The MTA is underwater(in more ways than one)

New York is a city on the water. For hundreds of years, its rivers and harbor have worked to its advantage, bringing it speedy transportation and pleasant temperatures.
New York City has experienced 7.5-foot floods several times in the past decade. Superstorm Sandy loosed 10- or 11-foot floods on much of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Staten Island, killing 43 people and inundating more than 88,000 buildings.The next couple hundred years may not be as smooth sailing. Global warming, caused by the release of carbon-dioxide pollution into the atmosphere, will cause the seas to rise and the storms to intensify around the city. A new study from an all-star list of climate scientists attempts to estimate how a few of climate change’s symptoms—higher seas, large storm surge, and more intense hurricanes—will intersect in New York over the next 300 years.It isn’t pretty. Sea-level rise will make every tropical cyclone that hits New York more likely to release damaging floods. For instance, storm floods of nearly seven-and-a-half feet once occurred only a couple times per millennium. In today’s somewhat warmed climate, 7.5-foot floods are projected to happen every 25 years. By 2030, these floods will occur every five years.

Princess Mononoke and finding peace between nature and humans

Hayao Miyazaki’s film Princess Mononoke takes place in fictitious Japan during the 15th century – a point in time in which cities and towns are quickly industrializing. The main character, Ashitaka, journeys to Irontown, which is currently on one side of a vicious war against the spirits of the forest. The inhabitants of Irontown are pillaging and wrecking the forest in order to expand their town and acquire more resources.  What is important about this movie, however, is that it doesn’t villainize either side of the war. The people in Irontown are poor, outcasts of society (deformed, disabled, etc), and/or are women, and it is through industrialization that they are able to provide for themselves.

The message in this animated film is important, because it forces viewers to consider a complex question- how can we live life sustainably while making sure the poor and disenfranchised are still members of this society?

Poor countries and people cannot afford water sustainability

As population continues to skyrocket water sources become depleted as the needs of that growing population are fulfilled. In China and India, citizens are dependent on glacial melts which will be gone within the century. People also get water through snow melts, which have been heavily altered by climate change – hastening the speed of snow melts and leaving noting to sustain people and their farms through the dry summers. China continues to pump underground aquifers, which are quickly being depleted, to water farms. And “the Yellow River has been diverted to the point that it no longer flows to the sea.” In India, upstream states sometimes stop water flow to downstream states when rainfall is poor, which is happening more and more often due to climate change.

However, solutions are costly. “…Better pricing of water will lead to much greater efficiency. Drip irrigation can reduce the water demand of crops. Desalination can vastly expand water supplies, though at high energy costs. Water storage systems can spare farmers the misery of crop failures. But these solutions presuppose vast expenditures of capital, and such solutions do not automatically address the needs of the poor, who are unable to pay for that capital.” The solutions are not easily accessible to the poor and countries that need it the most, will not bring about immediate and sweeping change, and could potentially have even worse affects on the environment.

A solution must be found soon, and fast for this global problem. And while the poor can’t afford some solutions, they (and everyone else) cannot afford to continue living unsustainably.

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.