imagine1community: carbon footprint

Industrial-scale farmers clear forests to plant the trees and shrubs that are the source of coffee and cacao beans. The resulting habitat loss contributes to species extinction, and the loss of trees means more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Roasting the beans, manufacturing chocolate bars, and shipping the end products also releases a lot of CO2.

There's a good run-down of the evils of chocolate here, and of coffee, here.

According to Our World in Data, carbon dioxide emissions per kilogram of chocolate and coffee are comparable to those of cheese and shrimp: not as bad as beef and lamb, but many times higher than the carbon footprints of lentils and soy beans.

Go here for a larger version of the chart.

So if you're paying attention to the ecological impacts of your diet, coffee and chocolate are up there, pound for pound.

As you can see from the chart above, net emissions of tree nuts are about three-tenths of a kilogram of CO2 per kilo of nuts, because the trees themselves take up CO2 as they grow. (On the other hand, they need a lot of water, and farmers in drought-prone places like California probably shouldn't be growing them.) Apples net 0.4 kg of CO2 per kilo, peas 0.9, tomatoes 1.4, and cane sugar 3 kg of CO2 per kilogram consumed.

But there's a big difference in the quantities consumed. On average, Americans consume nearly 10 pounds of coffee per year and more than 11 pounds of chocolate.

That compares to a total of well over 200 pounds per person of meat: in 2020, we averaged almost 100 pounds of chicken, almost 60 pounds of beef, and just over 50 pounds of pork. On top of that, we ate around 16 pounds of fish.

If you're wondering, we ate, on average, 145 pounds of vegetables in 2020. And we consume, on average, just over 150 pounds of sugar every year.

So the carbon footprint of our sugar turns out to be higher, in the aggregate, than the impact of our coffee and chocolate, which in turn is far lower than the total average carbon footprint of the meat we collectively eat.

In terms of individual choices, it's is environmentally sound to limit consumption of coffee and chocolate, and certainly to seek out shade-grown and fair trade varieties.

But you'll have a bigger impact if you trade in your gas guzzler for an electric car, put solar panels on the roof of your house, fly as little as possible, and vote for lawmakers who will fund public transportation and renewable energy.

01 March 2020

Reduce your Carbon Footprint for Lent

The suggestion comes around every year that instead of giving something up for Lent, folks should use the season to declutter their homes, finding one item per day to give away.

The problem is, we're drowning in excess stuff. Decluttering, whether to spark joy or find God, doesn't address the problem of how we got all that stuff.

I'm going to suggest, instead, taking action to reduce your carbon footprint for the days of Lent.

Instead of giving things away for Lent, we could give up buying things. Give up a category, like clothing, and make the things you have in your home work for a few weeks longer.

Or give up food waste. Or plastic supermarket bags. Or single-use plastic packaging.

Or give up beef, as the meat that's highest in emissions, and for the 40 days of the holiday eat only fish and fowl. Or reduce the quantity of meat you eat rather than the kinds.

In the solar year, Lent crosses the last few weeks of winter and the first few weeks of spring, a time when many of us are waiting eagerly for light and warmth, the change of season that will bring more light and enable more outdoor time and allow us to manufacture more vitamin D as we shed winter layers and take a big breath of relief that the dark cold of winter is over

For our ancestors, it was the hungry time, when stores of late summer and fall crops like potatoes and apples were running out and the spring lettuces and early berries had yet to grow.

Giving up a category of food as a religious exercise was a way to give meaning to the season's privations.Today, though, while poverty is an entrenched and serious problem, it doesn't follow the solar seasons the way it used to.

Today, referigeration and global shipping allow us access to wide varieties of foods year-round -- so much so that if you didn't grow up in a rural community, you might not actually know what foods are seasonally available in your local area.

Lent is a short time frame during which you can try out an action that will reduce your carbon footprint, and see if it will work for you in the longer term.

What do you think?

09 February 2020

Circular Economies

To slow the release of carbon into the atmosphere, we can turn to renewable energy and biodegradable packaging, but to stop it, we need to return to a circular economy, with localized nodes all over the world.

Our current global and local economies depend on "natural resources" and "human resources" with the assumption that these are limitless, that the earth possesses or will continue to generate enough raw materials for the endless production and transport of new goods. In fact, many of our global industries depend not just on stable markets, but continuously growing ones, for financial stability. We have now reached the point where this will no longer allow for environmental sustainability.

In order to reach a point of truly circular economy, we need to reuse, recycle, compost, or burn (as fuel) everything we produce. And we're doing a terrible job at that.

While glass and metals can readily be recycled and similar products created, with less energy output than refining new materials, recycling plastic is much more difficult. Plastic, once produced, can't be melted down and re-used in the same form.

Water bottles (#1 plastic), for instance, can be made into fleece sweaters, but not into new plastic water bottles. There's a problem, though: every time you launder that fleece, you release microplastics into your town sewer system, and they end up in the ocean where they're killing wildlife.

Here's a table from Oxford University that summarizes how plastics are generally recycled by communities:

Go here for the full-size image

It turns out, though, that the situation isn't quite as dire, in theory: Plastics labeled #2, #3, #4, and #5 can be turned into plastic wood. The town of Long Branch started a program last year to recycle plastic bags and wrappers (#4). They promised a park bench after 500 pounds of packaging was collected, and this January, the first bench was installed near Lake Takanassee.

Meanwhile, the town of Middletown, NJ recently opened a styrofoam recycling center, open to residents of the entire county. It only collects styrofoam used in packaging and shipping, not food-grade products, so you still need to get a reusable mug for your Dunkin Donuts coffee, and avoid take-out that's packaged in styrofoam.

There's a breakdown, however, been theory and practice. Between 1950 and 2015, the amount of plastic products produced annually rose almost 200-fold, from 2 million metric tons per year to 381 million metric tons, and only 9 percent of that was recycled.

We need to do better, and when it comes to plastics we need to address this in several different ways.

Governments need to enact carbon taxes to encourage corporate and individual consumers to use less carbon, by making it more expensive.

Producers of plastic products need to do a better job of making containers out of more easily recyclable products when possible, researching and developing biodegradable containers, and avoiding excess packaging.

Consumers need to send a message through individual purchases and buying habits that we don't want plastic. We need to:

stop buying bottled water and other products packaged in single-use plastics
refuse excess packaging, for instance when we buy loose produce
advocate with local and state governments to enact plastic bag bans, and meanwhile make the choice to use reusable bags for our shopping
boycott Dunkin Donuts and other corporations that still use styrofoam instead of paper hot drink cups, and tell them why

... and more. Those are starting points, not end points. We need to move to an economy where everything we produce can be repurposed in some way. It's going to take imagination and persistence. If we don't do it voluntarily, the effects of climate crisis will force the issue.

20 November 2019

Green Holiday Gift Guide

The holidays are hard on the environment. In the US, people generate 25 percent more trash between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day -- including uneaten food, giftwrap, packaging, decorations, and last year's phones and computers. Then there are the unwanted gifts that people don't know what to do with, many of which also end up in the trash.

It's time to rethink gift-giving. Regifting can be a positive thing. An older family member who was downsizing gave me a lovely wooden salad bowl one year. It became a treasure. If you're just passing on something that the recipient won't want and can't use, it's not going to be appreciated, but regifting can be done thoughtfully and tactfully.

It's time to rethink giftwrap. My family has a long history of wrapping gifts in paper tied with ribbon, no tape used, that can then easily be saved for another year. We also cut taped paper and re-use that. One year, my mother sewed a bunch of cloth gift bags. I usually use gift bags with tissue paper -- with a little care, endlessly reusable.

But with those caveats, we want to give gifts to our loved ones. So, a few thoughts.

Don't go overboard. I'll admit, I like to have a little gift for my son for every day of Hanukah. One day it might be the skateboard or commuter bag he's had his eye on. Another day it might be a shirt or a hoodie I think he'll like. Other days, it will be a snack or treat of some sort. But I try to keep most of it low-key, and a combination of food he'll enjoy, clothes he can wear, and stuff he's been wanting.

I know some folks appreciate it more than others, but I often make a charitable donation in lieu of a physical gift. Planned Parenthood, Heifer International, and the Sierra Club are some of the organizations I've supported in this way, but that's something that has to be personalized to both giver and recipient.

Another alternative is to give green products, and this is also a way to communicate with friends and family members about why you're doing this. You might give shade grown coffee, responsibly sourced tea, or ethically grown chocolate, with an explanation of what fair trade and environmentally responsible farming practices mean.

If you're going to buy someone clothing, save up for a quality piece that will last, both in terms of construction and fashion, and look for a company with policies friendly to both labor and environment.

Beware of green-washing. Overconsumption is a major driver of climate crisis, and even "green" products have production and transportation related emissions.

And don't forget folks who can't afford to give their families gifts. Consider making a donation to an organization that helps poor people at the holidays. And then vote in politicians who will raise the minimum wage and enact single-payer health insurance and make other inroads into the American scourge of poverty.

Just keep thinking. The holidays are stressful for all kinds of reasons. But try to keep environmental issues in sight as well. Other ideas? Please post in the comments, and I'll update.

27 June 2019

Environmental Commitment Project

Dr. Heide Estes, Professor, Department of English, and Dr. Catherine Duckett, Associate Dean, School of Education, Monmouth University

This project is assigned in our team taught First Year Seminar, Humans and the Environment, which combines literary study with climate science to help students to understand climate science -- and how they can be part of the solution.

_____________________________________________________________________

Rationale: Your development as a citizen is one of the many goals of a liberal education. Taking responsibility for one’s contributions, both positive and negative, is part of being a citizen and an adult. In this course, we want to encourage civic engagement by asking you to think about how you can make a contribution to improving the environment. Habits require practice; your project involves making a semester-long commitment to changing some aspect of your daily or weekly activity in a way that is environmentally constructive. Because feedback and support from others is helpful, we have structured this assignment as an ecampus discussion and hope you will use this as an opportunity to get to know one other.

Instructions: For this project, you will choose a project involving making an environmentally informed commitment to change your habits. You will document this project during the semester by posting updates on eCampus in September, at the beginning of the project, and in October, approximately at the midpoint. At the end of the semester you will use your updates as data to write a reflective paper. In your initial post, your midterm update, and your final reflective paper, explain how your project helps the environment.

For the first ecampus post you will describe, in 400-500 words, the commitment you have chosen, explain how you anticipate it will improve the environment, discuss what changes you need to make in daily or weekly routines in order to succeed, and think ahead to possible challenges in maintaining your commitment. NO FLUFF! Provide a one-sentence introduction, at most two sentences of conclusion, and make every word count.

After you have submitted your ecampus post, read what your classmates have posted. React to three different posts from classmates: have you learned something from their posts? Do you have advice for them? Are you intrigued by their choice of commitment? Don’t just say “hi” or “that’s a good project” -- for credit for a response, you need to add to the conversation.

Grading
Your eCampus post will be graded on thorough attention to the instructions, careful explanation of your project, thoughtful analysis of potential pitfalls, and good use of detail to support your ideas, as well as on organization, conciseness, and mechanical accuracy.

Some possible projects:

● Reduce your meat consumption. Limit the amount you eat at every meal, or pick a meal or a day every week to eat vegan or vegetarian
● Write a letter to an elected official twice a month demanding environmentally responsible policies
● Limit food waste: buy what you will eat, and eat what you buy
● If you live at home, turn down the thermostat in the winter or up in the summer
● Buy clothes only from thrift shops for the semester—or, don’t buy any clothing atall
● Purchase a reusable water bottle and coffee cup and skip disposables
● If you live within walking distance of campus or work, pick a day a week to walk orbike instead of driving
● Avoid food packaging, for instance from take-out food, and by choosing lowestpackaging options at the supermarket
● Reduce electric consumption by turning off lights, switching to LED bulbs,unplugging unused appliances, and similar activities. Bonus: Get a solar or hand-crank generator to power your smartphone, or organize a competition between MU dormitories to see which one can reduce electrical consumption the most.
● Reduce your waste stream. Reuse, recycle, repurpose, rethink how much garbage you’re contributing to the local landfills every day and how you can cut back.

If you choose a different project, please consult with one of the instructors for the course.

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?

19 May 2019

Flying as an Environmentalist

The amount I’m flying this year is getting me down, because it’s hands-down the most carbon-intensive thing I do, and it negates all the carbon reductions I achieve by eating vegan, biking to work, and trying to reject consumer habits.

I’m flying this year to four conferences to give papers on ecocriticism — the study of how literature and other cultural artifacts like art, movies, and historical documents describe or depict how humans interact with the environment. My scholarly work deals with how the literature of early medieval England represents humans and the environments they occupy and imagine — from wilderness and forests through farms and their homes.

My engagement with medieval ecocriticisms is explicitly activist. I believe that thinking about the ways that humans of the past engaged with their environments can help us understand our present. I also believe that we’re in a time of climate crisis, and ecocritical humanities has to recognize that, and our scholarly endeavors have to advance understanding of the need to act, NOW. So that means I also need to act, myself — and all the flying is a real problem.

The last time I flew, I googled “carbon offsets” for flights, and rapidly went down a rabbit hole of conflicting information. One article claimed individuals don’t need to buy carbon offsets, because airlines are taking care of it. For example, they claimed Delta was providing carbon offsets for all travelers through certain airports, including the one I flew through. Turned out they were only doing that for flights taken on Earth Day.

I decided to create my own carbon sink by planting a tree for every flight I take this year. Here’s number one:

It’s a tiny, baby swamp white oak, maybe a foot tall. I planted it in a gully by Long Branch’s elementary school, with the help of a colleague and friend who has a contact there. In the photo, I’m building a cage made out of hardware cloth that will help protect the little tree from predators, mostly deer, and from accidentally being mowed. I’ll need to check on it periodically, and if we have a dry spell in the next four years I’ll have to water it.

My flights to Detroit, San Francisco, Albuquerque, and Charlottesville will add up to carbon emissions of about 3.4 tons.

A tree can sequester one ton of carbon in 40 years.

I plan to plant four trees this summer to offset the four flights I’m taking. And the labor of doing that is making me think harder about conference planning for next year, because I plan to continue planting trees to offset my own flights. But we’re in climate crisis now — we don’t have 40 years for the trees to grow.

13 March 2019

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

—————
* 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.

05 March 2019

Six Weeks without Single-Use Plastic?

Lent isn’t my holiday, but I hope those of you who observe it won’t mind if I borrow it to re-commit myself to a couple of environment-friendly habits that have been hard for me to get behind.

It’s true, global warming isn’t going to go away because of the individual actions of a few tree-huggers. (I will admit to being a tree-hugger.) We need corporate and government action.

But we also need personal change. We need to find ways to say “no” to the endless cycles of consumption encouraged by capitalism and the marketing that supports it.

Lent begins tomorrow, March 6, and runs through April 18. Six weeks is a good time span to establish new habits. My goals: Buy nothing new, and give up single use plastics.

I don’t anticipate not buying new things is going to be difficult, not for six weeks. Once Lent is over, I’ll see how much longer I can keep it up.

Giving up single-use plastics is going to be a much bigger challenge. I’ve developed the habit of carrying a mug with me. I start my day with coffee and when that’s gone I switch over to water. So I don’t use water bottles or coffee cups.

But I’ve come to rely on take-out meals to get me through busy weeks, and it’s going to be hard to go six weeks without a take-out meal. It’s going to be hard to remember next time I’m at a reception not to grab a plastic plate and fork to have some cut up fruit or vegetables and hummus.

I might make it through six weeks without any single-use plastic items, but I’m certainly not going to be able to make it through six weeks without any plastic at all, because of the ubiquity of plastic packaging that comes with groceries. Most of those containers are bigger than single servings, so it’s not technically single-use, but it’s close.

I just went to the grocery store. I bought a couple of bars of soap in cardboard boxes, but inside the boxes — plastic wrap. Yogurt, in a plastic container, dishwasher detergent pods in a plastic bag. Garlic and onions, each in a plastic mesh bag. Almonds and walnuts, each in a plastic bag. Biodegradable plastic garbage bags — in a plastic bag. Calcium tablets in a little plastic jar, and two toothbrushes, both made of plastic and packaged in more plastic.

So at the same time that I’m trying to quit single-use plastic, I’m also going to try to limit the plastic packaging that comes with my food.

Wish me luck. It’s going to be hard.

01 February 2019

Biking in the Cold

I'm teaching in two places this semester. My home institution, Monmouth University, has graciously given me permission to teach at New York University, where I have the absolutely amazing privilege to run a graduate seminar on Medieval Ecocriticisms. What that means, though, is a lot more travel, and I'm trying not to drive if possible.

So yesterday I biked 2.5 miles from my place on the Lower East Side to the NYU English Department, and then a few hours later, biked home again. It was probably at or close to the day's high of 17 degrees when I left, and down to 15 or so for my trip home. This morning, when I walked from my Long Branch rental to campus at Monmouth, it was five degrees.

I am not a hero, I am not an amazon, and I am not a monster. I'm just well prepared. For my bike ride yesterday, I wore a dress with warm leggings and a wool sweater -- and over that, snowboarding pants, a down vest, a warm winter jacket, down-lined gloves, a hat, and a gore-tex helmet cover. Plus Dermatone, a Swedish ointment that's kind of like lip gloss for the face (and, importantly, does not make me break out), to keep exposed skin from frostbite.

In the United States, our lives are organized, economically and culturally, in ways based on a historic sense of natural resources being endless. And on this large continent, for many decades we could reasonably believe that they were.

Twenty years ago I'd have said biking in single-digit temperatures was impossible. But I learned how to do it, and biking at 15 degrees yesterday was brisk, but not uncomfortable. I got cold hands and feet, but there are degrees of cold, ranging from tolerable to dangerous, and I was nowhere near danger.

Even as it's becoming clear that we not longer can operate on the assumption of limitless resources, we have built lives that are structured on that idea. Which means changing our lives means changing our ideas about how housing and communities and commutes are organized, among many other things. That's complicated, but it's not impossible. We can change our behavior, individually, and we can lobby our elected officials and hold corporations accountable. It's hard, but we can do it.

Also: Choosing to commute in the cold without the warm cocoon of a car is a good reminder that there are many people who don't have a choice: their jobs require them to be outdoors in all kinds of weather.

imagine1community

21 April 2023

Climate Action Resources: A List

03 November 2021

Chocolate, Coffee, and Sustainability

01 March 2020

Reduce your Carbon Footprint for Lent

09 February 2020

Circular Economies

20 November 2019

Green Holiday Gift Guide

27 June 2019

Environmental Commitment Project

Humans and the Environment: Syllabus

19 May 2019

Flying as an Environmentalist

13 March 2019

Avoiding Plastic, Week One

05 March 2019

Six Weeks without Single-Use Plastic?

01 February 2019

Biking in the Cold

Heide Estes

On the Bedside Table

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