Sustainability Related Events

Throughout my 1st semester in Sustainable Communities, I had many unique opportunities to attend, participate and even help out with several events related to sustainability.  They were all different and consequently exposed me to different sustainability focused issues and perspectives.  So, without further adieu, here are some of the events I participated in:


Bloomington Commission On Sustainability monthly meeting - August 2011 

Shortly after the beginning of my first semester at SPEA, I had the opportunity to attend the August meeting of the City of Bloomington Commission On Sustainability at Bloomington City Hall.  This provided me a unique perspective on how Bloomington is attempting to incorporate sustainable practices and ideas into how the city is run.  What I remember most about this meeting was that BCOS was discussing two proposed roundabouts that had been approved by the city and were scheduled to begin construction shortly.  

A few people on the Commission were very strongly opposed to these roundabouts, claiming that they would contribute to growth of high speed traffic and suburban sprawl in the areas that they were being built in.  Within the confines of civil discussion, there was pretty vehement opinions expressed from BCOS and from the city engineer that had come to answer questions about the plans for the roundabout.  My read on the situation was that the BCOS member that expressed the most opposition to was concerned for actual issues of sustainability, while the city engineer's main argument for going forward with it was because the federal government was funding a large portion of it, and so it was necessary to do it so that we wouldn't "miss out" on those funds.  The problem I see with the engineer's perspective was that Bloomington still has to spend a significant portion of its budget on this project in order to get the federal funds.


This particular agenda item brought to light another issue regarding BCOS and its role with the greater city government.  Even though BCOS was concerned about whether the roundabouts are a good idea at all, the roundabouts had already been approved by the city and slated for construction prior to BCOS having even heard about the proposed construction.  So while it seems like a progressive move for Bloomington to have a whole department devoted to sustainability issues, it is also pretty clear that the new department has yet to be fully integrated into the structure of the city to the point that they have a chance to do much that is actually useful towards moving Bloomington in a more sustainable direction.  Until BCOS can pull more weight with big decisions regarding the Bloomington community, it will unfortunately only serve as so much green-washing for the city.


Big Red Eats Green

I volunteered to help out with the Big Red Eats Green event that was held in the fall as well.  The idea behind this event was to have local farmers and restaurants that try to use food from local sources in their dishes come together and showcase their menus with small sample that cost between $1 and $3.  

Due to the potential for rain it was moved at the last minute from Dunn Meadow to the Alumni Hall of the Indiana Memorial Union.  I helped the various organizations set up their tables and then walked around and checked everything out after I was finished setting up. 

I heard many comments from people attending the event as to how cool of an event it was and how they should have it as a monthly event.  It was really cool to see such a positive reactions by the student body in general.  By all accounts it was a great success with a lot of student traffic, even though the location had been moved.
 

Green Drinks - Bloomington


Throughout my semester, I'd heard about and wanted to attend one of the Green Drinks events at Upland Brewery, but always seemed to have a schedule conflict or something else going on.  Luckily I was able to attend the last one of the year on October 26th.  The speaker for this event was none other my esteemed profession Bill Brown; Director of Indiana University's Office of Sustainability.  He spoke on what the various sustainability interns were accomplishing at IU.


The biggest personal benefit that came of attending this event was that I meat Jami Scholl a food policy blogger and author, and got to have an enlightening conversation with her about food, sustainability and many things that fall between the two.  From what I've read of it (admitted not much, yet) My Edible Eden (Jami Scholl's blog) is interesting and has a lot of good information on it.  I would recommend checking it out and contacting her directly if you have more detailed questions for her.  She is a very amiable and smart person.  

I'd been slowly learning more about food policy and it's effect on sustainability throughout the semester due to a couple of my classmates being particularly interested in it.  When you talk to someone about something they care deeply about, you can't help but learn more about it and become more interested yourself.  After meeting Jami, I made sure to put those friends in contact with her, since they would definitely benefit with talking to her about what she does and writes about.


Cider Fest


The last event that I attended was Cider Fest at the Bloomington Community Orchard.  It was a brisk Halloween morning, which turned out to be a perfect day to enjoy hot, freshly made apple cider and all sorts of delicious homemade goodies that were brought by various people.  The Orchard was started in large part due to the devotion and work of Amy Countryman, a fellow classmate of mine.  While the orchard is still in its infancy, it's a cool idea that I hope continues to get support from the community.  The whole idea of the Community Orchard ("Free Fruit For All") is intriguing and completely worthy of it's own post, but what I found most interesting about this event was the sense of community that was present among those in attendance.  There was face painting and apple bobbing available (although I didn't really see anyone taking advantage of the bobbing) and was just generally a neat event.  Wassailing took place as well but I abstained due to earplugs not being available for everyone in attendance.

Here are a few of the pictures that I took at the event.  I'm in the center picture with Megan.   Thanks to Megan and Mary for being so photogenic.  The face painting seemed to be a hit with everyone.

Science Fiction as Critical Thinking

It should be obvious from a quick glance at the style and mood of my blog that there is a good chance that my personal thoughts and views on sustainability and the environment have been influenced in some part by science fiction.  Well if there was any doubt before let me put that doubt to rest:

It is.

In fact, I would say that having grown up being an avid reader of science fiction has contributed greatly to my love of our planet and my adoption of a relatively long term and big picture perspective towards Earth and the human race that populates it.  Good science fiction (the kind that tries to have scientific explanations for why thing are the way they are in the book's universe) is well thought out and researched.  Often times it is even written by well respected scientists (Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Stephen Baxter, and Arthur C. Clarke to name a few) so a reader can't help but absorb some of the ideas put forth by authors of "hard science fiction," because they often make a lot of sense.

Now science fiction writers cover pretty much every topic, philosophy and idea under the sun (or whatever other star applies), but for this blog entry I wanted to highlight a couple books that explore ideas of closed system environments (such as the "spaceship" that I reference in the introduction to my blog) and the impact of being aware of that closed system and acting to take care of it, or not.

The first book I'd like to recommend is Ark by Stephen Baxter.  This is actually the second book of a two part (so far) series and tells the story of a large spaceship (the Ark) that is sent in search of what is believed to be a habitable planet very far away.  This is done in response to the continued catastrophic rise of the oceans of Earth to the point that no dry land remains.

While the response of the people remaining on Earth to the flooding is interesting in itself, it's the story of those chosen to take the Ark on its long (many generations long) trip to the newly discovered planet that really lends itself to considerations of sustainability.  In the closed, and fairly close, quarters of the Ark a society develops where eventually there is no actual memory of Earth.  Generations are born, grow up and die, all on the ship.  This is one of the simplest and most direct examples of how everyone must ultimately act in the best interest of their ship and themselves.  When even a small contingent of people stop believing in the importance of the ship as what is ensuring their survival, it has major ramifications on everyone on the ship.  In this scenario, those ramifications happen much more quickly than they do on our real life Earth, but the analogy is appropriate and provokes the reader to thinks about how we must ultimately view our environment.

Stephen King is a fairly prolific writer; to the point that most people are at least familiar with his name even if they have never read one of his books.  King generally doesn't write science fiction and the science fiction that he does write doesn't generally use a great deal of "hard science" because he is not as intimately familiar with science and scientific thinking as the other authors I've mentioned.  But his recent book Under The Dome still paints an interesting, and unfortunately bleak, picture of how wanton destruction and disregard of a closed system environment can make that environment far worse and essentially poisonous for those within it.

The focus of this story is more about the people involved, as that is King's specialty, but it is played out on a backdrop of a town that suddenly becomes encased in an essentially impermeable dome.  The dome effectively cuts the town off from the rest of the world, creating a tiny microcosm made up of just the town.  It is interesting to see how the environment within this bubble, of unknown origins, changes over time, given that it's no longer capable of having new resources, air or water available. 

I am glad that some science fiction excerpts were used as readings in the Sustainable Urban Development Reader and I think that they provide another useful tool for providing perspective on these issues.  Some science fiction, especially those stories that emphasize the application of science, do an excellent job of distilling specific ideas regarding issues that are facing humanity now.  They provide unique and important "what if" scenarios that can often leave a strong impression on the minds of readers about how we should be treating our world and each other.

At least they have for me.

Behind the Mask of Sustainability

Whenever I hear about a city that's moving forward with some large "green" or "sustainable" initiative, it is inevitably about some new "green" technology: solar installations, or xeriscaping,  or some innovative recycling or composting service in a particular neighborhood.  Most of the time, the stories that seem to get the most attention are about greening efforts within relatively upper-middle class or high-income neighborhood areas or corporate spaces.  And if you think about this it sort of makes sense that the nicer areas seem to be the ones getting this attention.  From a "come visit our city" perspective, it makes a lot more sense to advertise your city's green efforts by showing pictures of neighborhoods and homes that use the latest and greatest high tech sustainability solutions.

 

Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs (click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

The other side of the same coin is that people who live in these more well off areas typically have more money to invest in green solutions and, as a result of their socioeconomic position, have generally made it to a higher point on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.  As a result I would suggest that they have more freedom to concern themselves with bigger picture issues like sustainability and protecting the environment, if they are so inclined, because their more basic needs are easier to obtain and sustain.  So it follows that they would have more opportunity and a higher likelihood to lie more toward the upper right area of the Human Perspectives chart (as detailed in Limits to Growth), where they can see a bigger picture perspective, because they are more secure and stable when it comes to more immediate closer to home concerns.

Based on this, it's not really much of a leap of logic to see the path towards environmental injustice.  Those who are less well off, don't have the luxury of caring about "the greater good" and "future generations" when they don't even have the security of knowing that the basic needs of them and their family will be met from day to day.  For the same reason the less fortunate end up living in cancer cluster or highly polluted areas because it is cheaper and affords them the ability to spend more of their money on a greater number of other life necessities than if they lived in more sustainable, green, and often more expensive communities.

Now I'm not saying that new, innovative and expensive technology is bad; far from it.  But if we only "green" areas of our global community that can afford to pay for the latest and greatest technological innovations, all we're going to end up with is a few model communities that look great and try to adhere to an ideal philosophy but are just small islands of environmental and sustainable progressiveness in a huge sea of rising temperatures, pollution and environmental injustice.

Phoenix, AZ is a great example of a community that is suffering from this.  While there is plenty of public talk on it becoming a green community, it still suffers from this problem of environmental injustice for lower-income areas of the the city.  "The Dark Side of The 'Green' City," an Op-ed piece by the New York Times is an interesting read and speaks to the situation in Phoenix a bit more.

So what's my point?  Well I guess it is that obviously all socioeconomic strata needs to begin a move towards sustainability, and that it needs to happen in a way that doesn't push disproportionate hardship down to lower-income levels where the population is least resilient to it.  Grassroots movements that push for this are great, but as Robert Bullard talked about in "People-of-Color Environmentalism" from Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality, everyone doesn't have the time, money or interest to participate in grassroots initiatives.  This change needs to be policed and promoted by the powers that be: those people who are in a position to see the big picture, have the power and influence to do something about it, and are frequently tasked, as part of their professional position, to be the ones who create the policies that further that goal.  Referring again the above charts, those at the top of both charts are relatively few, but in a lot of cases they are the same people with the best means to make the largest difference for the multitudes still at the lower areas of the chart.

People and companies with money seldom have difficulty being heard.  An effective government is one that should represent the interests of all of its peoples, in all issues, sustainability and environmental justice included.  We have one world and all breath the same air, eventually.  It's unfortunate that doing what's best for the entire world and everyone in it isn't just a foregone conclusion.  If it were, we'd be much further down the road to a sustainable (in every way) Earth.

A Post on Compost

So it's time for a quick update on my foray into composting.  As I have previously mentioned, I was coming to discover that collecting compost materials and delivering it to another location, that can actually make use of the compost, may be a more sustainable and efficient use of my resources and time than actually re-inventing the wheel and creating my own composting system.  I'm still collecting composting materials and am still in the process of educating my roommate, and myself, about what can and cannot be composted but ultimately I plan on not doing the actual composting process and will instead be opting for taking full bins of "compost materials" to a local public place that already has an established compost system.  I've yet to fill up the bins that I have chosen to use for this process, so I haven't yet determined where the best place to compost the materials are but I'm leaning towards one of the public gardens that are around Bloomington and have been given some suggestions by those more in the know than myself.

A picture of the Butler Organic Community Garden, a possible recipient for my compost materials.

Although this project has taken a 90 degree turn from the direction I had originally envisioned, I'm pretty happy with what I've ended up with and feel like I'm still getting the opportunity to learn about composting and its benefits, even if I'm not actually the one gaining those benefits.

Traffic Calming

Speed Humps at First Street

At the beginning of this semester one of the first activities that I participated in as a result of my Sustainable Communities class was that I attended a monthly meeting of the Bloomington Commision On Sustainability at Bloomington's City Hall.  One of the items on the agenda that evening, and the one that seemed to have the most contention and discussion, was regarding two large round-abouts that had been proposed over a year ago and were about to begin being built.  Part of the issue that some in attendance had with these proposed updates to the roads was that these round-abouts would likely have the opposite effect that one might normally associate with them; they would actually increase traffic volume and speed through the areas that they would be installed in. (If you'd like to take a look at the minutes from this meeting they can be found here.)  As a result, it was suggested that these areas would become more dangerous for other alternative forms of transportation, such as biking and walking, and would have a deleterious effect on traffic calming attributes that seem to be valued in a community such as Bloomington.

Traffic Circle at 6th and Oak Streets

Given that Bloomington holds itself out as a model community, it seems to me, that Bloomington would pride itself on creating traffic calming neighborhoods and strategies in order to keep its neighborhoods more desirable and friendly to community-building forms of transportation besides single owner/rider cars.  This can easily be seen in how much of a bike friendly town Bloomington is (there are bike racks everywhere) and from what a solid bus system it has as well.  So it struck me  (and no doubt others at the BCOS meeting) as a bit odd, that so much of the city's budget was being spent on measures that increase the flow and speed of car traffic.

Bloomington does seem to have implemented some form of a traffic calming strategy and I was even able to find a pretty cool google map that details some of the various traffic calming aspects that can be found around Bloomington.  My best guess is that most of the traffic calming measures shown on the map are found

Traffic Island: Azalea Lane

in and between neighborhoods where most residents are citizens of Bloomington (vs. seasonal students) who live in nicer neighborhoods and would appreciate measures that lend to a greater community feel and prosperous appearance of their neighborhoods.  However, as is mentions in Sustainability and Cities, sustainability can't be accomplished by only implementing traffic calming in certain areas of a community, because all that tends to do is push traffic to outlying areas.  By implementing traffic calming measures in some neighborhoods but still budgeting for large scale road upgrades that provide for more and faster traffic in others, there seems to be a mixed message about where the city's values lie and whether it is concerned with the sustainability of the entire community, or only certain parts of it; or whether sustainability, in regards to car traffic reduction, is a focus at all.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

While reading "Waste as a Resource" from Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development (1994) by John Tillman Lyle, I came across what appeared to be a most surprising statistic.  I will reproduce it here verbatim:

"In the United States each person produces 50,000 pounds of waste each year and almost 20,000 gallons of sewage."

Now, given the amount of water that people use on a daily basis for toilets, showers, sinks and so on, the sewage number didn't really set off any alarms of skepticism in my brain.  However, it seemed very ludicrous to me that your average American produces that much solid waste.  So based on the assumption that this factoid is referring to 50,000 pounds of solid waste (since sewage basically covers most liquid waste, and pounds are generally the units used in measuring solids) I set out to verify that my hunch about the ridiculousness of this number was correct.

Buried within a 2009 EPA report on municipal solid waste I found a table which details the amount of solid waste (in pounds) generated per person per day in America, shown below:

The nice thing about this table is that it shows a decent amount of historical data as well, which I will get to in a moment.  4.34 pounds of solid (non-sewage) waste per day still seems pretty high (at least for myself) but it rings true in my head as a number that could at least be feasible.  When we adjust this to show yearly amounts (per day x 365.25) and graph the three different levels of waste shown in the table, we get this:

This data shows that the amount of waste that a person produced in 2009 was just below 1,600 pounds. After various recovery methods (recycling and composting) were taken into account and after some amount of combustion with energy recovery was used the actual amount of waste that remains (red line) was approximately 860 pound per person in 2009.  This is still a lot but is a great improvement over the nearly 1,200 pounds that remained after recovery efforts in 1980.

But nowhere on this graph does the data ever approach anything resembling 50,000 pounds per person per year.  So how does one go about trying to reconcile such a disparity in 2 alleged "facts"?  The first thing that comes to mind is that John Tillman Lyle's book was written prior to 2009 and thus the data might have changed since then.  But the EPA data goes back to 1960 so that hypothesis is out.

Another possibility is that the 50,000 number includes "raw material processing."  This, I assume, would be due to attributing a portion of manufacturing and industry waste to each individual person.  Mathematically this may play itself out, but it is not what someone would understand when reading the quote that I originally took issue with.  The quote reads as though each person personally produces 50,000 pounds of waste.

At worst this quote is a lie, and at best it is a misleading statistic, either intentionally (to make a point) or erroneously.  But either way it demonstrates an important point:  When reading anything purporting to be truth it is important to be skeptical about what you are being told.  If a claim is outlandish or hard to believe or seems to defy common sense, it's worth investigating further.  This is the essence of science.

Using statistics that may not be an accurate accounting of what we claim they are does nothing to bolster the integrity of the science underlying the need for sustainability.  There are enough simple direct facts that easily support the need for sustainability and it only ultimately hurts the cause of attempting to create a sustainable planet when we try to play twister with the numbers.

Cost/Benefit Analysis

In the process of researching my potential transition from a non-composting person to one who does, I've run across the possibility that building and using a personal composting system might not actually be the most sustainable solution for my particular situation.   It would be fun to try, but doing something because it seems

Some particularly elegant and relevant art.

 

neat or cool is not the appropriate reason to do it, when it comes to sustainability.  It needs to make sense and be the most sustainable option for the situation.

I have little doubt that composting is more sustainable than non composting, but what I'm still evaluating is the method by which I ultimately end up doing that.  My current living situation is not one that doesn't really foster having the opportunity to use the end products of composting.  By this, I mean that I live on the 3rd floor of an apartment building and don't own enough plants to make use of the volume of compost that would result from my own personal compost bin.  Essentially, I would have to somehow transport my compost to a place where it could be put to use.  So if I'm going to have to drive somewhere to drop something off anyway, it seems more sustainable to not buy all of the supplies that I need to create a proper composting system and instead just use a simply container to gather compostable materials and then eventually drop it off to be composted at a community garden or something similar that already has a composting system set up.

Sometimes making efficient use of already existing resources and processes is more sustainable than going through the expense and resources to replicate those processes.

I haven't fully decided which way I will go yet.  Stay tuned.