Humans and the Environment: Syllabus

Dr. Catherine Duckett, Associate Dean, School of Science

Dr. Heide Estes, Professor, Department of English

Monmouth University

This course integrates perspectives from literature and biology in investigating contemporary climate issues. Students are challenged to understand the impacts of rising atmospheric and oceanic carbon concentrations in long-term ecological perspectives, to learn about the recent history of climate science debates, and to understand how literature can help to understand the development of current attitudes about environmental issues. Course assignments include a personal environmental project and letters to public officials or news media to encourage students to engage with civic engagement and the ethics of climate decisions.

Readings and Web Sites

Gaines, Susan M. Carbon Dreams. Creative Arts Press, 2001.

Hawken, Paul. Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global

Warming. Penguin Books, 2017.

Robert Frost, "A Brook in the City" (1923)

Earth System Science Partnership, Global Carbon Atlas. Global Carbon Project, 2001-2018.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute, EarthViewer app. HHMI Biointeractive, 2012-2017.

Schmittner, Andreas. Introduction to Climate Change. Open Oregon State, no date.

Tallamy, Doug. Bringing Nature Home, 2007. “Why Insects Can’t Eat Alien Plants” and “Blending in

with the Neighbors.”

United Nations report No 2013/3: "Demographic Components of Future Population Growth," K. Andreev, V. Kontorova, J. Bongaarts.

“The Day the Mesozoic Died: The Asteroid that Killed the Dinosaurs.” Howard Hughes Medical

Institute. 

“How do greenhouse gases actually work?” @minuteearth, YouTube

“The Wolves of Yellowstone” BBC Natural World

“Some Animals Are More Equal than Others: Keystone Species and Trophic Cascades” HHMI

Interactive.

Assignments 

Environmental Commitment Project 

Ecological Restoration Project 

Carbon Atlas Project 

Final Project: What Should We Do?

Avoiding Plastic, Week One

A week into my commitment to avoid single-use plastics, an update.

The knife and fork set that my dad gave me, with 1960s-era vintage plastic handles, is traveling in my bag. I’ve been packing lunch and even dinner to avoid take-out. I ate out once, and put the leftovers in a plastic container I had with me, rather than taking a new one that I would then end up throwing away.

For the most part, I feel pretty good about it.

Sunday, though, was a fairly epic failure. I drove my son to Jenkinson’s to apply for a job and went to a coffee shop to wait for him. I ordered a latte — in a paper cup, because for once I didn’t have my reusable mug with me — and didn’t think to ask them not to put on a lid.

He got hired on the spot. I didn’t even have time to drink the coffee before we headed back to join some people at a restaurant for lunch.

One fender-bender later, we got hung up for so long my friend ended up getting my meal wrapped up to take home. I ended up with a salad in a styrofoam clamshell, rice in more styrofoam, and tofu and broccoli in an aluminum container with a plastic lid.

Plastic 2, Heide 0.

Still, it’s been easier than I anticipated. It’s also making me take a hard look at my grocery cart. 

A bottle of ketchup or hot sauce that will last for a few months seems less problematic than the box of tofu that will make one meal, or the tub of vegan yogurt that I’ll finish in three or four breakfasts. I’m paying more attention to whether I can get a comparable item packaged in glass, which is fully and indefinitely recylable, unlike plastic*. I’m avoiding the containers of delicious but environmentally disastrous tomatoes. 

I said last week I thought it would be almost impossible. On Sunday, I was foiled by one mistake and one bad driver. But I’ve definitely reduced the amount of plastic I would otherwise have used during the week, and I’m feeling good about going into week two

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* You can sterilize a glass bottle and refill it with beer, or whatever, or you can break it up and make a new bottle. You can’t make a plastic water bottle into another water bottle. Contamination problems mean that food-grade plastic can only be recycled for non-food uses, like fleece sweaters (that then shed microfleece particles every time they go through the washer) or plastic park benches. Either way, it’s not going away.

Green Your Holiday

'Tis the season... of frantic shopping, and of appeals from "green" companies to shop with them rather than the other companies.

Maybe you want to put the brakes on all that consumption. I'm not suggesting you just say "no" to all gift-giving, but there are ways to make it more productive.

1. Give food that you know the recipient will enjoy that's maybe a little fancier and more environmentally friendly than what they'd have consumed anyway. Organic chocolates, fair-trade coffee or tea, a gift certificate to a farmer's market, a month's pick-up from community supported agriculture, a gift certificate at the neighborhood health food store.

In New York, some greenmarkets sell "wooden nickels." You pay with a credit card (there's a small fee that goes to their overhead) and you can buy wooden tokens worth $5 each to use later or give as gifts. Other cities have similar programs.

2. Give time. Commit to helping a friend or family member with cleaning, maintenance, a special home project, or a home-cooked meal.

3. Give donations in people's names, to charities they (and you!) support. Or commit an amount, and have a conversation about where they'd like it sent.

4. If you want to give material gifts, make them yourself or think hard about where you buy them. As with other purchases throughout the year, try to limit shipping, packaging, and other kinds of waste.

5. Recycle wrapping paper: easiest to do if you use bags and tissue paper with no tape. Or buy or make reusable cloth wrapping bags, or use the comics pages from the newspaper, or re-use cardboard boxes and decorate them.

A Backwards Solution to Junk Mail

I just got an email message from the Story of Stuff project, where they're doing lots of good things to lessen the amount of waste that we produce. This one was about junk mail, and how not to get so much of it.

Story of Stuff sent me an email link to Catalog Choice, an organization that lets people choose what junk mail not to get. Catalogs, credit card offers, reverse mortgages, phone and data plans, all the other unopened junk that comes in the mail, and maybe you tear it in half before you throw it in the recycle bin in the hopes that someone else won't use it to open an account in your name.

And it struck me that while this is probably a useful individual solution, and might be less time-consuming than calling all the mailers individually and telling them to get you off their lists, it's completely backwards, like so much that we do regarding the environment.

If we were serious about stopping the plague of junk mail and its carbon footprint, from production to transportation and delivery to transportation back out of each individual household to dump or recycling facility, we would cut junk mail off at the source.

What if ... we made it illegal to send junk mail? What if you could only get that LLBean catalogue if you told LLBean that you wanted it, and not because some other company sold them your name along with various associated personal information?

As with so many environmental issues, we need to re-think junk mail. We need to approach it not as an individual scourge but as a systemic, structural problem.

I don't know how to change that. But I'm going to start with email messages to Story of Stuff and Catalog Choice, suggesting that they push the junk mailers to rethink unsolicited mail.

Plastic, Again

You can crush glass or melt aluminum and make another bottle or can, and it takes a lot less energy than making either from scratch.  But did you know that you can't recycle a soda bottle into another soda bottle? 

You can recycle the plastic into a fleece jacket or plastic wood-like composite that in turn can be used to make deck flooring or picnic tables, and that takes less energy than starting with raw crude.  The promises of recycling aside, all those soda and water bottles are single-use items.

The mantra of environmentalists has long been "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle."  Recently, though, people have been adding a fourth "R," "Refuse."  We need to refuse plastic packaging as much as possible.  Yet it's almost inescapable, unless maybe you make

Vegetables, for one, don't need to be packaged in styrofoam.  If your local supermarket does it that way, have a little chat with the manager, and then write a letter to corporate.  A lot of other supermarket food comes packed in plastic.  Farmer's markets, CSAs, and coops are an alternative, if there's one in your area.

For things like yogurt, ketchup, peanut butter, and mustard, I don't know of good alternatives.  Making your own is a possibility, but for most of us not a feasible one.

Iced coffee doesn't require a single-use plastic cup.  Make your own at home, or get a reusable container, preferably made out of double-walled stainless steel, which will keep your cold drinks cold and your hot drinks hot and can double as a water bottle when not filled with coffee.

When did all the laundry detergent manufacturers switch over to liquid detergent packaged in plastic, rather than powder packed in cardboard boxes?  Besides the unnecessary plastic packaging (and probably not either #1 or #2, which are the only types that most communities accept for recycling), the water mixed with the powder drastically increases the weight, and therefore the energy required for shipping.

Consider switching back to powder.  If it doesn't work as well, let me know.





Another big source of plastic packaging is personal care items: liquid soap, shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, toothpaste.  Some of these are available in non-liquid forms packaged in paper.  Others are difficult.

So, do me a favor and think about it.  Is there one thing you can do to refuse single-use plastic packaging in your life?

Plastic: Escape It If You Can

I was at the office yesterday when I heard that New York City is now accepting all hard plastic for recycling.  (Unfortunately, they're still not recycling plastic bags, or toothpaste tubes, shower curtains, and other non-rigid plastics.)

I got to thinking a lot about plastic a couple of years ago and started to make a real effort to cut back on buying things made out of plastic or packaged in plastic.  I switched from shampoo and soap in liquid to bar form and from toothpaste to tooth powder (still plastic packaging, but less of it), and cut back on take-out lunches to avoid all the packaging that comes with it.

It's a constant thought process, because plastic is so deeply entrenched in our lives these days.  (Look around you: can you see five things made fully or partly of plastic? Ten? Fifty?  Just on my desk right now: sunglasses, watch with plastic band, laptop computer, iPad in case, two CDs in cases, pen, mechanical pencil, car key, cell phone, inhaler, phone charger, mousepad, photo album with flowers I pressed back in 1982 (ring bound), folder.  Seventeen items.  Oh, and I'm typing this while sitting on an exercise ball.

I wondered yesterday if my family could eat for a week without eating anything packaged in plastic.  When I got home, I went in the kitchen and took a look.  Here's some of what I found:

In the fridge: bread, mustard, mayonnaise, ketchup, tofu, tahini, cream cheese, hummus, celery, carrots.  The mustard is Grey Poupon, and I remember getting that in a jar; has the company switched over?

In the cabinets: a couple of kinds of cereal (plastic bags inside cardboard boxes), taco shells (ditto), various flours and a bag and a half of sugar, two kinds of seaweed, three kinds of oil, peanut butter, several bags of dried beans and lentils, and most of the spices and vitamins.

In short, no.  No, we can't eat for a week without plastic.  Probably not even for a day.


Want to play? Post a list of plastic items on your desk, in your backpack/purse, or in your fridge *right now*.

Where to Shop

The old mantra, reduce, reuse, recycle, begins with "reduce."  As in, better to avoid shopping altogether.  Learn to live with less.  Buy things that will last, and then get them repaired rather than replacing them as they wear.  But we do need food, shelter, clothing.  We need tools to cook with, we need furnishings for our homes.

The place to start, then, is buying used.  Double bonus: you buy something without the environmental costs of new manufacture, and you keep an item out of the landfill.  Some places to start: Better World Books, Craig's List, Goodwill, the Salvation Army, your local thrift or consignment shop.

When used won't do, you can shop from a store with explicit commitments to environmentally friendly materials and good labor practices across the supply chain.  Some of the better options:

American Apparel

Eileen Fisher

Hanna Anderson

NAU

Patagonia
Seventh Generation
simple shoes
Sustainable NYC
Ten Thousand Villages
World of Good

Among manufacturers that sell clothing in the US, only H&M, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and Abercrombie and Fitch have signed on to the  Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh.

Green America recommends fabrics made out of bamboo, organic cotton, industrial hemp, recycled polyester, soy silk or cashmere, and wool.  They also publish The National Green Pages, a directory of green businesses, as well as a newsletter with information on fair trade practices across a variety of industries.

In the absence of transparency about labor rights, industrial methods, and green materials, we all need to keep reading about corporate practices and putting pressure on individual companies to improve their records.

Green Garbage

Throwing away huge quantities of paper may not seem like much of a green moment, even if they're going into a recycling bin.  But read on...

I changed offices last summer.  In the process, I got rid of a fair number of books.  Duplicates and old editions of teaching texts went off to Better World Books, where they'll be resold or donated.

But then I moved all the files from my desk drawers and file cabinets to the furniture in the new office, leaving them pretty close to full.

I have notes from courses I took in graduate school, from studying for doctoral exams, from courses I've taught going all the way back to when I first came to this university ... in 1998.  I've typed up a lot of those notes, and revised a lot of the materials, but I still have folders full of hand-written notes and photocopies of handouts.  Semester, after semester, after semester.  Plus hand-written notes and photocopies of articles related to papers I've given at conferences and subsequently (eventually) published.

And so I'm facing a choice made across the nation in all kinds of contexts: downsize or upsize. 

The average size of a home in the US ballooned from 1400 to 2700 square feet between 1970 and 2009.  Meanwhile, the average household size decreased by half a person.* So what accounts for the near doubling in the size of all those houses?

Stuff.

We own more clothing, more electronics, more furniture, more kitchen appliances... more of pretty much everything than people in our parents' generation. And we build ever bigger houses to store all of that stuff.  We probably store more files, too.

Quick calculation: what percentage of the items in your home have you actually used in the past 12 months?  (Challenge: take a walk through your house, including basement, attic, garage, and really pay attention.)

So I have a choice: I can buy a bunch of file boxes and file those excess papers and store them someplace, or I can go through the files and get rid of the papers that I don't need any more.  Duplicates of exercises that I've since revised; hand-written class notes I'll never refer to again; rosters, attendance records, printouts of articles; photocopies handed down from my predecessor.

So I've been going through a folder or two a week and getting rid of almost everything.  One file drawer is almost empty.  By the end of the term, I may no longer need a filing cabinet.

Meanwhile, I'm also going through computer files and deleting old versions of assignments, syllabi, handouts, and materials for use on line.  It turns out that data storage, though it feels free because it's paperless, in fact uses a huge amount of energy.

If we keep stuff under control, we'll never be tempted to move to a bigger space just to store more stuff.  As often happens with these kinds of choices, the environmental impact is mirrored in a positive impact on the wallet.

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* Isn't statistics fun?

Incremental Change

The philosopher W. V. O. Quine wrote that human knowledge forms something like a vast spider web, rather than a hierarchical structure based on some first principle, and that new discoveries in the sciences or the humanities change the web at one small point, but from there, additional revisions ripple outward.

I read Quine's Web of Belief back in college, in the last millennium, and my copy of the book is at my office (closed up tight in anticipation of the impending storm), so my memory may be faulty and is certainly dim, but I've always imagined a web of human knowledge that's always rippling slightly at a variety of different points as artists and intellectuals and scientists cogitate and create away.

I also like the metaphor of a web as a way of thinking about our own indiviual beliefs.  We learn new things, and they cause slight shifts in our own thought-webs, with the potential to ripple outwards across our entire thought-webs, with time and the willingness to be open to new ideas.

When it comes to ecological thinking, small steps are an important beginning.  But changing our habits, ever so slightly, has to be a constantly evolving process, with change leading to change and shifting beliefs constantly challenging our webs.

Putting food scraps in the compost instead of in the trash might get you thinking about wasting less food in the first place.  Recycling paper for municipal pick-up might lead to the realization that batteries shouldn't go in the trash, either.

The old green mantra is "reduce, reuse, recycle."  Note that "reduce" comes first.  Recycling is important, reusing things even better, but for real impact to occur, everyone needs to reduce consumption in the first place.

For Love of Composting

This is Harmony Hazzard.  She loves her job!

Harmony works for GrowNYC, an organization that has started a huge city-wide composting and textile reycling operation so that apartment dwellers all over the five boroughs* can bring their food scraps and leftovers to be turned into soil, rather than dropped into a landfill where lack of air might mean they don't decompose for decades.

GrowNYC also collects clothing, towels, old sheets, rags, shoes.  Usable clothing gets sold, and other materials get recycled into filling for car seats, insulation, and other useful stuff -- and again, they stay out of the landfill.

Here's the list of locations where you can drop off compost and textiles.  Hint on the compost: store it in the freezer.  Won't stink, and also easier to transport when you're ready to take it to your neighborhood drop-off location.

The page also lists resources for recycling CFLs, cell phones, and other things you might be finished with, but that might be re-usable or recyclable. Whenever you're about to throw something in the trash -- think for a minute: can it be recycled or reused?

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* Actually, it doesn't look as though they have any locations in the Bronx.  Hope that's coming soon.

Green Resources

Although the New York Times has dismantled its environment desk, the BBC and the Guardian both have web pages devoted to reporting on the environment, as does the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, if you can read German.

Magazines with extensive environmental coverage include the  New Scientist and the Mother Jones,  blog The Blue Marble.

More specialized web sites for environmental coverage: 

Bike Blog NYC
Center for Science in the Public Interest
Environment Magazine
Environment News Service
Green America
Grist
Slow Food USA
Treehugger
Union of Concerned Scientists

Please add your own favorites in the comments.