Author: chrislau

I really liked how this article provided a pretty in depth analysis regarding resource management, urban planning, and sustainable development over the period of time humans have started to build cities to where we are right now. It also did a great job of breaking down civilization into a few phases where RM, UP, and SD were significantly changed to suit the needs of the global population during those specific time periods. The general trend was basically the more advanced our technology got, the larger the world population grew, and the more damage we did to our environment. The trend also seemed to take a shape of an exponential growth graph where the past 200 years took on huge technological developments leading to unrecoverable environmental damage. The graph in section 4 showing the timeline also shows the more we progress and advance as a civilization, the more problems we created for ourselves to face and the harder it was to manage our resources effectively and develop in a way that would sustain the environment. It just wasn’t practical because of the growing population and also the “side effects” of our technology would created new environmental problems on a consistent basis. One example of this is in section 3.4.1 where chemical fertilizers were mentioned to create food faster for people, but that eventually bit us in the back and created a slew of new problems including water pollution and the consumption of even more fossil fuels because these chemical fertilizers depended on them. Even though we thought we took a direction towards solving the problem of hunger, it created two more new problems regarding the environment.

I think at the present, sustainable development is the hardest of the three concepts to tackle and it has to be carefully intertwined within the other two concepts. As mentioned in the introduction, there are also a lot of conflicting views and definitions towards sustainable development, which can hinder our progress because people aren’t necessarily agreeing on the same solutions, which creates more problems because the longer we take to implement a plan, the worse the condition of the environment gets. At this point, we are already at a stage where the population is growing at extremely alarming rates and resources are being used up way faster than they can be replenished, with no end in sight. There needs to be remodeling of our cities soon that can lead us into a direction to still grow as a population, but also keeps our resource use in check. However, I don’t really see how we can get the environment to a point that it will replenish faster than it is used up unless there are serious reductions to the global population. If we can’t implement any good solutions, eventually the population will grow to a point where there will be no resources left and we will be in deep trouble by then and many many lives will be lost.

From the Colbert document, we can infer that most of the dinosaur species in the late Triassic and early Jurassic periods in the Connecticut Valley were not the type of dinosaurs that we think of when dinosaurs are mentioned to us today. These dinosaurs in the Connecticut Valley couldn’t have been really large and were rather small compared to other species as such as Tyrannosaurus Rex or Triceratops. There seemed to be only two distinct groups of dinosaurs in the Connecticut Valley. One of these groups were the larger prosauropod dinosaurs which included the Yaleosaurus, Anchisaurus, and the Ammosaurus, while the other group were the Coelurosaurian dinosaurs, which mainly consisted of the Coelophysis. Scientists can tell these two groups of dinosaurs weren’t really that large compared to some of the other species due the imprints in the Connecticut Valley today. However, it is also these imprints that is creating some ambiguity among scientists because the footprints could have also belonged to a couple of other dinosaurs such as the Grallator or even reptiles such as the Stegomus. Therefore, it is important for us to keep in mind that it is impossible to be near a high percentage of accuracy when dealing with fossils and tracks left behind millions of years ago. We will never truly learn what exact species of dinosaurs belonged to which areas during a narrow period of time because it is just not plausible due to all the years that have passed since these species have been long extinct. The best we can do is to make rough estimates and place species in a general location over a long span of time.

I found it pretty interesting how the maps were produced in the Bedrock Geology article because the mappers couldn’t use the lithology of the rocks due to the intense weathering conditions that had affected the rocks over time. The mappers had to resort to looking at the basalt layers of the rock and use that to make estimates during the construction of the maps. This just shows how hard it is to make estimates and accurate displays of what the world was like millions of years ago. There are just too many variables that could’ve affected the Earth that can create pointers to mislead scientists when they are trying to piece together the Earth’s past. The East Berlin rock formation did provide a quality photo showing us what the imprints mentioned in the Colbert article looked like. The photo on page 17 also shows kind of an amusing photo with the old age rock formations sitting just yards away from what seems to look like a relatively new road or highway. This just kind of makes you feel that all the modern cities and countries we live in today was once roamed with dinosaurs and shows how quickly human civilization converted nature to what we have today.

Definitions

lithology: is a description of a rock unit’s physical characteristics visible at outcrop, in hand or core samples or with low magnification microscopy, such as color, texture, grain size, or composition.

lacustrine: of, related to, or associated with lakes.

 

This report really did show a lot of improvement for recent years regarding the air pollution in NYC. Over this time interval of 2008-2013, it seemed that the focus of the city government was to reduce the omissions of Nos. 4 and 6 oils because they were heavily polluting the air even though there was only about 1% of buildings that used these fuels. It seems that the legislation to reduce these two harmful pollutant sources were passed relatively quickly and then enforced, which showed why there was such an improvement to the air quality from 2008 to 2013. The graphs and charts presented in the report also displayed how the air quality improved, which was nice to see visually. However, there should have been some graphs that showed pollution data before 2008 to show the trends on a larger scale and see if we are really improving at a consistent level. The people who were responsible with this project also seemed to be very productive and efficient because they located one of the major sources of the problem and then worked quickly with lawmakers and policymakers to reduce those oil sources. This shows a lot of hope that pollution can be reduced significantly if the right people are at the leaders of the projects focused to stop pollution.

The report also did a nice job of showing how reducing the air pollution directly correlated to reducing health issues related to bad quality air. The graph on page 10 of the report made it really easy to see how health issues related to air pollution is slowly declining, which is is good sign for people living in those areas. Even though the report mentions mainly positive trends relating to air pollution, I liked the fact that they still mentioned there is a lot more work to be done regarding air pollution and that they are now focused on reducing the NOx levels in the air. There are many components that contribute to air pollution and the fact that one component has been reduced doesn’t mean that all the air pollution will just vanish. The report shows that the focus will shift to reducing NOx in the future, which is a good sign because we have to tackle these components one at a time. There has been good progress made towards reducing air pollution and if researchers and government regulators can cooperate together, there should be no reason why air pollution will not continue to be diminishing year after year.

I felt that this chapter really presented some problems of nature that will be out of our hands to solve due to our actions harming the environment. The author mentions the rising sea level and how one big storm could basically destroy an entire coastal city given the right conditions for the sea. Even if we are trying to use technology to prevent these storms, we really can’t stop the strongest storms because mother nature can just overpower whatever we have built. We have basically created this condition for ourselves because of our careless behavior with the environment in the past and even now without thinking of the consequences. These powerful storms are just one of the many consequences that we will have to accept and face in the future and might be a good reminder for us to watch out with what we are doing with the environment right now. I do think that these storms and other immediate consequences might not necessarily be an entirely negative thing because they can show people that if we do not change our ways, then nature will eventually punish us one way or another.

Another interesting point McCully mentions on page 148 is that people believe that nature will change anyways, so what’s the point of us trying to do so much conservation and protective work regarding the environment. This mindset is probably true and the fact that nature will change is also true, so we can’t really blame people for thinking like this because realistically many people living on Earth right now probably won’t die from a huge natural disaster and as we can see throughout the readings, nature is a volatile force that is hard to predict and hard to protect against. McCully’s view on this mindset seems to be that compared to our ancestors, we are speeding up all of these bad natural disasters or processes, but people won’t really consider that point because even though we are speeding things up, the fact remains that it will still take at least decades or centuries before these impacts will directly cause huge troubles for us. The global warming example on page 148 says that global temperature measurements have changed from being measured over thousands of years to centuries now, but to the human species right now, centuries is still way past their lifetime and will not spark them to take action to instantly save the environment.

McCully seems to disagree with a lot of the preventive measures of storms taken by the coastal cities, implying that one big disastrous storm will wipe out any of these preventive measurements. However, I feel that these preventive measures aren’t necessarily as bad as she views them because at least the government or the locals are trying to slow down the storms instead of leaving themselves completely vulnerable to a direct storm, which will result in more casualties. There should be adjustments for these preventive measures to better adapt to the storms, but not having anything to reduce the impacts of these storms will not pose well for people living near the sea.

This paper was a really complete research paper that analyzed all the aspects of how green roofs will benefit us and also the necessary costs that we have to incur before we can see these benefits. It laid out for green roofs could do for the environment in a very organized way and then added some more new innovative ideas to further develop a more complete green roof design, which I found was very neat. I didn’t really know how complicated the whole process was and thought green roofs was just growing some plants and vegetation on rooftops and that would surely benefit the environment. The proposals the author make regarding the future directions for research included selecting the correct plants to grow that would fit the certain area they were in and also the specific substrates to grow on the rooftop. In a way, if green rooftops were implemented, the rooftop would be forced into an ecosystem similar to an invasive species, which is why the author emphasized the importance of growing the right species in the right locations.

Green rooftops obviously sounds like a great way to improve the environment without taking away the land that humans desire for because rooftops are usually empty and not used anyways. However, the persistent problem of short term costs to receive long term benefits still exists and will likely be the major reason why green rooftops won’t be implemented as fast as we hope they can be. Converting regular rooftops into green rooftops will take an enormous budget to implement and the people who are potential candidates to pay for these projects might not do so because they won’t really see the effects of their money being spent. It really isn’t that difficult to come up with very solid ideas like green rooftops, but the hard part with all environmental efforts is finding that lump of cash that can get these projects done, but we can’t just force those with money to sponsor these projects. There are plenty of creative minds in our world that come up with many brilliant ideas to help our environment, but it is truly the rich who can take the most action to save our environment. Currently, there are plenty of proposals and ideas like green rooftops out there, but not enough people willing to put these ideas into action, and the longer we wait, the more the environment deteoriates.

Chapter 6 does a good job of addressing the water pollution in NYC by focusing on government legislation, and why once a law is passed, it just doesn’t clean everything up like we imagine it to. The chapter mentions that some early laws passed in the 19th Century and early 20th Century were just simply ignored because there was no strict enforcement that punished the entities or people who purposely damaged the waters by dumping waste and pollutants. We can also see that the law can also be fought against by powerful people as shown in pages 89-90 where anti environmental legislation groups tried to take down laws such as the Superfund Act and propose their own rules such as the Dirty Water Bill, both of which tried to help the wealthy owning these corporations. Even though these two proposals were eventually defeated, we can see that the law usually involves a lot of wasted time that could’ve saved a portion of the deteriorating environment, and the worst case is that the courts do overturn the laws and bills that are trying to protect the environment. There were a lot of examples of legislation that were passed in the 20th century that did indeed dramatically help restore the waters and prevent a lot of pollution, so there is definitely hope in the future for lawmakers to pass even more favorable laws for the environment if the courts do not favor the wealthy and powerful in our world.

I would also like to mention the author’s pessimistic tone throughout the book and particularly near the end of the chapter where she mentions how “the rivers will never be crowded with fish that one can walk across them on their backs” and brings up no matter how well restoration efforts and protective efforts are, these ecosystems will always be fragmentary. We will never be able to go back in time with the knowledge we have now regarding our environment, and some mistakes just have to be forgiven and not constantly mentioned if we are to make good progress towards the future. The waste and pollutants had to be dumped somewhere in the past, and our predecessors didn’t realize the terrible effects it would have on the environment. It would be great if we could all predict the future and know exactly what consequences our actions would have, but as we know that is not the case. The fact that we are making a lot of progress in restoring these damaged ecosystems should be viewed in an optimistic light, but the author always seems to take a negative jab towards the actions that were in the past instead of focusing on the possibilities that we can achieve in the future. At the end of the day, we are still humans and will continue to use the environment to our advantage as long as we still roam the planet, but some of us are making big steps to restore our damaged ecosystems and preserve them for the generations ahead of us.

I felt that this chapter really did a great job of showing how fragile ecosystems really are and that one certain change to one specific species could cripple an entire ecosystem. Some old trends in past chapters such as the “European effect” on the environment are present in this chapter, but instead of putting a lot of the blame on the Europeans, it seemed to me that the European mindset of exploiting every aspect of their environment might have created some big benefits regarding medicine. If the European mindset towards the environment was the same as the Native Americans, the field of medicine might not as be as advanced as it is today, and surely many more people would’ve died from treatable diseases. Once again, this goes back to that fragile balance of man and nature and how we coexist with each other. Even though it is important to know how we have harmed the environment, sometimes I just think that for us to have what we have today, it might have been necessary for our ancestors to do what they did to the environment.

Another part I found interesting in this chapter was the two projects mentioned towards the end of the chapter that tried to improve the prairies in their respective areas. The processes for both of these projects were quite complex and faced a lot of challenges from invasive species and also whether or not the plants would receive the seeds from birds. In both these cases, the end result was great, but the great part about these two projects was that the solutions weren’t simple and had a bit of creativity to them, which is what we need in order to even further improve other ecosystems and the environment as a whole. Simple solutions just do not seem plausible because of the fact that there are so many different factors that can damage the environment and also how easily an ecosystem can be disrupted.

The last paragraph of the chapter really summed up the dynamics of the environment well. The author presents a situation where a loss or growth of a certain species in an ecosystem can lead to so many different outcomes for the ecosystem as a whole. It’s really hard for humans to make decisions regarding which species to save and what invasive species to kill off because the environment an change so fast depending on the actions we make. What if the endangered species becomes so abundant in the future that it begins to threaten their ecosystem? What if the invasive species soon becomes endangered or even on the verge of extinction because we decided to destroy them. As we can see, saving the environment is lot more complicated than it seems.

There is always discussion from people regarding what we should do to save the environment, but they don’t necessarily provide the audience with enough motivation to actually go out and take action. This article does a great job of intertwining our city life with the environment and gives a lot of good information telling us how the environment can help improve our lives and the specific factors that many people care about such as air quality and noise levels. What surprised me was the effect that vegetation can have on so many aspects to improving the well-being of a city. Vegetation was useful in almost all of the sections mentioned by the author, and the most surprising uses is probably for noise reduction and how much it can impact the air we breathe. Even though the study focused on Stockholm, vegetation really isn’t that hard to find across cities around the world, so different cities should be utilizing vegetation as well as they can. Section 3.6 even shows that people in the city of Stockholm value their green spaces such as vegetation simply for its aesthetics and provides a lot of good numbers backing up the psychological effects that green spaces had on the citizens. These types of relationships between citizens and their environment is what we need more of across the world because if people truly love the environment for what it is, they won’t mind taking additional steps to further care for it and preserve it for the future.

Another thing I felt that the article conveyed well compared to our previous readings is that it incorporates a lot of costs and the specific amounts of money people can save if they treat their environment properly. Most people might listen to and think about the environmental issues surrounding them, but won’t probably take action because they just don’t see any short term benefits, but in this case, the article mentions how the environment can help them save money quickly. The first example is in section 3.2 where the author describes how vegetation can decrease electricity bills by providing warmth in the winter and protecting from heat during the summer. The short term cost benefit here was saving around $50-$90 per unit per year. That may not be a lot of money for an individual, but just seeing these numbers might help spark some people’s passion to save the environment. If everybody chips in to the effort, then that can be a lot of money saved as a collective unit. Another example is presented in section 3.3 where shrubbery is mentioned to able to significantly reduce noise levels. Without the shrubbery, people would have to resort to building thick walls to prevent noise, but those walls are quite expensive costing around $625 per meter. This would certainly be a significant cost for the everyday citizen and would also not look very stylish, so in my opinion, this was a perfect way to get people to preserve their shrubbery or even get them to plant more. I felt that this article used a great method try and convey to people how important the environment really is by getting into their heads with short term benefits involving money, unlike a lot of the readings we read before where long term benefits were the main emphasis.

 

 

Chapter 9 shared a lot of similarities with chapter 8 regarding the different ways the Europeans approached America compared to the Native Americans. Instead of destroying trees this time, it was birds, and honestly the descriptions of the bird shootings really were horrifying. Once again, the Native Americans learned to hunt the birds with a limit, while the Europeans hunted without mercy. Page 131 provides a perfect story regarding the destruction of the birds in America, and paints a vivid picture of an entire village bringing their firearms upon sighting a migration flock and just unloading upon the birds. There was no logic to this and if the birds were to be used for food, then one shot would be enough, but as we saw in chapter 8, the Europeans didn’t really know when to stop when doing things that could harm the environment. The millinery trade mentioned in this chapter also emphasizes the point that when resources continue to dwindle, the prices of those resources rise, and become more desired among people. Instead of thinking to preserve the limited resources, people tend to want them more and more because of the rarity of the resource.

One really interesting passage in this chapter was on page 137 where the author describes the cormorant bird species. At first, the cormorant birds were dwindling in population because of the pesticides in their habitat, but once legislation was passed to stop the pollution in those areas, the cormorants rebounded and were able to have a significant increase in population. However, as time passed by, their population grew out of control to the point that it began to threaten the balance of the ecosystem they were a part of that the government had to pass laws to allow the cormorants to be killed again in order to maintain the balance of that ecosystem. This dramatic change in cormorant population only took around 20 years and shows how hard it is to keep every member of the environment in good shape because one change in one member’s population size could have significant effects on its ecosystem as a whole. This also raises the question of whether humans have the right to purposely interfere and kill a certain species just to preserve the balance within that ecosystem. The ending of the chapter provides the other side where we destroyed so many of the bird population and realized it too late that these birds will never be seen in New York again. Trying to preserve the environment will be a task that can never be fully accomplished due to the huge number of variables whether created by humans or not that can impact the environment.

The Biodiversity Assessment Handbook really did a great job of providing an understandable and detailed account of biodiversity in New York City as a whole. The sequence in which the authors try to make their points are also set up well as the handbook starts off with telling the audience about all the positive impacts of biodiversity and then giving examples of those positives that exists within NYC. There were two benefits that the authors mentioned that I never really realized and those were “the natural insurance policy” and “a source of inspiration and ideas” on page 5. The natural insurance policy was something new that I never heard of and actually makes a lot of sense because the more diverse an area is, the less likely it is to be affected by different kinds of external factors such as new diseases or natural disasters. Even though the authors mention at the end of that section, that some people think that biodiversity should be preserved solely for its intrinsic value, I believe that if more people understand how many positive effects biodiversity can have on our lives, the more willing they will be to preserve the environment.

Even though many people won’t think as NYC as a center of rich biodiversity, the handbook really shows that that might not be the case. I was surprised about the amount of different wetlands and bedrock reside in NYC and also how much impact the soil in New York makes regarding the species surrounding it. We don’t really pay attention to the soil when we are outside, but in reality slight changes to the soil can make huge differences for the environment surrounding it.

The section about threats to NYC biodiversity showed how many factors can have a negative impact on NYC biodiversity and I found the sections about non native species and pollution to be the most interesting. I didn’t really think that introduction of new species to an environment could be so harmful to that certain area, but as the authors mentioned, sometimes these new and invasive species can decimate the biodiversity of a certain environment if not properly managed. The authors also mention “overabundant” species and how the increase of population of those species decreases the populations of other species, but in my opinion, should we really do anything about this because isn’t this just nature going on its course. What gives us the right to try and limit a certain type of species in order for another one to prosper? Light and noise pollution also was an interesting factor that could harm the environment, and I found the example about birds crashing into skyscrapers because of artificial lighting to be alarming. In the end, I still believe that education at a very early age might be the most important factor for getting more people to take the necessary steps to save our environment. If everybody knew about these wonderful uses of our environment and also some of the more hidden consequences resulting from our actions, we can pool our efforts to improve the environment around us.