, effects. The rise in oceans, temperature and reduction in snowfall has not yet brought about colossal change in our way of life. But it’s somebody else’s problem until it gets to affecting humans. There just happens to be no one else to pass the buck on to.
Perhaps it’s going to take New York City being overrun by the Atlantic ocean for people to begin to take climate change seriously. Then again that may never happen. For all we know, climate change is a perfectly normal phase of the earth’s weather cycle and we are just going through a warm phase. But it seems an awful lot like humans are the cause, and looking at what else we’ve done to the planet, I don’t feel confident having the climate in our hands.
The scariest fact of all is that our affect on the planet is growing, “average arctic temperatures have increases at almost twice the global average rate in the past 100 years,” (30). This means that we are only picking up steam on our way to a much warmer earth. The statistics mentioned above are only going to be exacerbated as we keep ignoring our contribution to our warming climate.
The earth knows what to do. It knows how to sustain life. Ironically those that rely on it most are the ones contributing to its destruction. We love earth’s benefits, just as an athlete loves their body, but when it comes time to do the push ups and lift the weights we just seem to want to stick a syringe full of anabolic steroids in our ass and call it a day.

What is Sustainable Development?

Why have we not been able to figure out exactly what sustainable development is? It seems like a simple enough task, to define this term, this goal that we should be striving for. It seems that the problem comes from the governments, businesses, and other organizations that don’t want to be on the wrong side of that definition once we finally figure it out.
The definition that Dryzek gives seems to be a satisfactory one, saying, “sustainable development is a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development, and institutional change are all in harmony an enhance both current and future potential to meet human needs and aspirations,” (145). It’s that last statement that seems to be troublesome “enhance both current and future potential to meet human needs and aspirations.” Depending on what a government, business, or organization views as what these human needs and aspirations are, their interpretation of sustainable development changes drastically.
Just as Speth puts it “increasingly, pollution comes not from something going wrong but from normal life,” (88). If our society is ever to become sustainable, we must first create a standard for what is considered to be sustainable development. The Environmental Sustainability Index developed in Northern Europe is the first step in holding countries accountable for their destructive development. Certainly in this country and in many others we are going to need to revamp our industries and find new ways to maintain the lifestyle that affluent nations seems to need. If we do not lead by example, the rest of the world’s developing nations will follow our same unsustainable path and we will exhaust our world at an alarming rate.