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jilliangkenny-blog · 6 years ago

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Final Practicum Essay

Fordham University at Rose Hill has tremendous environmental history. This is important to learn about because it is the land where I spend most of my time: sleeping, studying, and learning about how to become a better person (and a better steward for the environment!). The Bronx River used to flow through Fordham’s campus, forming a trout pond. The “college pond” was only about three feet deep and held many different species, such as muskrats, mud turtles, and terrapins. This pond was important for the area because cattle was walked here every day for drinking purposes. The ecosystem before Fordham University was on this land was merely for cattle and natural species (“Internships”).

Once more people began to inhabit this land, they built the Rose Hill Farm House. This was built in 1694 and was located where Collins Hall is presently located. The Rose Hill farm extended much farther than just the campus, all the way to the Bronx River. There were hiking trails and swimming places in this area. In 1889, though, much of this land was sold to the city of New York for conservation purposes. This later became the New York Botanical Garden (“Internships”). Personally, I like to spend a lot of my time at the botanical gardens because it reminds me how much life grows back every single year, even after the toughest of winters. It is a great place to reflect on my studies and apply what I learn in this class. Specifically, there is a location called the Biodiversity Gardens where they talk about the importance of biodiversity and try to maintain it in this area. This relates to what we learn in class because we learn about how important biodiversity is and about different ways to protect it. This is a real-life application of that.

For my practicum, I participated in two different methods of becoming connected with Fordham’s environmental community. Firstly, I joined SEAJ. SEAJ is the students for environmental awareness and justice club, and they do great things on campus in order to make us more sustainable. They connect many of the different environmental projects together, and it is refreshing to come together with people who care about the environment and want to do something to save it within the community. The first meeting I went to, Anita gave a presentation about the Green New Deal. I was not very familiar with this proposal before the presentation, but I was able to learn a lot about this new proposal and was informed about a big development in the environmental community. I also got to learn about the Sunrise Movement, which is a great movement of young people dedicated to lessening environmental degradation. I’ve been going to the meetings all semester, so I’ve been able to learn a lot about different environmental topics. At the last meeting we also made up survey questions to be sent out to students in order to gauge their environmental knowledge and interest. This is helpful because it can be used to show administration that we need more environmental education, and hopefully that people care about Fordham’s stake in the environment. Additionally, at our most recent meetings, one of our members gave a presentation about a new possible solution to climate change, saline aquifer sequestration. It was something that I have never heard of, and it was very interesting to become aware of new technologies that are working to solve the immense problem of climate change. This club has helped educate me on current environmental topics that are very applicable to current issues. SEAJ meetings are one hour per week.

Additionally, I write for The Ram, the school newspaper. I write in the opinion section, and I write a lot of articles in support of environmental sustainability and legislation. For example, I wrote an article about the Green New Deal. I was able to take what I learned from SEAJ and develop it further so that I can influence others to support important environmental legislation. I am planning on continuing to write environmental articles for the Ram because it is a platform that can be used to influence the entire student body. Hopefully people will read my articles and support these important developments in environmental policy. I write articles about every other week, and I usually put about 4 hours of work into them.

My practicum was extremely valuable for my education about environmental studies because it helped me learn about ideas we discussed in class in a more applicable way. Since we discuss current topics in the environmental field during SEAJ meetings, I was able to discuss with like-minded people about environmental activism and ways to implement that into Fordham’s community and the greater community of the world.

One example of this is when we learned about the Green New Deal in our SEAJ meeting. I had never heard of this set of legislation, but the club was able to show me what this is and how this could change the landscape for environmental action. The Green New Deal consists of many different large-scale changes to switch over from nonrenewable resources, like burning fossil fuels, to renewable resources, like wind and solar power. Chapters 15 and 16 of our textbook go in depth about the different types of energy sources and which are most environmentally costly. The Green New Deal is aware of all of this, and it aims to solve these problems while also implementing economic changes. In my blog post for week 13, I wrote about different types of nonrenewable energy such as coal, natural gas, and oil. All of these are nonrenewable, which means they will run out at some point in time if we use them up too quickly. Renewable resources, though, can last forever. As long as the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, in a literal sense, these forms of energy can be utilized. The Green New Deal takes advantage of this fact and implements it into legislation that would change the workforce to make it more sustainable.

This SEAJ meeting about the Green New Deal encouraged me to write an article for the Fordham Ram about it, and defending its principles. This was a great experience for me because I was able to take what I learned from this class as well as from my club meetings and implement it into writing that could influence opinions about large-scale changes affecting the environment. In my article, I included many facts that I learned from class about why it is damaging to burn fossil fuels and why it is important to switch over to renewable energy. Writing this article helped me put together my knowledge from class and from SEAJ meetings to shape people’s opinions. Additionally, because it was an opinion article, I was able to formulate my support for the Green New Deal and I was able to send it to my friends and family. Even if it did not change anyone’s minds about their support for the legislation, it still spread awareness for an important environmental issue that must be addressed.

In addition to the Green New Deal, I learned about many topics from going to SEAJ meetings. Just recently, one of my fellow students presented about a new way that could prevent climate change from worsening: saline aquifer sequestration. This is a process that was developed from the fossil fuel industry, and it involves taking carbon from the atmosphere and putting it back into the ground. While it is still a very new technology and it is still being developed, it was interesting to learn about, since we discussed the effects of climate change during class. There are many ways of going about solving climate change, and we learn about these during class: stopping the burning of fossil fuels, reducing meat consumption, etc. Learning about this specific way to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere could be combined with other methods in order to make a change.

Works Cited

“Internships: Bronx River Alliance, NY Botanical Garden, Wildlife Conservation Society (Bronx Zoo).” Edited by John Van Buren, Fordham University The Jesuit University of New York, 2018, legacy.fordham.edu/academics/programs_at_fordham_/environmental_studie/internships_bronx_ri_75801.asp.

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jilliangkenny-blog · 6 years ago

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Air Pollution and Climate Change

Blog Post 14

Air pollution is one of the biggest global problems we face today. Air pollution an environmental problem that started as merely an issue in urban areas, but has since spread to all over the globe. There are many causes of air pollution, but two primary causes are deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels. Both of these processes are extremely detrimental not only to the air we breathe, but they can also cause other problems in the earth, like extreme weather, changes in climate, destruction of land, water pollution, and many others.

South Asia’s Massive Brown Clouds

In the textbook, their primary case study for Chapter 18 is South Asia’s Massive Brown Clouds. These are huge clouds full of many pollutants, to the point where it covers as much area as the entire continental United States. These clouds formed originally in urban areas, but all the pollution combined to make these massive clouds. The clouds take up space in the atmosphere over India, Bangladesh, most of the industrial areas of China. It also covers much of the Western portion of the Pacific Ocean. This set of clouds is about 2 miles thick and contains particles of dust, smoke, and ash. Additionally, in these clouds, there is soot from the burning of biomass, acidic compounds from exhaust from cars and coal power plants, and some particles of toxic metals, like lead and mercury. All of these particles in the air we breathe can create different health problems for humans, making mortality rates go up, especially in highly polluted areas like cities.

These specific brown clouds are problematic because they change weather patterns in these areas of Asia, and they cause disruptions in food production. There is decreased rainfall in Northern China and increased flooding in Southern China, so this creates problems for agriculture within all areas of the country. This creates problems for food access in the country, which could create droughts and increase poverty levels in these countries which already have extreme poverty. Additionally, these clouds move around very quickly, crossing continents within days and creating issues for people around the world. This is especially prevalent for cities like Los Angeles, which, on certain days, can trace a large portion of their air pollution to these same clouds over Asia. These air pollutants can revolve around the world in as short as two weeks. This shows why we should care about air pollution from China: it really does affect every single person on Earth. This is an inescapable problem. We cannot stop breathing; we cannot ignore this problem.

Changes can be made to reduce this pollution, though. By reducing the burning of coal, these clouds would be reduced in a relatively short amount of time. Moving from the fossil fuel industry into other renewable energy sources could help to reduce air pollution as well. China has made a fair amount of progress already, but there is still so much to be done. Within the chapter there are more solutions to the problem of air pollution, so these could all help to alleviate some of the pollution of these massive black clouds.

The Atmosphere and its Layers

The two layers of the atmosphere that the chapter focuses on are the troposphere and the stratosphere. These are the two layers closest to Earth’s surface, and therefore the densest layers. Gravity pulls the particles in the air toward Earth’s core, making these layers closer to the ground. This means that the atmospheric pressure of the layers closest to Earth is higher. The troposphere is the layer closest to Earth, and about 75 to 80 percent of air mass is found here. This layer extends to only about 11 miles above sea level, so it is very thick. The textbook makes a comparison to an apple: “If the earth were the size of an apple, the lower layer containing the air we breathe would be no thicker than the apple’s skin” (Miller and Spoolman 467). The stratosphere is the next level higher than the troposphere. It extends from about 11 to 30 miles above Earth’s surface. The stratosphere has a similar makeup to the troposphere, but with much less water vapor and much more ozone. The stratosphere contains the ozone layer, which protects us from many harsh rays that the sun produces. It filters UV rays, which can be very damaging to people because of sunburn, different types of cancers, cataracts, and immune system damage. Both layers of the atmosphere are extremely important for human life: they give us air to breathe and protect us from the Sun’s harmful rays. This is why damage to the atmosphere can be so dangerous, and so important to solve.

Types of Pollutants

There are two categories of pollutants: primary and secondary pollutants. Primary pollutants are “chemicals or substances emitted directly into the air from natural processes and human activities” (Miller and Spoolman 468). Secondary pollutants are when primary pollutants mix with other primary pollutants to form new substances that are usually more dangerous. Pollution is prevalent in all areas, but it is usually worse in urban areas. The pollution from cities can spread to less industrial areas, though, causing air pollution even in areas where it is not caused. Air pollution is a big problem for people living in poverty in cities especially, which is over 1 billion people on earth. Most of these people live in very densely populated areas in underdeveloped countries. Often, this will cause respiratory problems and other problems.

While outdoor air pollution is a huge problem, the biggest problem we face in terms of air pollution is indoor air pollution. This is caused by “burning of wood, charcoal, coal, or dung in open fires or poorly designed stoves to heat their dwellings and cook their food” (Miller and Spoolman 469). Smoking cigarettes inside can also contribute to this problem. Poor ventilation can cause about 1.6 million deaths per year, a staggeringly high number. Not only that, but it can cause health problems for millions more people. This is clearly a very important problem that must be addressed in some way.

Ways to Deal with Air Pollution

There are many possible solutions to the problem of air pollution. The United States has made much progress in terms of solving this problem through a regulatory approach. This means that the US has passed laws that regulate air pollution and prevent companies from abusing it. For example, the Clean Air Act of 1970, 1977, and 1990 are enforced by states and cities to prevent air pollution and increase air quality standards. The EPA has also done much work to prevent six major pollutants from being too heavily released into the air. These pollutants are carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, suspended particulate matter, and lead. All six of these pollutants are extremely damaging to the earth’s atmosphere and to people who breathe our air (everyone).

Laws are not the only way to deal with air pollution, though. Another method that has been slightly controversial is using the open market to provide incentives for lessening air pollutants. One of these methods is by buying and selling allotments of air pollution from the government. This gives air freshness an economic value, making it more likely that it will be protected. Other ways to reduce outdoor air pollution are walking, biking, using public transit, improving fuel efficiency, and reducing the amount of older, polluting cars that are on the road.

The Basics of Climate Change

Climate change is, clearly, one of the earth’s biggest problems, yet most people do not even know what it means, or what it entails. To start off with the basics, climate and weather are not the same. Weather is a short-term measure of variables like precipitation and temperature. This changes day to day, even within a few hours. This is why it can rain one day and be sunny the next. Climate, however, is a measure of these same variables over a much longer period of time. This means that precipitation, temperature, and other variables are measured over time, and then we find the average of these levels over many decades. This determines the general statistics of what weather tends to be like over a long period of time, rather than focusing on the day-to-day precipitation and temperature.

Climate change is also not a new concept. The globe naturally fluctuates in climate, and this is a good thing. It is normal for climate to change over time. However, the levels at which the temperature has risen over the past one hundred years are so are staggering. They are unprecedented, and this is why it is such a big problem.

It is also a known fact that climate change is caused by human activities. One of the most prevalent human activities causing climate change is the burning of fossil fuels, which increases levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This causes a thicker atmosphere, which traps in gases that were not meant to stay inside the earth’s atmosphere. Global warming contributes to rising sea levels, melting of glaciers, deforestation, and many other problems. While this may seem like a detached problem, or something we should not worry about right now, it has real effects that are happening right now. A new phenomenon called climate refugees has emerged. These are people displaced by the effects of climate change, such as with rising sea levels or extreme weather, that has destroyed their homes and prevented them from finding shelter. There are thousands of these people who are now refugees, just because of the changing climate. This is a real problem, and in order to make lasting changes, we must take action now.

Word Count: 1655

Question: Is personal reduction of car emissions enough to solve the problem of air pollution? Should there be a widespread agreement among large corporations that air pollution must be reduced?

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jilliangkenny-blog · 6 years ago

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Nonrenewable Energy and its Disadvantages

Blog Post 13

Chapter 15: Nonrenewable Energy

For an overview of human energy use: we did not use energy in a significant way until the Europeans went through the Industrial Revolution about 275 years ago. This started the burning of wood from forests, which was used to heat buildings and provide energy for steam engines. Because the Europeans burned wood so fast, many forests became depleted. They could not grow back forests as quickly as they were chopping them down. This created a need for a new type of energy. Mining and burning coal was the solution to this problem. Many European countries, alongside the United States, bought into the coal industry, as well as petroleum from the ground to use oil as an energy source. Natural gas also emerged as an energy source, which was found underground. All of these energy sources are nonrenewable, meaning that they will run out, since they take millions of years to regenerate.

The first law of thermodynamics says, “it takes high-quality energy to get high-quality energy” (Miller and Spoolman 371). This means that, in order to obtain energy sources like oil and coal from the ground or from a mine, it takes high-quality energy in the first place to get this extracted. Therefore, burning fossil fuels requires energy. Then, once that energy source is extracted, that fossil fuel is burned, creating even more pollution and using even more energy. The second law of thermodynamics says, “some of the high-quality energy used in each step is automatically wasted and degraded to lower-quality energy” (371). This means that we are inherently wasting energy just by burning fossil fuels in any capacity. We cannot escape these two laws of thermodynamics, so this process results in a lower net energy after the process is completed. Net energy is how much energy is usable from a specific energy resource. We can calculate the net energy of an energy source by finding the total amount of energy and subtracting the energy needed to obtain this energy source for its consumers. Essentially, this process calculates how efficient an energy source is once you calculate the amount of energy needed to obtain that form of energy. The book compares net energy to a company’s profit. A company only makes profit if its earnings outweighs its expenses. If a company’s profit is significant enough to endure all of the expenses, then it is worth it to continue business. Similarly, if an energy source does not produce enough energy to outweigh all of the energy spent on extraction, then it is no longer worth it to expend resources on said energy source.

Therefore, once you calculate an energy source’s net energy yield, you can evaluate how likely that resource is to compete in the economy. Energy sources that have low or negative net energy yields are less likely to be competitive in an open market. On the other hand, energy sources that have high net energy fields are more likely to be competitive in the open market because they are less costly. This can be evened out with government subsidies, as is the case with nuclear power. Nuclear power has a low net energy yield because it requires large amounts of energy to begin the process of the nuclear power fuel cycle. This process includes extracting and processing uranium ore, converting it into nuclear fuel, building and operating nuclear power plants, safely storing the resulting highly radioactive wastes for thousands of years, dismantling each highly radioactive plant after its useful life, and safely storing its radioactive parts for thousands of years. Because of how strenuous this process is, it makes it more difficult for nuclear energy to succeed in an open marketplace. Governments around the world use subsidies to fund their success in order to make this energy available to consumers.

There are advantages and disadvantages to every kind of nonrenewable resource. Focusing first on oil. Some advantages of oil are that it is currently an abundant resource, it has a high net energy yield and it is relatively inexpensive. We currently depend heavily on oil for about one third of the world’s total commercial energy. Forty percent of this energy is used in the United States. Oil is used to grow most of our food, transport many people and goods, and make many of the items that we use in everyday life, such as plastic and asphalt. While we currently have many stores of this resource, it will not last forever. Since the world goes through oil so fast, and it is not the single largest source of commercial energy in the world, it will run out faster than we think. It is said that we will use about eighty percent of the world’s oil stores between 2050 and 2100, and it will be too expensive to remove any more of that remaining oil. While this seems like far away, we must be prepared for when this precious resource does, in fact, run out. The textbook suggests four options: “look for more oil, use less oil, waste less oil, or use other energy sources” (375). Another problem that the textbook suggests is with OPEC, or the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The US and China are not a part of this organization, even when they are the two largest consumers of oil worldwide. This presents a problem for these two nations because, when oil becomes a scarcer resource, these countries will have to pay much more for the same resource. OPEC would be a united front against all other countries in need of oil, giving them much more economic power than other countries.

Coal is another nonrenewable energy source that has many advantages and disadvantages. Coal is very plentiful in the mines of our planet, meaning that we are not likely to run out anytime soon. While this is good for its reliability, it is a very dirty fuel. Coal is mostly carbon, but it also releases small amounts of sulfur when burned, and it turns into sulfur dioxide. It also releases black carbon particulates, also known as soot, and other small pollutants. These pollutants get into our lungs and create issues with respiratory functioning. The Clean Air Task Force completed a study in which they discovered that, “fine-particle pollution in the United States, mostly from coal-burning power plants, prematurely kills more than 24,000 people a years, or an average of nearly 66 people per day” (383). This is clearly problematic for the well-being of people all over the world, and something we should concern ourselves with. While this is a huge drawback to using coal, it is a good resource for obvious reasons: it is relatively cheap to produce, and it is reliable for countries that do not have access to many other resources. There is a lot of controversy, though, over different types of coal, and if some can be considered “cleaner” to burn than others. In 2008, the US coal industry released something that they called “clean coal (385). They claimed that this was a way to burn coal in a cleaner way. This is not possible, however. In essence, coal is dirty, and there is not a way of burning it that creates less pollutants.

Nuclear energy is another form of energy, and it is a relatively new one. The process of nuclear energy involves nuclear fission. This process is a highly complicated one for what it is, which is heating up water that spins and turbine, which generates electricity. Nuclear fission is an inefficient process because it loses about seventy-five percent of all high-quality energy available through this process. Even more energy is lost later in the process, so this results in a low net energy yield. To talk a little bit about the history of nuclear power: in the 1950s, it was predicted that, by 2000, “at least 1,800 nuclear power plants would supply 21% of the world’s commercial energy … and most of the world’s electricity” (387). These predictions have not been met, though. There have been many government subsidies put into place in order to meet these goals, but it is still the world’s slowest growing form of energy. Nuclear energy can also result in very tragic accidents. Chernobyl saw one of the world’s most detrimental nuclear power plant accidents. This was a power plant located in Ukraine, and the reactors in the plant blew the roof off of the reactor building. The reactor then melted down, and the components of the plant burned for ten days. Many people died as a result of radioactive exposure.

Overall, there are many advantages and disadvantages for all of these types of nonrenewable energy sources. The primary disadvantage to most of these sources (oil, coal, natural gas) is that we are too reliant on them, and they are set to run out in the distant future. While they may be abundant right now, this will become problematic in the future, especially for countries that do not have as much of these resources readily available within their country. Another problem is that all of these forms create pollution, or become problematic when things go wrong. Oil and coal both release a lot of pollution into the air, coal especially. This creates many health issues for people in the area. Nuclear energy becomes very problematic when things go wrong with the plants, as seen historically. Radioactivity is extremely dangerous for people that are exposed to this, and this should not be something that we advocate for. While these are all reliable resources in the present, we should not continue to use them in thought of the future. We should turn to renewable resources in order to create reliable, lasting energy.

Word Count: 1623

Discussion Question: How can we justify the restriction of developing countries to use coal, for example, when developed countries of the present used these same resources in order to elevate their status economically?

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jilliangkenny-blog · 6 years ago

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Water Pollution and My Contribution

Blog Post 12

My Water Footprint

This information is based solely off of my dietary restrictions, yearly income, and country of origin. Since I estimated my yearly income, I’m not sure how accurate it is, but my water footprint is very high compared to the global average. This makes sense, since I live in a developed country and all of my needs are met. This cannot be said for most people on the planet. I should be cognizant of my overconsumption of water.

Chapter 13: Water Resources

Colorado River

In Chapter 13, Miller and Spoolman discuss the story of the Colorado River. This river used to be free-flowing, but it has been tamed by a plumbing system over the past 50 years or so. This created 14 major dams and reservoirs, as well as canals. These provide water for farmers, ranchers, industries, and cities. The river is being so overused that the water source is depleting. This is the only river in the entire arid land, and all the water is being used for human consumption in this area. It is used for crops and to support cities in this dry climate. The river has experienced drought over the past few years as well. Water shortage is one of the leading environmental problems the world faces at this time, alongside biodiversity loss and climate change. This is an essential issue to analyze, and the case of the Colorado River can help us to see how we can solve the problem.

Will We Have Enough Usable Water?

As we know, water is essential for human life. If a person goes longer than about three days without water, our bodies cannot function, and that person cannot live. In addition to human use, water also sculpts the Earth’s surface, controls and moderates the climate, and removes some pollutants and wastes that are human caused. Freshwater is a form of natural capital, and it is probably one of the most important ones that the Earth offers. Despite all of that, water is very poorly allocated among the people of our planet. Even though it is so valuable and essential for life, we do not treat it like this is the case. We pollute it without thinking twice, and we do not charge enough for its availability. Water is widely available for those who are wealthy enough to have it close, but for those in poverty, clean water is rare. This is an environmental justice issue because there is unequal access to water among people, something that is seen as a fundamental human right. This also presents itself as an environmental issue because, when an excessive amount of water is taken from aquifers and rivers, this shrinks rivers and lakes, and depletes wetlands. This results in worse water quality, lower populations of fish, species extinction, and degradation of aquatic ecosystem services (Miller and Spoolman 319).

There are several different methods of obtaining freshwater. The first is from groundwater, which is in spaces between soil, gravel, and rock that comes from precipitation. It rests on top of a layer of rock that it cannot penetrate through. There is also something called a zone of saturation, which is a zone completely filled with water under the earth’s surface. The top of this zone is called the water table, since a large amount of water resides there. These dry up when we take too much groundwater, and it does not have enough time to replenish itself. Aquifers are another way to get water. These are geological layers of “sand gravel, or rock through which groundwater flows” (320). Groundwater often falls into these deeper caverns because of gravity, and then it gets infiltrated into an aquifer. They are contained in this layer of aquifer because there are watertight layers of rock or clay under the aquifers.

For groundwater and aquifers, there are pumps that we use to get the water to the surface for human needs. This water is used for drinking, irrigating crops, and other industries that require water to function. These pumps often take water too fast for the ground to replenish, leaving these areas in drought and changing their ecosystem services. Another form of water as a resource is surface water, “the freshwater from precipitation and melted snow that flows across the earth’s land surface and into lakes, wetlands, streams, rivers, estuaries, and ultimately into the oceans” (320). We can use some of this runoff for the same things we use groundwater for.

The textbook goes through many possible solutions for what the answer could be to this growing problem of water. It suggests extracting groundwater, but this is shut down fairly quickly. Extracting groundwater is a common practice throughout the world already, and these groundwater aquifers are not replenishing themselves quickly enough for this to be a solution. If we continue to merely extract more groundwater, the process of the disappearance of water will increase greatly. They then discuss whether or not building more dams is the answer to this question. The textbook defines a dam as “a structure built across a river to control the river’s flow” (328). This creates a reservoir, or an artificial lake, behind the dam. Dams change the way that rivers run, and they are meant to store and capture runoff. Not only do they find a way for humans to use runoff water, they provide a recreational purpose for swimming, fishing, boating, and other activities. Dams are so widely used, though, that there is 3 to 6 times more water in reservoirs than are flowing in any rivers worldwide. These dams can misplace people due to access to water. This has caused the displacement of 40-80 million people from their homes. It also causes flooding in areas where dams are built.

Chapter 20: Water Pollution

Lake Washington

Lake Washington is located in Seattle, Washington on the western shore of Puget Sound. The city expanded to the east, getting closer to Lake Washington, in the earth 20th century. The citizens of Seattle relied on the lake for recreation. Not only did the city dwellers use this lake as a form of recreation, but wastewater was typically discarded here as well. As time went on and the lake became more polluted, it was discovered that blue-green algae was present in the lake as of 1955. These algae grew quite quickly, and they rotted near the shore and created foul air. The algae killed many different populations of fish and made the water cloudy. Edmonson, a scientist at the University of Washington, predicted that phosphorus coming from the waste dumped into the lake was what was perpetuating algae growth.

Edmonson and his colleagues wanted to bring awareness to the public about the algae growing in the lake, so they wrote letters and articles. These efforts saw results: blue-green algae had practically disappeared from the Puget Sound within three years of putting pressure on local government. While this problem was solved with political pressure, it is steadily rising again as the population of Seattle rises. This shows that, although political change can be met with activism and the spread of knowledge, lasting legislature needs to be put into place to solve long-term issues of environmental degradation.

Water Pollution: Causes and Effects

Water pollution is when the water quality in a body of water is changed enough that living organisms are affected in quality of life. Usually, the water is contaminated by some chemical or by excessive heat. There are many sources of pollution, but they are distinguished by two types: point and nonpoint sources. Point sources are sources that can be traced back to one specific location. Some examples of these are factories, sewage treatment plants, and oil tankers. Nonpoint sources are sources that cannot be traced back to one source, usually in broad areas. This includes runoff chemicals from cropland, livestock feedlots, and urban street pollution. Nonpoint sources are more difficult to solve because it is harder to identify where the pollution comes from, exactly, making it more difficult to find the solution. Many sources include agriculture activities and industrial facilities.

A reason why water pollution is such a big problem is because of the sheer amount of it. Usually, streams can clean themselves without any cleanup needed by humans. They recover from degradation and oxygen-demanding waste through dilution and breakdown. This process does not work, however, when there is a buildup of so many pollutants. This intense level of pollution cannot be solved through an oxygen sag curve, which is how pollution is usually cleansed by the stream.

Word Count: 1442

Discussion Question: How can we implement long-lasting policy to prevent water pollution?

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jilliangkenny-blog · 6 years ago

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Diseases and Waste: Ways We Can Prevent the Spread

Blog Post 11

Chapter 17: Environmental Hazards and Human Health

In Chapter 17, Miller and Spoolman discuss health risks that the world faces today and what this entails regarding environmental hazards. They define risk as “the probability of suffering harm from a hazard that can cause injury, disease, economic loss, or damage” (437). There are many ways of evaluating risk, including risk assessment and risk management. These are important fields because they help to prevent some of these things listed above from happening. Infectious diseases are one of the biological hazards the world faces today. An infectious disease is “caused when a pathogen such as a bacterium, virus, or parasite invades the body and multiplies in its cells and tissues” (438). There are two types of infectious diseases: transmissible diseases and nontransmissible diseases. It is important to know the difference between these diseases so that you can identify how to reduce risk of spreading these diseases.

Diseases, while very dangerous and deadly, are only one type of hazard faced by the human population. Chemical hazards are equally as dangerous. These can be caused by toxic chemicals. A toxic chemical is “one that can cause temporary or permanent harm or death to humans and animals” (446). There are three types of potentially toxic agents. First, a carcinogen is a “chemical, type of radiation, or certain virus that can cause or promote cancer” (446). This is dangerous for obvious reasons: cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world. Another type of toxic agent is a mutagen, which is a chemical or radiation that increases the likelihood of a mutation. Mutations can be problematic because they change your DNA. This can lead to other disorders and problems. The third toxic agent is a teratogen. Teratogens are “chemicals that cause harm or birth defects to a fetus or embryo” (446). This can be damaging for the future generations of humans. This is problematic as well because, as this increases, it can affect individual births as well as large-scale population trends.

There are many factors that can help determine whether or not a chemical is harmful. This is an important process because it allows us to learn more about what chemicals are okay for us to use and which we should prevent consuming. We can use toxicology to do so, which is “the study of harmful effects of chemicals on humans and other organisms,” or the study of poisons (451). We can measure how toxic a chemical is based on its toxicity and its dose. Dose is a key factor that plays a part in a chemical’s toxicity. This means that, the more a certain chemical you ingest, the more harmful it can be. The response to a chemical is another important component of toxicology, and it is “the damage to health resulting from exposure to a chemical” (452). There are many ways to test the toxicity of a chemical, but it sometimes includes animal testing. This can be an environmental justice issue, though, since these animals can sometimes be treated unfairly, and solely for human benefit. On a personal level, I do not use any makeup products that are tested on animals because it can be cruel to them. This is something I am working to implement into all of my products, but there are not enough options in the current market for this.

Are These Contaminants in Your Body?

In “Body of Evidence” from NBC with Tom Brokaw, they discuss how chemical contamination is affecting human life. This is a real-life example of how environmental problems seep into everyday life of humans, something that no one seems to believe is occurring. Andrea Martin is shown in this segment, and she had 95 chemical contaminants in her body. This is extremely dangerous because it can lead to cancer and other neurological disorders, affecting quality and longevity of life for many people. These contaminants did not always exist: they come in processed products like hairspray, perfume, nail polish, cleaners, and dry cleaning fluids. There are many more examples of processed items that can be toxic chemicals. It is important to learn about what is put into every product consumed on an individual level to protect the livelihood of yourself and your family. This is a concrete example of how environmental problems like pollution directly affect human life. This is not a small issue: people fear illnesses such as cancer on a large scale. This gives people a reason to care about said environmental issues.

Chapter 21: Solid and Hazardous Waste

Chapter 21 of Miller and Spoolman’s textbook covers solid and hazardous waste, which is a large-scale problem in the growing field of technology. With so many new technologies emerging on a daily basis, it can be hard to keep track of which materials result in hazardous waste and which do not. This is not a problem with natural products that are not combined with other materials. This becomes a problem, however, when the earth is not used to breaking down a particular product. A product does not break down when it cannot be used as a nutrient and recycled naturally. Since we are creating too much waste at our current rate of consumption and disposal, we are always looking for ways to reduce this level of waste. Studies indicate, however, that we can reduce the environmental impact of this waste by up to 90% depending on future human activities.

There are two main categories of waste: solid and hazardous waste. Solid waste is “any unwanted or discarded material we produce that is not a liquid or a gas” (558). Hazardous waste is waste that “threatens human health or the environment because it is poisonous, dangerously chemically reactive, corrosive, or flammable” (558). Both of these types of wastes are harmful because they do not integrate themselves into a natural cycle. Therefore, they remain on the earth’s surface, taking up space and creating issues for large populations, or they are genuinely harmful by nature. An example of hazardous waste is highly radioactive waste. This is a type of hazardous waste because it can be a carcinogen and create problems for extremely large populations of species. This started off as a product of nuclear energy, something that seemed to better human life because it provided an almost infinite amount of energy. Nuclear power plants become a problem, though, when they malfunction and release radioactive waste. This is damaging to large human populations.

There are many different ways that we can transition into a sustainable, low-waste society. One of these is through grassroots movements, which seem to be the primary method used already, especially in the US. There have been many individuals that have organized grassroots movements to prevent many incinerators, landfills, treatment plants for hazardous and radioactive wastes, etc. These have huge health risks, and they cause other environmental problems. Waste reduction is so important because it is an environmental justice issue. Too often, people in low-income areas are the ones who have to deal with toxic waste, making their communities worse off. Marginalized people do not deserve this treatment, and by reducing waste, their suffering can be lessened. Another way to prevent hazardous waste from being produced and improperly disposed of is through international treaties. While these do not always have large binding effects, they can help alleviate some of the problems from less developed countries.

What is the Impact of “No Impact Man”?

Colin Beavan is the no impact man, meaning that he aims to have no environmental impact. This is much more difficult than it seems at first glance. Here are some ordinary activities shown in the trailer that Beavan does not do: take the elevator, eat meat, watch TV, get takeout food, use packaged cosmetics, driving a car, taking the subway and eating foods from far away. Clothing is mentioned as well, and I assume that all clothes they buy must be made using no waste and must not be transported using a truck. While this may seem extremely ambitious, and it most definitely is, it is not impossible. This must have been something that Colin and his family accomplished and was deeply impacted by. This is fascinating because it challenges each individual to think about how much waste we produce in a year. If we think about this, hopefully we can identify areas where we can cut down on waste, even when we thought we could not have. Colin is an exemplary model (even if extreme) of what we should all strive to do, as we all have personal responsibility to care for the environment.

Question: How can we, personally, stop the spread of transmissible and transmissible diseases on a larger scale?

Word Count: 1462

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jilliangkenny-blog · 6 years ago

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Films about Farming: The Soil and What’s Growing in it

Blog Post 10

Symphony from the Soil

“Symphony from the Soil” shows how important soil can be to our life processes. It displays this in an artistic way, and shows how different soils can create life in so many different ways. Soil is a living thing, and different types of soil cultivate different living things. The documentary takes the viewer to many different locations, such as volcanoes in Hawaii, farms in Wales, and vineyards in Napa Valley. The documentary focuses on natural habitats for plants. By focusing on where plants naturally grow, this allows the plant to flourish in its intended habitat. When agriculture began to pick up and become commercialized, people lost touch with their land. Mass farming of the same crop year after year was common, and this would deplete the soil. Depletion of soil then results in the waste of perfectly good land, if it had been taken care of in the proper manner. The documentary focuses on ecological farming, not “slash-and-burn” farming, for one. Fertilizer is also an important topic within this documentary. There are so many fertilizers that, while are effective at killing species that interfere with the crop, end up hurting the land in the long run.

I wanted to focus on a specific scene when the documentary focuses on Punjab, India. The man that they interviewed, Jaspal Chattha, said that he saw the soil changing within his own lifetime. The use of chemical fertilizers completely changed the content of their soil. He talked of how his father did everything he was told to do by the Green Revolution, but it ruined his land. Jaspal is now trying to fix his father’s mistakes by returning to the lack of chemical fertilizer. It has not been easy for him, but he is slowly seeing the soil recover to its original state. This is because nitrogen is fed back into the soil when weeds are allowed to coexist with the crop. This shows how agriculture is not necessarily degrading soil. There is a way to plant crops without depleting the soil, and this can be done by treating the land respectfully and renewing the fertility of the soil in a natural manner.

Food, Inc.

This is a film by Robert Kenner. He opens with the claim that the way we eat has changed more in the past 50 years than in the past 50,000 years, but that we still think of our food production as made by agrarian America. Something I instantly thought of while watching this documentary is my own experience with food shopping. I work in the cheese department of my local grocery store, and I think about the way we label products quite often. We sell cheese spreads, which are dips made with cheese and other ingredients like artichoke, spinach, peppers, etc. We get these spreads in a white tub of five pounds each. We then package these spreads into smaller, buyable packages and label them with stickers given to us from the company. I thought of one sticker in particular: the Bacon Chive cheese spread. On the sticker, there is a little cartoon pig, looking happy, sitting in the grass. I have always found this to be quite horrifying. This soothes customers that are buying products made from pig. It is a distraction from the idea that they are eating a pig that was probably slaughtered in an inhumane way. All packaging is like this at the grocery store. There is no evidence of slaughter in the grocery store; that would be disturbing. The grocery store is so far separated from the process of making the food that we are detached from the formation of our food. How, then, can we possibly care?

When the documentary focuses on McDonald’s, the degree to which ingredients are specialized to their company is insane. There is no individuality in this process at all. The desire to make all meat taste the same brings animals and plants through a process of ease. Meat companies have forced all animals to be processed in a way that costs the least amount of money and benefits their company the most. This takes away all liveliness of the animals they are producing. Personally, I find this to be highly disturbing. These companies are forgetting that animals have the quality of life, something that we find so sacred when it is for humans. Animal suffering is a negative externality that is not accounted for in this system. The scene where the chicken farmer, Vince, is driving toward his farm is so interesting to me because he is so focused on money with his farms, he forgets all these chickens have life. When Vince is playing with his dog in the car ride over, he clearly values animals in some way. I do not know how he reconciles this with having such inhumane chicken living quarters. Vince does not seem to recognize this inconsistency in his personality.

Carole, though, recognizes the problem with her farm. She has no control over it, but she does not support her own work. Being in this situation must be an extreme moral dilemma for her. I cannot imagine being forced to operate in a way that horrifies yourself every single day. By allowing them to film her farm, she is taking an important step in making people realize why there needs to be a change in the way we produce meat. The scenes at night where they catch the birds are truly disgusting. They have become so desensitized by their work that they do not see what they are doing wrong to these innocent animals. It is hard to watch, but important to see.

Michael Pollan, the author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” discusses how absurd it is that he needs to write a book about where our food comes from. He finds this to be an important issue to understand because it allows us to gain knowledge about our food purchases. He discusses this “illusion of diversity.” This means that there are only a few companies that own most food products, and most of the products are made from the same crops. Corn is one of those crops. Corn can be grown in clever, new ways that differentiate products from each other. This production of corn is backed by government policy: corn farmers are paid to overproduce corn because big companies want this to happen. This shows just how corrupt the food industry truly is. Because large food companies have so much power and money, they can even control politics in their favor to keep them in control in this way. This is alarming because it furthers our ignorance about where our food comes from, and it perpetuates animal cruelty.

Food, Inc. is such an interesting documentary because it really focuses in on the food production industry and shows us how it manipulates every consumer to make them less aware of the harm they do to animals. I watched a similar documentary called Cowspiracy, and this is part of what inspired me to become vegetarian. I have been vegetarian for over four years now and I do not think I will ever return to eating meat because of how the meat industry has progressed. Additionally, though, sometimes I think about the rhetoric used in films like these. I am very aware that the images they show of animal cruelty are put in these documentaries in order to manipulate me in some way. While I do believe that this is occurring and that it is a huge problem (clearly), I hope that I rest on the side of the argument that uses facts and reason instead of appealing to pathos.

Word Count: 1317

Question: If the food industry is so well protected by politics and the media, how can we, as a society, prevent this corruption?

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jilliangkenny-blog · 6 years ago

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Aquatic Biodiversity, Food Security, and Land Restoration

Blog Post 9

Chapter 11: Sustaining Aquatic Biodiversity

There are many threats to aquatic biodiversity in today’s economic and social climate. There’s still a lot to learn about aquatic biodiversity: much of the species in the deep sea have yet to be discovered by humans. While this may be true, in recent years, studies of the deep ocean have been growing. Over 2,400 scientists from over 80 different countries have began to catalog the species of the deep sea. There is still much to be discovered, but so far they have identified about 17,650 species living in the deepest ocean zone. They also add a few thousand species every single year, so this number is growing.

Many human activities are destroying aquatic habitats. To start, invasive species are a main factor in the degradation of aquatic biodiversity. Invasive species are species that do not belong in a certain ecosystem, but are introduced through movement of species. For aquatic ecosystems, this typically occurs when certain species arrive in the ballast water of ships. Certain fish and other species will get trapped in the ballast water of ships, and they are then released into foreign waters. Invasive species are so dangerous for biodiversity because they can reproduce rapidly, then consuming many other weaker native species and making them become extinct. An example of one of these invasive species is the Asian swamp eel. This eel is native to Asia, but it has invaded waters of Florida. It eats nearly anything, and it sucks up species like a vacuum. It can survive in many different environments, so it depleted many species while thriving in this foreign environment. Species like these are extremely dangerous for biodiversity, and it is hard to regulate this movement due to lack of enforcement of policies enacted by organizations like the U.N. Often times, there is no way to enforce international policies regarding habitat protection due to the lack of international law enforcement: law is primarily enforced by each sovereign state that is a part of the U.N. This limits the U.N.’s ability to implement lasting and effective policies that make a positive change regarding the protection of biodiversity.

People are also decreasing biodiversity in our oceans because of our increasing population growth. According to the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), approximately 80% of the world population occupies land near the coast. All the human-caused pollution in these areas, then, heavily affect the oceans. There are many different forms of pollution: plastic, toxic pollutants, nitrate fertilizers, etc. For nitrogen input specifically, this results in eutrophication of marine and freshwater systems, and this can lead to algal blooms, fish die-offs, and the degradation of ecosystem services. For plastic, those plastic items that are dumped from ships and garbage barges, as well as those left from litter on beaches, have killed up to 1 million seabirds and 100,000 mammals and sea turtles every year. All of these pollutants in total cause millions of marine animals’ lives to be threatened. There are also many fish that become entangled or poisoned by these pollutants. Overall, pollution has led to a reduction in aquatic biodiversity and a degradation of ecosystem services. Climate change and overfishing are two other causes of the decrease in aquatic biodiversity.

There are many endangered species that we do not want to live without. An example of this is the great blue whale, the largest mammal on earth. These whales are in danger because of mass whaling practices and pollution, and it is debated whether or not these species will recover. There are ways that we can protect and sustain marine biodiversity so that we do not lose some of these crucial species, like the great blue whale. There have been laws and treaties enacted to protect some endangered and threatened species. The U.S. Endangered Species Act and other international agreements have been used to pinpoint specific endangered species and protect them. Some animals protected under these agreements are whales, seals, sea lions, and sea turtles. With international agreements, though, it can be difficult to get other countries to comply, and then to enforce punishment for disobeying these agreements.

This is one of the largest issues with international policies: they can become extremely difficult to enforce. While it is a great step in the right direction to employ agreements between countries that protect ecosystem services, it may be a more important first step to get people to understand why these policies are being enacted, and why it is so important to follow them. For many within industries that are affecting aquatic biodiversity, such as fishing, working in factories, oil drilling, and others, there is not much knowledge as to why we need to act in ways that protect the environment. The only way that we can make large-scale change is if everyone that affects aquatic biodiversity is acting in a way that acknowledges the problem and constantly, on a daily basis, acts to solve the problem. If we are trying to enact policies among people who do not know or care about the issue, then it is pointless.

Something that is often used as a reference to why we need to stop polluting our oceans is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This is the “largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world, and is located between Hawaii and California” (The Ocean Cleanup). The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the perfect example of how humans have destroyed the ocean. In this huge accumulation, no life can be sustained. It has turned the ocean into a garbage can, tossing all of this plastic waste into the clean ocean and disregarding any sort of life living there. If garbage continues to accumulate in the sea like this, there will be no more aquatic biodiversity.

Planet Ocean is a very interesting documentary because it balances showing the wonder of marine life and human effects on the ocean. In the first half of the documentary, it shows fascinating marine life: coral reefs, plankton, octopi, and other animals with unique patterns of predation, camouflage, and other habits. It discusses how long the ocean has been developing and cultivating life. Then, in the second half the the documentary, it shows human processes of overfishing, offshore drilling, and factory production. They show a town in Senegal, where boats go out to fish every single day. They may be small, but they occupy the whole coast, every single day, taking thousands of fish from the ocean. If every single coastal town does this every day, it is easy to see how overfishing becomes such a huge problem. The documentary also brings light to the issue of bycatch, which is when nets catch fish that are unnecessary, or fish they do not need. These fish get tossed back into the ocean, often dead or dying, and they are killed for no reason. This is an extreme waste of ecosystem services, and it takes the lives of these animals for no reason at all. This is a huge problem with large-net fishing, and I believe it to be a moral issue that must be solved.

Chapter 12: Food, Soil, and Pest Management

Food security how accessible food is to people in a certain area. Food security is lower in areas of poverty, like in developing countries. Food production is very high, and we are currently producing enough food to feed everyone on earth; however, food waste is such a huge problem that there are many people who lack food security. This means that they have food insecurity, which means “living with chronic hunger and poor nutrition, which threatens their ability to lead healthy and productive lives” (Miller and Spoolman 278). This is a huge problem because it causes an immense amount of unnecessary suffering for so many people globally. Chronic hunger and malnutrition occurs when people do not have enough macronutrients, such as carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. They are also lacking in micronutrients, like vitamins and minerals. Malnutrition occurs when people do not have access to enough food, or when the food they do have access to is not rich in nutrients. This creates many problems, such as a lower immune system and many diseases.

This does not add up with the increased food production we have experienced over the past 100 years or so. The way humans have produced their food has dramatically shifted over the last 10,000 years. People originally would hunt and gather, but now we have huge agricultural systems that feed our world. While this is very productive to meet more people, it also takes people away from the food production process, making them more willing to waste food and ruining plant biodiversity.

There are many environmental problems associated with industrialized food production. One primary effect is topsoil erosion. This occurs when soil components move from one place to another, either by wind or by water. This can waste natural capital of land by destroying soil-holding vegetation while farming. Another main problem is drought and other human activities that are degrading drylands. Desertification is when land that was originally wet or fertile becomes desert-like due to lack of water, overgrazing or deforestation.

While there are many, many ways that the agriculture industry can ruin land, there are ways to go about solving these problems. We can reduce soil erosion by keeping land covered with vegetation instead of leaving it to waste. There are many methods of soil conservation, such as terracing, contour planting, and strip cropping. These help keep the natural capital of the land so that it is not wasted. We can also restore soil fertility by using organic fertilizer, animal manure and green manure to replenish the land.

Word Count: 1659

Question: What is the best approach to avoid problems such as overfishing? How can we balance a growing population with the problem of a lack of resources?

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jilliangkenny-blog · 6 years ago

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The Amazon and Before the Flood

Blog Post 8

For my presentation, I focused on the Amazon rainforest and its history of deforestation. Chapter 10 of our textbook is based on the ecosystem approach to protecting biodiversity, so I chose a topic that allowed us to analyze the subject on a large-scale basis.

History of the Amazon

The Amazon has been continuously inhabited by humans for over 10,000 years. For a large portion of that time, it was occupied by stone-age people living in small tribes. This did not have a large impact on the environment because there was not a very large population, and they only used the resources they needed. This changed in 1541 when Gonzalo Pizarro led a Spanish expedition there. Some of the members on the expedition entered the rainforest to replenish their resources, and they discovered this forest rich in biodiversity. Some Europeans inhabited the rainforest, but it remained largely unaffected until 1842, when sap from the rubber trees fell into demand.

The sap became largely desired across the world when Charles Goodyear developed vulcanization, a process that makes natural rubber into a durable rubber that can be used for a variety of technological developments. This caused an extremely high demand for rubber trees, and thousands of seringueiros, or rubber tappers, flooded into the area. This time period caused much of the deforestation of the Amazon, and it also created an environmental justice issue for these thousands of people trapped in a slave-like system. Brazil kept its rubber monopoly for as long as possible, but Henry Wickham from Great Britain smuggled rubber tree seeds from Brazil to England. The price of rubber then plummeted, causing the end of the rubber boom. It was briefly revived during World War II, when the location of the British rubber trees was occupied by the Japanese, but it fell once again. Since Brazil was so afraid of other countries coming in and occupying the Amazon, they went into the depths of the Amazon, occupying the interior. Often times they broke up the rainforest with roads and other infrastructure, which damaged much of the biodiversity of the area. By sectioning off areas of the forest, it broke up the ecosystem and created habitat fragmentation. This decreases biodiversity tremendously.

Deforestation

Now that we understand the background of why the Amazon has been degrading over the past century, we can focus on the details of the deforestation. Since 1978, over 289,000 square miles of the Amazon have been destroyed across many South American countries, but primarily in Brazil. Before the European explorers settled in South America, the only form of deforestation was when subsistence farmers cut down small amounts of trees for their families. Once rubber fell into demand under large-scale production, though, deforestation spread at an alarming rate. The Amazon was disappearing extremely fast, and people began to recognize that something needed to change. In 2004, Brazil and its citizens began to make an effort to save the rainforest. It became a hot-topic issue, and Brazil’s policies began to reverse the effects of deforestation. Much of the biodiversity was saved, and since then annual forest loss has decreased by roughly 80 percent. This was a result of increased protection legislation, satellite monitoring, pressure from environmentalists, private and public sector initiatives, new protected areas, and macroeconomic trends.

While this sounds like a positive change, and it truly was, it did not stick around forever. With the changing of leaders in Brazil, some have reversed many of the policies that preserved the biodiversity of the Amazon. In recent years, much of the restoration work done between 2004 and the present day has started to become obsolete. It is worth raising the question, then: how can we implement environmental restoration policies in a more concrete way? One suggestion is implementing them into national or state constitutions. This would make it so that future leaders are unable to override policies protecting important biodiversity hotspots, such as the rainforest. The only problem with this approach is getting the government to make an amendment to a constitution. Agreement among government has to be extremely high in order to pass an amendment, and unfortunately not enough people are generally on board for environmental policy. Generally, some see it as either too expensive, or they receive donations from large companies contributing to environmental degradation.

Amazon and the Textbook

There are many points within the textbook that can be applied to the situation of the Amazon. First, it discusses how causes of tropical deforestation are “varied and complex.” Because this is true, it can be hard to identify the problem and solve it in a concrete way. Some causes listed are population growth and poverty, because both of these push people who have no other option into the rainforest for shelter. Government projects can also speed up this deforestation process through logging and ranching, and reducing the costs of timber harvesting, cattle grazing, and creating large plantations. The causes of deforestation can also vary depending on the tropical area. Some forests, like the Amazon, are burned and cleared for the purpose of cattle grazing and soybean plantations. Other tropical areas, like in Southeast Asia, are being replaced by palm oil plantations. In Africa, tropical areas are cleared mainly because of individuals who are struggling to survive, so they clear small areas of land for their families to eat. By these examples, it is clear that there are so many different problems causing deforestation of tropical forests that it can be hard to pinpoint one activity to prevent.

Additionally, the textbook discusses ways in which we can manage and sustain forests. A lot of this involves more sustainable practices, such as stopping clear-cutting and only using selective cutting methods. It is also helpful to think of environmental benefits, such as the rainforest, as having economic value. This relates to the tragedy of the commons: since we view all natural resources as a public resource that everyone can take freely, it depletes the resource. If we do not continue to perpetuate this idea, though, it could help us to realize the value of the rainforest in an economic way as well as an inherent way. This accounts for the idea of externalities in economics: if we assign economic value to the resources of the rainforest, they are less likely to be degraded. Lastly, we can also get rid of government subsidies and tax breaks that perpetuate the destruction of the ecosystem and then provide economic rewards that promote the health of the ecosystem. We can also follow the example of the Green Belt Movement and create a tree planting program for the rainforest.

Recently, I watched Before the Flood, a documentary starring Leonardo DiCaprio. In this documentary, DiCaprio speaks with many professionals about what is causing climate change, the effects climate change will have on the future of our planet, and ways to stop climate change from spiraling out of control. An important topic DiCaprio covers is the idea of a carbon tax. A carbon tax is a tax applied to anything that perpetuates the addition of carbon into the atmosphere. This would definitely include deforestation, especially of the Amazon. Because clear cutting destroys so many trees, this increases carbon put into the atmosphere. This is due to the fact that trees take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen, balancing out human respiration. When trees are cut down in mass numbers, though, so much of that carbon remains in the atmosphere since there are less trees to take it in.

In Before the Flood, DiCaprio talks to Gregory Mankiw, a leading professor in economics who worked under several presidential administrations. He proposed that we should be implementing carbon taxes, but this does not necessarily mean paying more in taxes. This tax could reduce an alternate tax, such as income tax or property tax. This would just be a tax transfer rather than a tax increase, making it more appealing for those who will not support any tax increases. This is a crucial idea because it makes carbon taxes more palatable, especially for U.S. Republicans. Past the U.S., though, this could help save rainforests like the Amazon because it would be more expensive to deplete its resources with a carbon tax.

Word Count: 1373

Question: In the case of the Amazon, much of the land was preserved and saved, but now deforestation is a problem yet again. How can we create longer-lasting policies?

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jilliangkenny-blog · 6 years ago

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Midterm Practicum Essay

For my practicum, I did a few different things. Firstly, I joined SEAJ. SEAJ is the students for environmental awareness and justice club, and they do great things on campus in order to make us more sustainable. They connect many of the different environmental projects together, and it is refreshing to come together with people who care about the environment and want to do something to save it within the community. The first meeting I went to, Anita gave a presentation about the Green New Deal. I was not very familiar with this proposal before the presentation, but I was able to learn a lot about this new proposal and was informed about a big development in the environmental community. I also got to learn about the Sunrise Movement, which is a great movement of young people dedicated to lessening environmental degradation. I’ve been going to the meetings all semester, so I’ve been able to learn a lot about different environmental topics. At the last meeting we also made up survey questions to be sent out to students in order to gauge their environmental knowledge and interest. This is helpful because it can be used to show administration that we need more environmental education, and hopefully that people care about Fordham’s stake in the environment. SEAJ meetings are one hour per week.

Lastly, while I have not yet had much time to do so, I will be attending meetings for the Climate Impact Initiative led by Colleen. I’ve been interested in this since I heard about it, and I really want to commit to helping this important initiative.

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jilliangkenny-blog · 6 years ago

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Population Growth and Sustainable Development: Trade-Offs

Blog Post #7

Chapter 6 opens with a description of China’s population growth. China is the largest country by population, with about 1.3 billion people currently living there. They have also devoted a large portion of time and resources to curbing their population growth. They implemented their one-child policy. The government also provided contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortions for married couples. All of these prevent overpopulation and allow for family planning. This resulted in a significant decrease in the country’s birth rate as well as the average number of children per woman. The book brings up the point that we, in the United States, should take notice because overpopulation is an ongoing problem, and it must be addressed in larger countries such as our own. While the one-child policy is questionable in its results and its ethics, perhaps the US could learn from other aspects of China’s policies, like government-provided contraceptives.

The video, “Visualizing a Plenitude Economy,” brings up an important point about renewable energy. Renewable energy is seen as a common solution to the problem of environmental degradation, but it is argued here that this is only a partial solution. Since renewable energy still requires a large amount of development and production to be put in place, it still degrades the environment, even if it is better than burning fossil fuels. The narrator here argues that we need to adopt a plenitude economy, which means that we give each person more time off. This gives more people the opportunity to work, while also giving the working class more time off, reducing stress and devoting more time to family and friends. When you distribute work more fairly, it also distributes income more fairly. So, this is beneficial to lessen income inequality as well.

While this sounds like a great idea, I find the logic to be slightly problematic. The narrator in the video says that reducing work time would reduce carbon emissions, but she doesn’t elaborate on this point. How is this the case? Jobs differ greatly, and it is a large claim to make when she says that less work would reduce carbon emissions. Additionally, if every person reduced their work week to four days, this would only be replaced by an additional worker. This results in the same amount of work, and the same carbon emissions, only it gives more people the opportunity to work. This is not a bad thing, per se, but I don’t see how it necessarily reduces carbon emissions.

It also argues that, when people are given more time off, they tend to make things themselves and create new ideas. While this can be true, I don’t think that everyone would do this. For some people, more time off would result in more time spent doing other activities, such as going out with friends, taking up new hobbies, and traveling. All of these activities result in a large amount of carbon emissions, so it is not fair to say that giving people time off will be more ecologically beneficial. Many Americans specifically are so used to their fast-paced, packed schedules that they will not adjust in this way by spending more time at home making things for themselves. This could definitely be a possibility if there were a greater awareness and care regarding environmental preservation, but many people still don’t care. Therefore, individual production is one possible outcome of giving working people more time off, but it is not a necessary progression.

This is not to say that it is not a good solution, though. If people did act in this way and took up a more sustainable lifestyle, it could result in a reduced carbon footprint and possibly create happier lives. This brings up an important problem with our current capitalist economy: we are constantly striving for more. Measuring success based on wealth is problematic because wealth is only used to attain other ends. In a philosophical sense, a plenitude economy could create more widespread happiness for more people in addition to helping the ecosystem. Whether or not this is plausible, though, I believe is a valid concern.

Going back to the textbook, there is not consensus about when exactly the world population will reach carrying capacity, and how this will happen. They argue that “most of the increase in the world’s population during the last 100 years took place because of a sharp drop in death rates - not a sharp rise in birth rates.” This means that, with growing health fields, we have found cures to many more diseases and we have learned a lot about how to live a healthy, long-lasting life. This has created a huge population boom in the last century or so. While population has slowed a lot recently, it is still growing at a rate of about 1.21 percent per year. This means that 2 people are added to the world’s population every time your heart beats. This is fascinating to think about, and it’s important to note so that we can address this problem.

The textbook further states that “there is little, if any, chance for stabilizing the size of the human population in the near future, barring global nuclear war or some other major catastrophe.” There is also controversy over how fast the population will grow in the next century, and it is unclear when it will level off, or if it will start decreasing. The topic of cultural carrying capacity is also introduced, which is the “maximum number of people who could live in reasonable freedom and comfort indefinitely, without decreasing the ability of the earth to sustain future generations.” This has an important distinction from simply carrying capacity because it includes a realistic account of human life, and it includes a sustainability portion in its definition. This also leaves more room for interpretation, and therefore, debate.

The book has a section on how to slow human population growth. This is a controversial ethical debate because the health field is so important, and we do not merely want to curb the population by allowing disease and illness to run rampant. Many would consider this unethical, myself included. They identify three important steps to take on the goal of slowing population growth. First, poverty can be reduced through economic development and education. Second, elevating the status of women can help to curb population growth. Third, by encouraging family planning and education on reproductive health, we can reduce population growth. These are all important, long-term solutions to the problem of exponential population growth, and they are obviously large goals to take on. The good thing about these goals, though, is they also relieve a lot of common human rights issues that people want to achieve. This makes it a larger priority by organizations such as the UN, and therefore more attainable.

The presentations added perspective on the ideas of population growth and sustainability in cities. From the first presentation, we learned more in depth about China’s one-child policy and how it affected their population. It resulted in many forced sterilizations and abortions, as well as a large increase in female babies being killed, orphaned, and abandoned. This is an example of how it can be problematic to implement such a straightforward, restrictive policy: it brings up human rights issues that were not previously there. In 2016, there were about 33 million more men than women in China, creating a huge disparity and creating difficulties for the traditional family. It also created problems for undocumented children, restricting their job and education opportunities. While this did have many negative repercussions, it also decreased fertility and birth rate in the country, which bettered the environment and human rights in China.

In the second presentation, we learned about how urbanization comes with disadvantages, and how certain programs are trying to combat these issues. Urbanization is the establishment and expansion of urban and suburban areas. These tend to have huge ecological footprints, as well as less vegetation and natural environment. It also requires complex systems for water transportation and waste management, which has a large ecological footprint. Additionally, the rise of suburbs created a need for cars, which releases huge amounts of carbon emissions. The case study, “The Big U,” is a design project that specializes in helping cities to become more sustainable. They do so by utilizing urban planning, and they are geared toward helping New York (the Lower East Side especially). It also helped the city to combat climate change by implementing sustainable design and lessening its ecological footprint.

Word Count: 1471

Discussion Question: Since the chapter says that elevating the status of women can slow population growth, how does this conflict with many cultures’ current ideas of women’s inferiority? How can we prevent this from continuing while also being respectful towards cultural differences?

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jilliangkenny-blog · 6 years ago

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Ecosystem Services, Environmental Economics, and Sustainable Business

Blog Post #6

“The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital,” Costanza et. al.

This article offers unique insight because it takes natural resources, something we do not think of as having a concrete monetary value, and attempts to put a price tag on it. This is an extremely important way of thinking because, in our capitalist economy, monetary value is the most important way of determining worth. This seeps past economics and into the way we think about everything’s worth. Therefore, we must think of natural resources in a monetary way because it fits into our economy and forces us to evaluate how much we value our ecosystems. The article claims that, by ignoring the economic value of natural capital, it is “often given too little weight in policy decisions.” This can be seen in the economic idea of externalities, which are results of purchases that are not taken into account. For example, when we buy groceries, they are often placed into plastic bags. The customer pays for the groceries, but we do not pay for the plastic bags. These bags then get thrown out and are often tossed into the ocean, damaging sea life and ocean ecosystems. This cost is not taken into account when given out by grocery stores.

Chapter 23: Economics, Environment, and Sustainability

Definitions:

Economic system - a social institution through which goods and services are produced, distributed, and consumed to satisfy people’s needs and wants, ideally in the most efficient way possible

Natural capital - includes resources and services produced by the earth’s natural processes, which support all economies and all life

Human capital, or human resources - includes people’s physical and mental talents that provide labor, organizational and management skills, and innovation

Manufactured capital, or manufactured resources - refers to items such as machinery, equipment, and factories made from natural resources with the help of human resources

Economic growth - an increase in a nation’s capacity to provide goods and services to people

Economic development - the improvement of human living standards through economic growth

Environmentally sustainable economic development - using political and economic systems to encourage environmentally beneficial and more sustainable forms of economic development, and to discourage environmentally harmful and unsustainable forms of economic growth

High-throughput economies - attempt to boost economic growth by increasing the flow of matter and energy resources extracted from the environment through their economic systems to produce goods and services

Genuine progress indicator (GPI) - the GDP plus the estimated value of beneficial transaction that meets basic needs, but in which no money changes hands, minus the estimated harmful environmental, health, and social costs of all transaction

Greenwashing - a deceptive practice that some businesses use to spin environmentally harmful products and services as green, clean, or environmentally beneficial

Matter recycling and reuse economy - an economy that mimics nature by recycling and reusing most matter outputs instead of dumping them into the environment

Low-throughput (low-waste) economy - we can live more sustainably by controlling human population growth, greatly reducing poverty, using and wasting less matter and energy resources, and reusing, recycling, or composting most matter resources

There are three major assumptions of which ecological economics base their models. First, they believe that resources are limited and we should not waste them. There are no substitutes for most kinds of natural capital. They apply this idea of financial capital and believe that natural capital will take its place in the future. Second, they believe that we should encourage environmentally beneficial and sustainable forms of economic development. Additionally, we must discourage harmful environmental economic practices. Third, the price of natural capital should be integrated into the price of the good. For example, the cost of pollution when producing in a factory should be integrated into the price of the good produced at said factory. Not all economists believe these principles, though. If they did, we would have a much more sustainable economy. There are people who classify themselves as environmental economists. They generally agree with these principles, but they believe in fine-tuning current practices rather than completely changing our systems.

Chapter 24: Politics, Environment, and Sustainability

Definitions

Policies - the sets of laws and regulations it enacts and enforces, and the programs it funds

Politics - the process by which individuals and groups try to influence or control the policies and actions of governments at local, state, national, and international levels

Environmental policy - environmental laws and regulations that are designed, implemented, and enforced, and environmental programs that are funded by one or more government agencies

Democracy - government by the people through elected officials and representatives

Lobbying - individuals or groups contact legislators in person, or hire lobbyists to do so, in order to persuade legislators to vote or act in their favor

Civil suits - brought to settle disputes or damages between one party and another

Plaintiff - the party bringing the charge

Defendant - the party being charged for injuries to health or for economic loss

The problem with some environmental policies

An interesting topic from this chapter is that individuals can make a difference. They discuss the importance of bottom-up tactics, which they define as “when individuals join with each other to bring about change” (646). They cite that, previously, grassroots political action has resulted in big changes, such as with air and water quality. They also claim that individuals have become more empowered through the development of the internet. The internet, since its origin, has been a tool for people to connect and communicate. It is a platform in which people can influence others’ opinions. Through this platform, the textbook argues that we can come together and learn more about issues such as climate change. With the progression that the internet has taken, though, I’m not so sure that this is true. The increased use of internet for political issues hasn’t caused more unity, but more division. There’s an increased level of politicization of issues that should not be politicized, and this is detrimental to activism from the internet.

It also argues, though, that all politics are local. This makes sense because we are all familiar with our own communities. We’re the ones that can detect the issues with our communities; therefore, we know how we can fix the problems. This is an interesting topic to apply to modern politics, though. With an increasing globalization of society, it could be argued that our communities are becoming larger and larger. If we think of our communities in this way, maybe we can make larger-scale changes among our larger communities. Environmental leadership also becomes even more prevalent in these larger communities because we are looking up to people within these larger communities, and they have more of an impact on the greater community.

Sustainable Business

According to Wikipedia, sustainable business is “an enterprise that has minimal negative impact on the global or local environment, community, society, or economy.” This means that sustainable businesses have many policies put in place that protect environmental and human rights. Sustainable business is a growing field because it allows for further capitalist development, something that many Americans do not want to stop from occurring, but it does so in a sustainable manner. It utilizes the triple bottom line concept, which is that sustainable development can positively affect the environment, growth of business, and society as a whole. My worry with the idea of sustainable business is that it does not make a big enough change to really have an impact on the environment. Sustainable business is just a component in capital growth, which is still going to loom as a problem. We cannot ignore the inherent flaw in the American belief that capitalist development is always good, because it will eventually reach a tipping point (if we have not already).

Word Count: 1316

Discussion Question: If individuals matter in terms of the environment, how can we reconcile this with the idea that large-scale change is necessary to achieve change?

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jilliangkenny-blog · 6 years ago

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Orr and Earthlings - An Analysis

Blog Post #5

David Orr, “What is Education For?” - I decided to focus on this article for my blog post because I found it to be compelling, and I wanted to critique his argument in a constructive manner.

This quote from Wiesel is especially poignant: “It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience.” Wiesel refers to the Nazis here, saying that this was the problem with their thinking. He argues that the Nazis were educated people, but they forgot about their humanity while committing these atrocities. Orr compares this to the way we think about the environment. He says that there is not a necessary correlation between being educated in the way that we think of our traditional education, and having education that promotes and values the sanctity of life.

Orr then goes on to list six myths that people undoubtedly believe. He claims that these myths are the foundation that our modern education rests on. The first of these myths is that ignorance can be solved, which Orr claims is untrue. He says that believing in solving ignorance results in believing that you can make a change with no consequences. This is not true, since there are always unforeseen consequences for human action. Second, he says that it is false that we can “manage planet Earth” with “knowledge and technology”. This is untrue because you can never manage a system as complex as planet Earth. The only thing that can be managed is human action. Third, Orr refutes the argument that human goodness increases with knowledge, and that knowledge is generally increasing. He says there is not an increase in knowledge, but a shift to different kinds of knowledge. He argues that “important knowledge is being lost because of the recent overemphasis on molecular biology and genetic engineering,” which implies a loss in the intensity of other types of science.

His fourth argument is that we cannot “adequately restore that which we have dismantled.” His argument is that, based on the way we developed higher education, we create fragmented students. People generally end up specializing in whatever field they go into, whether it is medicine, law, or many other disciplines. This creates a fragmented society where people are not aware of the connections between fields. They end up focusing too heavily on their specialization and ignore the big picture of the good of the whole. Fifth, there is a belief among developed countries that education is intended to make you successful. By tying success and mobility to education, it takes away the value of education in itself, discouraging careers and lifestyles that make positive change for the good of the whole world. This belief can take away purpose and morality from our day-to-day tasks. Lastly, people falsely believe that American culture represents progress and success. By believing that capitalism is positive in itself denies all the damage it has done on people and their humanity.

Now that Orr has determined these misunderstandings about our modern society, he suggests six more principles for how we should think about our education. Education is the formation of our future, so this is the most important way to change the way we shape our lives. First, he believes that “all education is environmental education.” This means that everything we teach the younger generations should fit into the idea that we are a connected ecosystem, and that all forms of knowledge interact with one another in a way that makes sense. Second, he discusses the Greek idea of “paideia,” which means that education’s goal is about mastering the person. This reminds me of the Jesuit idea of cura personalis, or care for the whole person. If a school can not only teach their students concrete knowledge about specific subjects, but also teach them how to be well-rounded people living in a larger system, this will benefit the entire human community at large. Third, Orr argues that, when we gain knowledge, we must use it responsibly. Once we gain the ability to do something does not always mean that we should do it. This can be seen in an event like Love Canal, where many people suffered from the effects of nuclear waste. Knowledge about the development of a certain product or system does not imply immediate implementation, and we should all tread with caution.

Orr also says that we cannot claim knowledge on a subject unless we know how it affects people. Many people make large claims about how certain legislature or policy affect them personally, but they do not know the whole story. By limiting their opinions to what they know, this completely invalidates the experiences of anyone else who was affected differently by this same legislature. Fifth, he argues (using William Blake’s belief) that example is more important than words. This means that institutions should practice what they preach, so to speak. This is extremely important to future generations because it perpetuates the idea that people must do what they say should be done. He implies some sort of moral responsibility in this. This is not a new idea, but it is very important to implement in an environmental standard. Lastly, he suggests that the process of learning is “as important as the content of particular courses.” By saying this, Orr means that learning should transcend the physical boundaries of a classroom. When only learning in the constraints of a room with chairs, a projector, laptops, and the like, it does not ensure that students will connect what they learn with their own world.

Orr’s argument is compelling because he focuses on the long-term implications of environmental teaching and uses widely accepted principles to build on this idea. Education is something often thought of as always good, regardless of what it is. His argument could be controversial among cultural relativists, who believe that cultures should allow their own groups to choose how they educate their youth. This ensures that sections of history are not tossed aside in the interest of preserving national pride, or that western culture is not forced upon anyone who does not want that experience. This proves difficult, though, when teaching about the environment. Orr argues that we should think of education as having a correct or incorrect way of implementation. Is this undermining the idea of cultural relativism? How can we strike a balance between respecting the values of different cultures and making people realize their place in the environment? This is an extremely difficult balance to achieve, and possibly why Orr’s ideas are not more widely accepted.

Of course, there is the age-old argument that philosophical ideas such as these cannot be implemented for a number of reasons. First, how can you change people’s worldviews? Every single person I’ve met has a specific way that they tend to think about their place in the world, and, for the most part, this does not change. While people change gradually over time and shift in how they come to believe in their own truth, there is often a general way that people think about issues, and it is framed from a young age. The people who are in charge of educating the youth, then, are already stuck in their ways of thinking. How can we break this dangerous cycle, and should we?

I wanted to also discuss Earthlings, the film we watched in class. For the most part, this film was disturbing, yet insightful. The opening scene where the narrator compares the way we treat animals to mass genocide is a very strong and polarizing statement, but it is effective. They label this as speciesism, which is the same as other “isms” in that it is a social justice movement bringing awareness to discrimination based on a certain trait. In this case, that trait is being a species other than human. They highlight the moral imperative of the sanctity and respect of human life, and says that every living species is a someone, not a something. It also argues that it is part of our duty to eradicate pain and suffering to the best of our abilities, and we are denying this duty if we do not do that in the case of slaughter. These ideas relate to Orr’s piece in many ways.

Since we watched mainly the slaughterhouse section of the documentary, we saw the worst parts of what mass cattle farmers do when they slaughter different farm animals. I found myself extremely disturbed and upset by these images, as anyone would be. That is the point of these images: they want to make it so that you do not want to perpetuate this kind of behavior. It wants to challenge the way we think about the lives of animals, and it says that animals have an equal right to life to humans. It wants us to think of how we rely on animals to live, yet we do not respect them by giving them a peaceful and relatively painless life. Even raising animals to kill them seems fairly unethical to me, but we should at least treat them well if we do this.

The documentary also discussed the injustices faced by those who run the slaughterhouses. Because these are jobs that not many people desire to have, minorities and the poor are often placed in them. They are then treated poorly in these locations. Additionally, these workers are completely desensitized to the killing of animals, a huge injustice to them. This can cause psychological problems and can create lack of sensitivity in other areas of life. They could lose their social nature and become dangerously comfortable with violence. Not only that, but the workers are the only people that are exposed to any sort of killing of animals. The customers are then completely shielded from any type of violence, disconnecting themselves from their food. This can be problematic because it emphasizes meat consumption and lessens awareness of the effect killing your food can have on a person.

Word Count: 1674

Discussion Question: How would cultural relativists respond to Orr's argument about how education should be implemented?

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jilliangkenny-blog · 6 years ago

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A Reflection of Stoll’s History of Environmentalism and the Green New Deal

Blog Post #4

The dropping of the nuclear bomb, first as a test in New Mexico, later over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sparked people to think of the world in a much more fragile way. The dropping of these bombs not only killed hundreds of thousands of people, but also affected every single human on Earth by exposing them to some level of radiation. The bombs affected every biome on Earth. Once this happened, the environmental movement began as a combination between a philosophy and a political stance. People who considered themselves environmentalists generally believed in some intrinsic value in nature, maybe due to aesthetics or beauty in the natural world. They also believed that legislature should be passed to protect the environment, and that the industrial system at the time was harming the environment. Essentially, environmentalists of this time wanted to see a change in the way that people consumed and the way that industries developed to further damage the environment.

The first use of the term “environmentalism” was in the 1920s, meaning “the sum total of moral or social influences shaping a person or community.” Before this, though, industrialization occured in England and the United States. Industrialization is defined here as “a way of organizing labor, capital, and environments toward the manufacture of goods.” This process of industrialization has had a huge impact on the environment because of how widespread manufacturing had become. The level of consumption by the average person skyrocketed between 1820 and 1920, also increasing the level of pollution and waste tremendously. This caused a rise in reformers during the 20th century, with a push for cleaner air and water, especially in England. After World War II, the consumption of cars increased tremendously as well, which created a lot of air pollution and the rise in suburban living. This also increased production of apartments, houses, malls, and other developments, creating more pollution and human changes of the land. This caused many Americans of the 1950s to have increasing concerns with how pollution would affect their livelihood, and sparked values of sustainability and biodiversity.

Romanticism was a counter-movement to industrialization that first occurred in the 1850s. Many artists and writers began to view forests and nature as places of reflection and beauty, rather than just a scary, unknown place. Many artists of this time period draw inspiration from nature and see its intrinsic value, especially in comparison to the developing cities of England and the US. Thomas Cole was one of these artists, and he drew beautiful, mystical pieces of art that depict American mountains. This not only creates fantastic art, but also places value on these mountains and makes people realize why they may be worth preserving and visiting. Other influencers of the romanticism movement, such as Thoreau and Muir, also helped people begin to care about nature and all it has to offer, especially for people that grew up in cities their whole lives.

Muir’s time of activism for the environment began to identify an important difference between conservation and environmentalism. Conservation is the idea that we should preserve nature in a way that ensures economic growth. This means that things like building dams, although they alter the environment, are still acceptable under conservation because the river is still running and it provides hydroelectric energy. Environmentalism, though, differs in that they believe in preserving nature the way it is because of its innate existence, and that it should not be altered. The hydroelectric development of the New Deal developed by Roosevelt in the 20th century would fall under conservation methods, since there was a lot of work on damming rivers that provided hydroelectric activity, which also produced thousands of jobs and a more sustainable source of energy.

This part of the article reminded me of a new legislation proposal called the Green New Deal. This is an idea that is currently being fought for by young activists who are working with liberal politicians to try and make this a viable option for the future of America’s environmentalist movement. They entered Nancy Pelosi’s office in November, explaining to her how climate will affect or is already affecting their communities directly. For example, in Northern California, a woman commented on her town: “There were fires at my school. There was ash falling from the sky for a week.” This sparked the idea of the Green New Deal, which is a proposal supported by a few young Democratic congressmen and women to “decarbonize the U.S. economy by 2030 and provide a green job to anyone who wants one.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a primary figure in the drive for this Green New Deal, but a grassroots movement called the Sunrise Movement is who is really responsible for the development and growth of this idea. Sunrise was a group started in 2015 of about twelve people who had previously worked for the divestment movement. They took inspiration from 1963 Birmingham, Alabama and other grassroots movements and decided to try to make a change.

Comparing to the history US’s movements, the Sunrise Movement in support of the Green New Deal seems similar to many of these other movements in the past. It will be interesting to see how big of a change they can make on the actions of politicians, especially those who are primarily funded by big oil companies and other nonrenewable, big-business organizations. This has been a huge obstacle to the implementation of renewable energy for years; now, though, more and more people are becoming aware of the funding of politicians. Hopefully, by bringing light to this problem, politicians will continue to deny funding from big businesses and vote with their brains, not with their funding.

The Anthropocene is another idea we were supposed to look at for this week, and it is interesting to compare this idea to the history of environmentalism and the growth of the Green New Deal. The Anthropocene is “a proposed epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on the Earth's geology and ecosystems, including, but not limited to, anthropogenic climate change.” While this is not an official title, it is beneficial to think about our time on earth as the anthropocene because it reminds us of how we are treating the Earth. Even with all this history of environmentalism and backlash against the degradation of the environment, we are still damaging Earth at a tremendous rate, and this shows in the time of the anthropocene. Perhaps, if the Green New Deal becomes legitimized and other countries follow in the footsteps of the US, the anthropocene could come to an end and the world could stabilize in a manner that sees much less human effect.

Something interesting that was brought up in class is the comparison between racism and environmentalism in the history of the United States. There is a dichotomy of racism in the US in that we claim to be the birthplace of modern democracy, and yet it was the last of the developed countries to abolish slavery. Even after the US abolished slavery, there were the Jim Crow laws and mass lynching in the south. Racism is still present in today’s society, even though we claim to be a free and equal country. This dichotomy exists in the environmental movement as well. The environmentalist movement began in the United States, and it has progressed through John Muir and national parks, yet there are so many people currently living the US who do not even believe that climate change is human-caused. The US is multi-faceted in this way - there are two Americas in the sense of a large difference of opinion and action.

Word Count: 1343

Discussion Question: If people today still doubt human-caused climate change in the very country that saw the generation of the environmentalist movement, how can we make people see around the world that we must make a change? What role does legislature play in this problem, and to what extent can we fix the issue with solely legislature?

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jilliangkenny-blog · 6 years ago

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Remembering Why We Should Preserve Our Long-Lasting Earth

Blog Post #3

The earth we live on today has been around for millions of years. Countless other species have walked on this earth, flown in this air, or swam in this water. This should be a reminder to us that Earth does not exist solely for our disposal, and it has existed for so long before us. This should prompt us to treat it with the respect that other animals had for it.

How Wolves Change Rivers

Trophic cascade - an ecological process which starts at the top of the food chain and tumbles all the way down to the bottom

Ex - Yellowstone National Park - Wolves reintroduced

Deer population in Yellowstone was very large - no control over their population, which reduced vegetation

The wolves had an effect on the population - killed some deer, changed the behavior of the deer - started avoiding the places where they could be trapped most easily, and these places started to regenerate

This led to a growth in other species as well - otters, ducks, fish, amphibians, etc.

Wolves changed the behavior of the rivers - regenerating forests made the rivers be more fixed in their course, caused soil erosion

Not only did wolves change the ecosystem of Yellowstone, but they changed the physical geography of the park

This video made me think of how much of an effect all human actions have on every single living and nonliving thing on our planet. If the mere introduction of wolves can affect every single aspect of the Yellowstone National Park, this means that actions taken my myself every day are affecting my ecosystem in the same way. For example, if I am choosing to litter, I am choosing to impact that space in which I am littering. All the trash that piles up after just a few months can change the behavior of the animals, which can change the species that exist there, which can even change the topography of the land in which I am littering. Additionally, I am just one person. If everyone behaved carelessly toward the environment, which is fairly close to the truth in our current day, this completely changes our environment. This explains how our environment has deteriorated over such a short amount of time. It also, though, gives hope for the future. If a small wolf population can restore the biodiversity of Yellowstone, the entire human population banding together could certainly solve the environmental problems we are currently facing. The biggest obstacle is getting people on board, I believe.

The Evolution of Life on Earth

Life: 3.8 billion years of existence

4am - single cell organism

1pm - first eukaryotic cells

6:30pm - multicellular life

8:30pm - sea plants appear

8:50pm - diversification of animals

Before 10pm - plants appear on land, followed by animals

10:24pm - earth is covered in forest, first insects appear

11:41pm - dinosaur extinction

11:58pm - humans emerge

All recorded human history occurs within a few seconds

An individual life lasts barely an instant

This video shows us that all of human life has existed for such a short amount of time in context of our entire world. For so long before us, there were single-celled organisms, other plants and animals, dinosaurs, all sorts of living creatures that no longer exist. This makes me think that we should be more aware of the way human life has impacted the world, since we are almost like foreigners on this earth, in the grand scheme of things. This is not just our Earth, so we should not treat it as so. It is so important for everyone to realize this.

Now it is important to learn from the textbook notes of basic environmental science. There are many definitions in these chapters, and I find it beneficial to provide the vocabulary from these chapters in order to contextualize future chapters and learn these words for future use.

I took AP Environmental Science in high school, as well as other high school level science classes, so I am already familiar with many of these subjects. I wanted to just take notes on a few things that I am unfamiliar with, or with which I want to refresh my memory.

Chapter 2

Scientific law, or law of nature - a well-tested and widely accepted description of what we find happening repeatedly in nature in the same way

Tentative science, or frontier science - preliminary scientific results that capture news headlines are controversial because they have not been widely tested and accepted by peer review; they are not considered reliable

Reliable science - consists of data, hypotheses, models, theories, and laws that are widely accepted by all or most of the scientists who are considered experts in the field under study, in what is referred to as a scientific consensus

Unreliable science - scientific hypotheses and results that are presented as reliable without having undergone the rigors of widespread peer review, or that have been discarded as a result of peer review

High-quality matter - highly concentrated, typically found near the earth’s surface, and has great potential for use as a resource

Low-quality matter - not highly concentrated, is often located deep underground or dispersed in the ocean or atmosphere, and usually has little potential for use as a resource

Law of conservation of matter - whenever matter undergoes a physical or chemical change, no atoms are created or destroyed

Chapter 3

Chemosynthesis - a few producers, mostly specialized bacteria, can convert simple inorganic compounds from their environment into more complex nutrient compounds without using sunlight

Detritus feeders, or detritivores - consumers that feed on the wastes or dead bodies of other organisms; these wastes are called detritus

Aerobic respiration - uses oxygen to concert glucose (or other organic nutrient molecules) back into carbon dioxide and water

Anaerobic respiration, or fermentation - a form of cellular respiration where, instead of carbon dioxide and water, the end products of this process are compounds such as methane gas, ethyl alcohol, acetic acid, and hydrogen sulfide

Summarization: ecosystems and the biosphere are sustained through a combination of one-way energy flow from the sun through these systems and the nutrient cycling of key materials within them

Biomass - the dry weight of all organic matter contained in its organisms

Chapter 4

Adaptive trait - any heritable trait that improves the ability of an individual organism to survive and reproduce at a higher rate than other individuals in a population are able to do under prevailing environmental conditions

Differential reproduction - enables individuals with the trait to produce more surviving offspring than other members of the population produce

Endemic species - species that are only found in one area and are especially vulnerable to extinction

Background extinction - species disappearing at a low rate

Foundation species - species that play a major role in shaping their communities by creating and enhancing their habitats in ways that benefit other species

Chapter 5

Interspecific competition - occurs when members of two or more species interact to gain access to the same limited resources such as food, water, light and space

Resource partitioning - a way of avoiding competition with other species by evolving specialized traits that allow them to share resources by using parts of them, using them at different times, or using them in different ways

Age structure - a population’s distribution of individuals among various age groups

Environmental resistance - the combination of all factors that act to limit the growth of a population

Chapter 7

Three types of deserts:

Tropical desert: hot and dry most of the year, have few plants and a hard, windblown surface strewn with rocks and some sand

Temperate desert: daytime temperatures are high in summer and low in winter, more precipitation than in tropical deserts, sparse vegetation

Cold deserts: vegetation is sparse, winters are cold, summers are warm or hot, and precipitation is low; desert plants and animals have adaptations that help them to stay cool and to get enough water to survive

Chapter 8

Aquatic life zones - the aquatic equivalents of biomes

Major types of organisms:

Plankton - weakly-swimming, free-floating: phytoplankton, zooplankton, and ultraplankton

Nekton - strongly swimming consumers such as fish, turtles, and whales

Benthos - bottom-dwellers such as oysters and sea stars, clams and worms, lobsters and crabs

Decomposers - break down organic compounds in the dead bodies and wastes of aquatic organisms into nutrients that aquatic primary producers can use

Turbidity - cloudiness in deep waters that can occur naturally, such as from algal growth, or can result from disturbances such as clearing of land, which when it rains, causes silt to flow into bodies of water

The end of Chapter 8 comments on how human activities are disrupting the Earth’s freshwater systems. Dams and canals are affecting about forty percent of the world’s 237 largest rivers, flood control structures destroy aquatic habitats, cities and farms add pollutants into freshwater systems, and many inland wetlands have been drained to sustain human life and progress. All of these effects are creating a loss of natural capital, and this is an important factor in the degradation of the world. This must be stopped if humans want to live in a world with less disaster and more sustainability.

Word Count: 1568

Discussion question: The two videos prompted me to think of how acting sustainably can change the course of the world for how humans live; do we view this as a possibility, like how the wolves saved Yellowstone, or are humans just a few seconds in the larger “day” of life on Earth?

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jilliangkenny-blog · 6 years ago

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An Introduction to the Connections Between Subjects of Environmental Studies

Blog Post #2

Miller and Spoolman define sustainability as “the capacity of the earth’s natural systems and human cultural systems to survive, flourish, and adapt to changing environmental conditions into the very long-term future”. This means that if everyone acted in a sustainable manner, whether it be regarding their personal lives, business lives, or whatever it may be, the environment would be in a condition that lasts for future people to live. The textbook sets up its first chapter by making a definitive stance that there is, indeed, hope for the future. While studying the environment can seem hopeless, at times, I feel as though it’s a good decision to start the textbook off in this manner because it gives purpose to learning the subject and it reminds the reader why it is so important to learn about and spread the message of environmental sustainability.

Although it is important to focus on the positive, there is also a definite warning that needs to be projected to the world in order for change to happen. This is the tone that the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice” takes on. In the article, they use concrete scientific data to support their claim that, “to prevent widespread misery and catastrophic biodiversity loss, humanity must practice a more environmentally sustainable alternative to business as usual”. This is similar to the textbook’s view, but the evidence it cites gives away how dire the situation is currently.

The environment is everything around us, including living and nonliving things. Environmental science is “an interdisciplinary study of how humans interact with the living and nonliving parts of their environment. Miller and Spoolman reference three specific goals of environmental science: “to learn how nature works, to understand how we interact with the environment, and to find ways to deal with environmental problems and to live more sustainably”.

More Definitions:

- Ecology - the biological sciences that studies how organisms interact with one another and with their environment

- Organisms - living things

- Species - a group of organisms that have a unique set of characteristics that distinguish them from all other organisms and, for organisms that reproduce sexually, can mate and produce fertile offspring

- Ecosystem - a set of organisms within a defined area or volume that interact with one another and with and their environment of nonliving matter and energy

- Environmentalism - a social movement dedicated to protecting the earth’s life-support systems for all forms of life

- Biodiversity - the astounding variety of organisms, the natural systems in which they exist and interact, and the natural services that these organisms and living systems provide free of charge - Provides countless ways for life to adapt to changing environmental conditions

- Chemical cycling (nutrient cycling) - this circulation of chemicals from the environment through organisms and back to the environment is necessary for life - For life to sustain itself, these nutrients must be cycled indefinitely

- Natural capital - the natural resources and natural services that keep us and other forms of life alive and support our human economies

- Natural resources - materials and energy in nature that are essential or useful to humans - Contain renewable resources (air, water, soil, plants, wind) and nonrenewable resources (copper, oil, and coal)

- Natural services - processes in nature, such as purification of air and water and renewal of topsoil, which support life and human economies

- Topsoil - the upper layer of soil in which plants can grow

- Resource - anything that we can obtain from the environment to meet our needs and wants

- Perpetual resource - a resource that is continuous and is expected to last a long time (solar)

- Renewable resource - a resource that takes anywhere from several days to several hundred years to be replenished through natural processes - renewable as long as we do not use it up faster than nature can renew it (forests, grasslands, fish populations, freshwater, fresh air, fertile topsoil)

- Sustainable yield - the highest rate at which we can use a renewable resource indefinitely without reducing its available supply

- Nonrenewable resources - resources that exist in a fixed quantity, or stock, in the earth’s crust (coal, oil, etc)

- Reuse - reusing a resource over and over in the same form

- Recycling - collecting waste materials and processing them into new materials

- Economic growth - an increase in a nation’s output of goods and services

- Economic development - an effort to use economic growth to improve living standards

- Natural capital degradation - how human actions and development cause air pollution, climate change, soil erosion, shrinking forests, decreased wildlife habitats, etc.

- Pollution - any presence within the environment of a chemical or other agent such as noise or heat at a level that is harmful to the health, survival, or activities of humans or other organisms

- Pollution comes from two types of sources: - Point sources - single, identifiable sources - Non-point sources - dispersed and often difficult to identify

- Two types of pollutants: Biodegradable pollutants - harmful materials that natural processes can break down over time Nondegradable pollutants - harmful chemicals that natural processes cannot break down (lead, mercury, arsenic)

- Two types of dealing with pollution: Pollution cleanup (output pollution control) - cleaning up or diluting pollutants after we have produced them Pollution prevention (input pollution control) - reduces or eliminates the production of pollutants

- Tragedy of the Commons - when natural resources are not owned by any one person in particular, it takes away the incentive for people to take care of it and not degrade these resources. This is the root cause for the exploitation of many resources such as air, water, etc.

- Ecological footprint - the amount of biologically productive land and water needed to provide the people in a particular country or area with an indefinite supply of renewable resources and to absorb and recycle the wastes and pollution produced by such resource use

- Per capita ecological footprint - the average ecological footprint of an individual in a given country or area

- Ecological tipping point - time delays can allow an environmental problem to build slowly until it reaches this threshold, which often causes an irreversible shift in the behavior of a natural system

- Three potential tipping points - collapse of certain populations of fish because of overfishing, premature extinction of many species resulting from humans over hunting them or reducing their habitats, and long-term climate change caused in part by the burning of coal and oil

- Culture - the whole of a society’s knowledge, beliefs, technology, and practices - Human cultural changes have had profound effects on the earth

- Exponential growth - occurs when a quantity such as the human population increases at a fixed percentage per unit of time - starts off slowly, but causes the quantity to double again and again and grows into enormous numbers

- Affluenza - an eventually unsustainable addiction to buying more and more stuff

- Poverty - occurs when people are unable to fulfill their basic needs for adequate food, water, shelter, health, and education

- Environmental worldview - your set of assumptions and values reflecting how you think the world works and what you think your role in the world should be

- Environmental ethics - beliefs about what is right and what is wrong regarding how we treat the environment - Why should we care about the environment? Are we the most important beings on the planet or are we just one of the earth’s millions of different life forms? How do we promote sustainability?

- Planetary management worldview - holds that we are separate from and in charge of nature, that nature exists mainly to meet our needs and increasing wants, and that we can use our ingenuity and technology to manage the earth’s life-support systems, mostly for our benefit, indefinitely

- Stewardship worldview - holds that we can and should manage the earth for our benefit, but that we have an ethical responsibility to be caring and responsible managers, or stewards, of the earth; we should encourage environmentally beneficial forms of economic growth and development and discourage environmentally harmful forms

- Environmental wisdom worldview - holds that we are part of, and dependent on, nature and that nature exists for all species, not just for us; according to this view, our success depends on learning how life on earth sustains itself and integrating such environmental wisdom into the ways we think and act

- Environmentally sustainable society - one that meets the current and future basic resource needs of its people in a just and equitable manner without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their basic needs

- Natural income - the renewable resources such as plants, animals, and soil provided by the earth’s natural capital

- Social capital - building this involves getting people with different views and values to talk and listen to one another, to find common ground based on understanding and trust, and to work together to solve environmental and other problems facing our societies

Three components of sustainability: Natural capital (as defined above) - if we think if capital in the way that it is used in economic terms, it is a form of wealth that gives us the ability to sustain life, by purchasing everything that we need (water, food, etc). Natural capital can do the same for the whole world, as long as sustainable practices are used. This works in the same way that money capital is used - if you spend it too quickly, you won’t be able to sustain your own life. This applies to natural capital on a global scale. Human activity can “degrade natural capital by using normally renewable resources faster than nature can restore them, and by overloading natural systems with pollution and wastes”. This includes the destruction of forests faster than we can regrow them, as well as pollution of rivers and other bodies of water faster than they can clean themselves. Solutions - environmental scientists are committed to finding scientific solutions to the problem of human activity degrading the environment. In order to implement these scientific solutions, though, politicians must be the ones who create policies that alter the laws that change the way people act. Scientists cannot do this. There is often conflict when searching for these scientific solutions because trade-offs must be made.

IMPORTANT: individuals matter! Each individual person can help the world shift to a sustainable one. If everyone put forth their talents to changing the way the world operates. “Sustainability begins at personal and local levels”. Additionally, the book points out that countries differ in how sustainable they are based on economic prosperity and development. Countries that are more developed use much more resources than less developed countries. According to the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, “human activities have degraded about 60% of the earth’s natural resources”. Most of this occurred in the past 50 years.

While pollution cleanup is important, there are several problems with this method of dealing with pollution. First, it is a temporary solution to a problem that keeps growing faster than we can clean it up. Second, by removing one pollutant from the environment, it often introduces a new pollutant to the environment (ex - burning garbage pollutes the air). Third, it is very costly to remove pollutants. For all of these reasons, it is important to clean up pollution, but also prevent it in the first place.

Ways to deal with the tragedy of the commons: 1) “use a shared renewable resource at a rate well below its estimated sustainable yield by using less of the resource, regulating access to the resource, or doing both”, 2) “to convert open-access renewable resources to private ownership”.

According to the Ecological Footprint Network, we would need 2.7 earths if everyone lived like me. This is a very large number, and obviously problematic because we only have one earth. I am also a vegetarian, so this is probably a little bit lower than the typical college student. That said, a lot of the survey is out of my control as a college student, such as the type of energy used in my dorm room. The largest section of my energy pie chart is my carbon footprint, which means that a lot of my activities require carbon emission. My ecological footprint in hectares is 4.6, and the average hectare per person is about 1.7. This shows the problem - people living in developed countries are used to this lifestyle of affluence. The problem becomes harder to change once the lifestyle is implemented into our culture.

Influence = Population x Affluence x Technology (IPAT). This environmental impact is “a rough estimate of how much humanity is degrading the natural capital it depends on”. There is an exception to this - sometimes technology can be environmentally beneficial.

Three major cultural changes: 1) agricultural revolution; 2) industrial-medical revolution - invention of machines, getting energy from fossil fuels; 3) information-globalization revolution - began about 50 years ago when we developed new technologies for getting information.

Affluence can have large-scale effects. We can look at the United States as an example of this, since American affluence causes environmental degradation on a daily basis. According to certain ecological footprint calculators, the typical American requires 27 tractor-trailer loads of resources per year. According to the WWF, the US is responsible for “almost half of the global ecological footprint”. There are upsides to affluence, such as access to education about environmental degradation, but primarily it just damages the environment further.

In the case of poverty, it can increase environmental degradation, and pollution can also influence the lives of the poor. Malnutrition is a common problem that arises from increased degradation of air and water quality.

This idea of overlapping and escalating problems does not exist for poverty alone. We can see how environmental degradation can be a worsening cycle with a new study released from Indiana University. In this study, it has been revealed that “trees influence whether soil can remove or emit gases that cause smog, acid rain and respiratory problems”. This means that certain trees are emitting these gases currently. Since forests are changing from trees that do not emit these gases to trees that do, this is worsening the problem of climate change. This shows how every human action, even if it may seem that it is not harmful, affects other parts of the environment. It is always important to remember that the environment is an interconnected system, and we still do not know every one of its connections. If we do our best to change our effect on the rest of the environment, we can reduce unexpected results like these gases from trees. This is also evident in the list of ecosystem goods and services from Annex 2.

The textbook also discusses externalities, although it does not call it by this name. Externalities in an environmental sense are when companies provide goods using resources, but they do not have to pay for the effects that they have on these resources. For example, air pollution is a negative externality to burning garbage. If we included “the harmful environmental costs of the goods and services we use” into market prices, that would be considered more sustainable living.

On a larger scale, an environmental problem is that people do not all agree on how to solve environmental problems, or that environmental problems even exist. There is an endless amount of possibilities for how to address these problems, and this makes it increasingly difficult to agree on anything regarding environmental policy. There’s also the issue that environmental policy often involves putting a lot of money into growing a specific industry, which many people have a hard time getting on board with. This causes extreme measures to how people act regarding the environment. An example of this is eco-fascism, which is when a government implements environmental policy from the top down, and forces people to follow the policy. This can be seen as an infringement upon freedoms if they are extreme policies, and it can also force people to act environmentally before their environmental worldview has changed. This is why worldviews are so important: once people are on board with eco-policy, implementing it becomes so much easier and more voluntary.

These are the three big ideas of this chapter: 1) we should be relying more on perpetual resources like the sun in order to reduce the amount of other resources we use, 2) we should protect biodiversity by preventing degradation of the world’s species, and 3) we should reduce the amount of waste we produce by the processes of reducing, reusing and recycling, and taking preventative measures to pollution rather than just clean-up methods.

Word Count: 2569

Question: How can we balance the development of third world countries while still aiming to keep environmental control over the development? Are developed countries now entitled to control how these countries develop, since we did not have this same barrier during our development?

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jilliangkenny-blog · 6 years ago

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The Disciplines of Environmental Studies: Changing Worldviews to Start a Revolution

Blog Post #1

Since environmental awareness is such a broad and applicable topic, there are many different disciplines when it comes to the application of environmental studies. This extends from something as concrete as sciences (physics, chemistry, biology), to something as abstract as art (fine arts, literature). Applying environmental stances to these areas and everything in between is extremely important because everyone must think of the environment in all aspects in order to save the future of the environment.

In order to evaluate the disciplines, it is important to know what these disciplines are and how to apply them to environmental studies. The disciplines include: sciences (physics, chemistry, biology), history, worldviews, ethics and education, economics and business, politics and law, sociology/demographics and population & consumption, urban planning and design technology, and fine art. These are all extremely important disciplines in order to fully understand how to apply environmental studies and make a true, lasting change. Environmentalists must utilize all of these disciplines to help maintain the environment in a sustainable way, but there are some disciplines that are more beneficial to focus on than others. So far, I have taken two science classes, so these classes help to put what I will learn in this class into context. Since I have basic knowledge about environmental sciences, this allows me to learn more about the interdisciplinary aspects of environmental studies. I have also taken basic microeconomics, which counts toward the major. I still have many classes to take within the major, so this class will help me to get an overview as to why these classes are important to environmental studies.

Framed in a different way, there are four larger branches of disciplines: humanities, social sciences, applied arts and sciences, and environmental sciences. These each have subgroups that include some of the disciplines listed in the paragraph above. Each of these four disciplines correlates to some class included in the Environmental Studies major. These disciplines are supposed to teach students how to make change in the world on topics such as climate change, habitat loss, mass species extinction, natural capital degradation, environmental health and justice, and building sustainable societies. All of these areas are important to learn about because they are the major environmental problems that Environmental Studies students are set out to learn more about and solve.

The Environmental Studies major is more than just taking courses, though. There are many different opportunities to take advantage of outside the classroom. There are facilities at Fordham, in New York City, and abroad to utilize, such as the Louis Calder Center Biological Field Station. This field station is a 113-acre property that was donated to the University in 1967 by Louis Calder. It was renovated in the early nineties, and it is dedicated to ecological, evolutionary, and conservationist research. It is also meant to help students of a diverse background understand the environment more clearly and make discoveries in a changing landscape of the world. Other resources Fordham offers are the St. Rose’s campus urban agriculture garden, Facilities campus sustainability program, and partnerships with the New York Botanical Garden, Wildlife Conservation Society, and Bronx River Alliance. All of these resources are great for Environmental Studies students to take advantage of because they utilize what these students learn in the classroom and apply it to real environmental grounds. This summer I’m thinking of applying to work at one of the zoos part of the Wildlife Conservation Society. This could help me apply what I learn in the environmental studies program.

The hands-on learning practicum is an activity in which we are supposed to apply what we learn in class to a real-life example, such as a club or an organization dedicated to environmental sustainability. For this practicum, I have a few different options for what I can do, but I’m hoping to become active in the Students for Environmental Awareness and Justice club. This club has seemed interesting to me for a while now, but I want to get more involved and see what kind of work they do.

In addition to the regular courses of the Environmental Studies major, there are concentrations and career tracks that students can follow in order to specialize their studies and become more educated in one specific area. These concentrations include: conservation biology, pre-health, environmental law, sustainable business, sustainable agriculture and urban planning, environmental journalism, and sustainable agriculture. Each of these concentrations allow students to learn more about a specific topic that will further their career. These concentrations are often paired with another major or minor in order to pair what the student learns in Environmental Studies with another subject. For example, with the Sustainable Development concentration and career track, students are encouraged to minor or major in International Humanitarian Affairs, or double major in International Political Economy, International Studies, or Economics. This can help students that are interested in sustainable development learn more about this by overlapping two majors. This career track/concentration is particularly interesting to me because I am a double major with International Studies. By taking this track, it could help me specialize my studies and I could have a better informed education for a career dealing with sustainable development.

While all of these disciplines are important, there are some that should be focused on more than others in order to maximize change and create the most impact. By analyzing each of these disciplines, it can be argued that the Humanities discipline, more specifically the worldviews, ethics, and education discipline, is the most important because it deals with the root of the problem rather than attempting to fix the problem from other areas. Ultimately, in order to make a change in the way people interact with their world, it is crucial to first change their minds about why they should act a certain way in the world. By learning ways in which people can educate future generations about environmental problems, it can help alleviate a lot of the continued indifference toward the state of the environment. Going along these same lines, worldviews is a topic that must be worked with carefully in order to change the minds of people who have long believed that problems such as climate change do not exist. It is important not to undermine these people, or make them feel alienated, because they are the ones that people must convince, not the people who already believe in making a change in the environment.

Beyond just getting people to believe in the environmental issues of the modern world, it is crucial to get people to care about environmental issues. Taking climate change as an example, there are many human-rooted causes of climate change that can be prevented with large-scale change among the human race. If all companies decided to stop using fossil fuels, for example, the issue of climate change may become fixable. While this is an idealistic goal, it is important to remember that marginal change is just as important as large-scale change. By learning how to change people’s worldviews regarding environmental issues such as these, it can completely change the trajectory of the environmental field.

In a larger-scale evaluation of the Environmental Studies major, there are dimensions that umbrella over each discipline. These include: worldviews, values, policies, stakeholder groups, technology and design, and environmental problems. Each of these dimensions are essential to the major in a similar way that the disciplines are essential. Again, it can be argued that worldviews are the most important topic to focus on when trying to motivate a “sustainability revolution” in the next fifty years. While laws and politics may seem to be more important in this field, the world must first change their minds and then change their laws. Environmental Studies students must learn about how to change people’s mindsets, and then all the other disciplines can follow. While the scientific portion of discovering environmental issues is essential in order to change people’s minds, it cannot change the way the world acts alone. This is why, even though worldviews are important for change, all of these disciplines must work together in order to achieve lasting change and a “sustainability revolution”.

Word Count: 1355

Question: How can we incorporate our studies into our hands-on learning practicum in the best way?

#ENST 1000

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