Category: Students

Posts written by students

Need a new tune? Give this a listen

So this is a song/presentation written and sung by Mrs. Delebridge’s 5th grade class. I was searching for music about water conservation and stumbled upon this gem. Even though it’s fairly simple and doesn’t go in depth, it does cover a lot about water that should be common knowledge, along with ways to conserve.

Not only is this a cute, catchy little song but it’s also important to highlight that these are only fifth graders. While it was a project, the knowledge that they gained from doing this assignment should definitely have an impact on their lives as they continue to learn more. It’s vital that education on the environment starts when kids are young so that they are more likely to grow and be conscious of their surroundings. Definitely a YouTube video I’m happy to have found.

 

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Painting with Sludge to Raise Awareness

Ohio’s John Sabraw is an artist who uses the oxidized sludge from abandoned coal mines to help raise awareness regarding this result from burning fossil fuels.

Capturing the pigments of the toxic waste that he and Guy Riefler, an environmental engineer found required some creativity to extract, “We pump the toxic, acidic water coming from the mines into a large, portable container and bring it to the lab,” Sabraw outlined. “At this point it is fairly clear, then our engineers pour it into tanks with bubblers set to aerate it at a certain rate. As the metals oxidize they fall to the bottom and become a wet sludge of mostly iron oxide.”

What these art pieces really do is highlight that though something beautiful is being created, it is only because of actions that are very ugly and will only serve to harm the environment in both the long and short term.

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Climate change and our health

For decades, climate change has been spoken about as if it is an issue that will be felt in generations. This seems to be a large reason why so many people are not taking action to combat it- they believe that climate change will not affect them in their lifetime. However, scientists have been warning us that changes have been slowly occurring for decades, and that finding sustainable ways of life is critical. A new study finds that not only is climate change an environmental issue, but it is a problem that is negatively affecting the health of millions of people right at this moment.

A prestigious scientific journal called The Lancet, published findings that reveal how climate change is currently impacting public health.  For example, the journal states that “Changing weather patterns are already altering the transmission patterns of infectious diseases, resulting in unexpected outbreaks of malaria, dengue fever, cholera, tick-born encephalitis, and West Nile virus.” These diseases can affect children, elderly, and low-class citizens, and be felt by everyone emotionally and economically. In addition, climate change causes unpredictable weather shifts that make raising crops difficult and increases natural disasters such as hurricane and flooding. The great progress medical fields and global health communities have made to combat world hunger and infectious disease can be reversed just from the use of fossil fuels. It it clearer than ever that not only is climate change an environmental issue, but a health issue that can bring death and suffering to millions.

Although these new findings can be scary, they can be reversed. I believe that scientists and government officials must work together to create policy that can reduce the use of polluting substances, and eventually protect the health of citizens around the world. It is vital that we make changes not only for future generations or the environment, but for the sake of the health of everyone living today. This new study should inspire others to create a world where we are sustainable.

Water Sustainability With Fashion

It is no secret that Michigan has dealt with a horrifying water crisis, that forced citizens to find alternative ways of getting water. It is astonishing to think this problem has been going on since April of 2014. Because of this tragedy, many Flint residents have been forced to buy a large supply of water bottles for their everyday needs. Unfortunetly, water pollution in Flint has been causing another type of pollution as well- plastic pollution. Plastic contributes to most of the trash floating in our oceans today, killing sea creatures and creating a damaging cycle that can pollute our water even further. Although using plastic water bottles is not a choice that Flint residents have at the moment, it is clear that this is not a sustainable way of receiving water and that the problem needs to be fixed starting from its roots. This scenario is the perfect example of why sustainability is crucial to keeping our Earth green. This temporary solution is polluting our waters even further.

Artist Mel Chen brings some light into this situation by using the plastic bottles in Flint to make raincoats, swimwear, and other clothing. He states that this can create jobs and climate a large amount of plastic from polluting the earth. Chen gives us hope that there are many creative and unthought ways we can eliminate waste from our waters. However, we must work to find ways where we will be creating minimal waste to begin with, so solutions like these would not be necessary.

Climate Change

“With higher population growth, more people will be vulnerable to climate change. Understanding how much society values those future people should be an influential component of climate policy decisions.”

This article was refreshing in that it not only focused on the depressing impeding doom of climate change effects, but also put the effect of climate change in perspective to our current happiness, and how much we care about the well being of future generations due to the climate change related decisions we can make during our time on this planet. Climate change might be due to our poor environmental decisions, but it is crucial to examine why certain decisions are being made, such as for pleasure, comfort, or through ignorance.

“At its core, the climate problem is about protecting the future against intolerable damages, so it’s essential that policymakers think clearly about how much we value our descendants. Our goal is that our descendants will think back to this generation and be convinced that we carefully considered their interests [when setting climate policy].”

Most of the population would agree that we want to leave a habitable space for our future kin, but this is becoming increasingly difficult with exponential population increase, and the build up of mismanagement in poorer and less developed countries who are either unaware of climate change effects and their causes, or simply do not have the economic ability to actively finance change and try to make a difference.

“If society values the absolute number of people who are happy, it also has a significant effect on the world’s optimal peak temperature. A higher population leads to a higher carbon price but a lower optimal peak temperature; this is because it is even more important to limit temperature rise when there are more future people who will suffer the damages.”

Ultimately, the article concludes that understanding the amount happiness, and average happiness levels of our global population can help put climate change in a perspective where we actively care about our children, and their children, and so on, because we are in the happy mental state that allows us to focus on more long term goals. This is interesting to explore because many groups of people do not have the privilege to ponder the well being of the people who will come after them, due to circumstances such as poverty, which statistically showcase less happy people, who would ultimately make less future oriented decisions, and would submit to choosing quick, cheap solutions that they can benefit from in the short term. In conclusion, we are still deciding how much we should value the future generations well-being, especially in the context of understanding what the population wants and why, and if we will be able to help those in need quickly now, or if that will impede our ability to leave a habitable Earth for our children.

 

Water Sustainability

We are in an interesting, vicious, endless cycle of consumers continuously demanding more from industries, but expecting the increase of production  to also include products that are both safe and sustainable for themselves and the planet. This becomes an issue when industries such as agriculture face several issues with water risks, including water crises impacting the global economy, and many companies experiencing water-related losses.

To be able to keep up with the modern sustainable mindset of the population, certain food and beverage companies go the extra mile to ensure that they only get resources provided to them by environmentally responsible sources. This encourages agriculture companies to have to meet certain sustainability standards, however, the main issue is that water facets are not explicitly controlled, thus prompting a need to define water facet related standards more clearly and highlight them to companies.

Ultimately, the goal is to keep encouraging sustainability standards in agricultural supply chains, but we need to make sure that these standards span across the entire sustainability spectrum, especially water.

 

Conserving water, one drop at a time

This article suggests many ways that the individual could conserve water from home. For example, many people can check the flow of water running from their toilets and showers, and make sure they do not exceed the recommended amount of flow. We could turn the faucet off while brushing our teeth/ scrubbing our hands. We could limit the length of our showers to make sure that we are not wasting too much water. We could check the pipes and faucets to make sure there is no water being wasted.

These things seem pretty simple to do, I think the problem is making people more aware of these ideas. If many people knew that conserving each drop of water possible was important, we would be able to increase the conservation a lot. We need to come up with ways to spread the awareness in order to conserve water and this planet, for us and for future generations.

Hurricane Irma= too much wastewater

Florida was hit by a category 5 storm, Hurricane Irma, and now there is an indeterminate amount of wastewater that is accumulating over the land. The EPA estimated that there is tens of thousands of gallons of sewage piling out of the sewers in many parts of florida as a result to the storm. 

Because of this, Florida’s devastation is not to be cleared any time soon, until solutions are proposed for this conflict. In class, we’re trying to propose solutions for our own assigned sewersheds, so maybe one of our solutions that we come up with may in fact be the one for Florida’s conflict.

Pollution responsible for 16% of early deaths globally

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171020182513.htm

This article quantifies the effects of pollution. To generalize, pollution is responsible for 16% of all deaths globally,
“Pollution, which us at the root of many diseases and disorders that plague humankind, is entirely preventable”(Lanphear).Moreover, negative effects of pollution disproportionately kills low income people (with 92% of deaths occurring in low income countries). This shows a link between money and environmental issues; leading countries should do their part and switch over to eco-friendly energy (seeing as third world countries may not have the resources). As more nations move towards sustainability more will follow. Lastly, this percentage is projected to increase if nothing is changed. Therefore, we should continue to encourage innovations in sustainability.

Kiribati: The Race Against Climate Change

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P7jXveokDY?ecver=1]

By Caroline Zuba

The article I posted on Twitter, shown above, is ominous, yet painfully true. Titled “Kiribati’s fight for survival,” the article discussed how the 33 islands that make up Kiribati, a low-lying nation in the Pacific, are in tremendous danger with climate change. The highest point on most of the islands is only a couple of metres above sea level. On one island, South Tarawa, there is only one road.

Rising ocean water as a result of climate change is threatening to engulf the islands. Not only will it sink Kiribati, it also leaves it susceptible to storm damage.

Houses on the lagoon side around the village of Eita have been isolated by salt water from sea incursions and storm surges.

The most immediate concern, tied also to climate change, is fear of crop destruction. Sea incursions and king tides are ruining taro plant pits and fresh water sources. Villagers are already being forced to relocate, as evidenced from the photo. One villager says the following: “I talk about life because before this land was full of banana, babai, coconut trees, so many coconut trees, so many trees we get food from, but now how can those trees continue to live when you don’t have fresh water to give them? This is community land and so everybody has a right to live on it but now it seems like the sea has taken that away.”

“At the southern end of Abaiang in the village of Tebontebike, Maria Tekaie leans against an uprooted coconut tree that used to be 100 metres from the shore. The village had to be moved recently, as did the babai pits, due to the incursion of the sea.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The plight of the Kiribati is real for many other countries worldwide, but as the video explains, they might be our very first climate refugees. And as my discussion question asks: Who will be saved? The industrial work of countries like the U.S. and the UK are a good deal responsible for recent temperature changes that are affecting sea levels, and yet the lives of their entire populations is not at stake – the Kiribati’s are.