Author: Jessica Kraker

Solar Thermal Response

This article was cool in how thorough they were with their explanations. It says over 30% of a building’s energy consumption is used fro heating and hot water – a number that goes up in the winter time. 30% doesn’t even sound like much, but it is in terms of how it harms the environment. We already know from previous readings how the oils used for those heatings can harm the air and we need to look into other solutions. Solar thermal technology can be the answer we were wondering about. It’s renewable, emissions-free and cost efficient. We just need to get it running off the ground, but that’s hard without money incentives and well, without people knowing about it in general, right?

It was interesting to find out that NYC is the most “favorable market” for solar thermal technologies in our state. Everything about our city makes it the perfect candidate for the renewable energy solution while also being a city that the world looks to for innovation and inspiration. The Solar Thermal Pilot Program frames the things that are holding this vision back and outlines what they city has to do such as offering grants to decrease installation costs. I also liked that they used buildings in different boroughs for their data collection/ demonstration projects, this way they can know the highs and the lows.

I understand people’s hesitation about solar panels because the initial costs can be quite a bit. But really, what they lose there, they will make back with how low their energy bills will be afterwards. They literally will save hundreds of dollars as seen by the data. This seems like an agreeable solution. So does the emissions reduction and job creation that can stem from having a solar thermal energy system in our city.

 

Resource Management Response

We talk about urban planning in class as something thought of in post-production terms; things we have to add onto/ into our city. But this article pointed out that my view of it has been completely flawed. As the abstract spells out, resource management and urban planning have literally gone hand in hand with each other since the beginning of time. The human race wouldn’t have gotten so far if they hadn’t followed their intuition/logic to see how important it was to manage their resources to the benefit them. In modern society now, we’re trying to manage them to benefit both us and the environment.

As Samin points out in his response, the article focuses on how cities can use their limited resources and make them last longer. Why have our resources been depleted so quickly? The authors list industrialism, rapid growth of the world population, urbanization and technological development to be the leading factors. These are things that we can also view as progress for the human race; it’s a double-edged blade. These are also things we can’t really do much about. We talked about dissuading people from having ton of kids, but we can’t control them. It’d also be hard to stop technological progress and industrialization. That’s why we just have to run with it/ work with it. We don’t have the luxury of using up resources without consequences.

The article poses the question of what can be sustained and developed at the same time. The WCED defines sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. But this seems to be a hard balance to find. It’s what requires resource management to be so well thought out, testing all options, knowing the trade-offs. In the 1990s, SD became something linked to social and economic issues which was helpful for awareness and also for idea generation, but I don’t know if this is actually a good thing (draws us away from the main issue?). It would really suck if good ideas and plans were scrapped because of political red tape which seems to be everywhere.

 

Field Trip Response

Most of the fossils and footprints found in the Connecticut Valley are from the Triassic and Jurassic periods (found by radiometric dating of basalt layers), which is when the Hartford Basin was formed. The Hartford South quadrangle has the youngest formations, including the East Berlin Formation which contains tracks of Eubrontes and other dinosaur footprints. In the black shale layers there are also fish fossils. In the New Haven arkose, Newark group, and Portland arkose are the remains of plants and animals from the Triassic period. The fossils are grouped into 2 categories: the impressions left in the sediments by living things and the actual fossilized remains of plants and animals.

These are all pretty great and cool and everything, but just because they’re there, doesn’t mean we can start painting a picture of how everything was and how these creatures found there way there. For example, the fossils found there don’t necessarily tell us all the creatures that lived there. There were several dinosaurs represented by the bones: Anchisaurus, Ammosaurus, Coelophys, Yaleosuarus. These all share similarities, but they don’t mean there weren’t other, completely different dinosaurs lurking about. What do footprints tell us? Well, they’re the markers of the comings and goings of creatures. And that’s what makes me question, and it makes Baird question too, whether the tracks show dinosaurs they haven’t found the bones of. There could be ones who migrated through the area seasonally for food or mating. Sure, prosauropods were the most abundant, but maybe they were there for only a specific time period that just so happened to coincide with their death?

arkose: a granular sedimentary rock composed of quartz and feldspar or mica;a feldspathic sandstone

lithology: the physical characteristics of a rock or stratigraphic unit.

Hurricane Irene Article Response

As we talked about in class today, it’s pretty much fact that when you build on the coast, you are likely to get flooded. The introduction begins with pointing out the obvious, “They are populating an area that is vulnerable to coastal flooding by major hurricanes.” After Sandy, I’m pretty sure we all realized this. But like we were talking about, no one wants to move. Instead, they got the government and their house insurance to rebuild their homes in the same place they were. This is just illogical. Maybe the government should enforce imminent domain and use the money they would use for rebuilding and put it towards getting the people a new residence away from the coast.

This, of course, comes with its own set of obstacles. Where would these people live. Overcrowding is already a problem in our city and our outer boroughs. There is simply no more land to give. Since we can’t build outwards towards the coasts, we would probably have to continue building upwards. Can you imagine a New York where people mostly live in skyscrapers? That leaves much of the land free to go back to its natural state or be used as parks. Realistically, though, people don’t want to live on top of each other like this.

The article also talks about how some buildings are not up to snuff when it comes to NYC building regulations because those regulations do not take into account climate change and other developments. This means new buildings have an increased risk of flooding and old ones too. We need to work harder for better integration between our policy makers and our builders and scientists who actually know what’s going on first hand. Bloomberg’s Vision 2020 sure sounds great because it hopes to make our 500+ mile shoreline sustainable. But this came out in 2011 and we’ll graduate by 2018. Will things really be so different in less than 4 years? I don’t really think so.

Here’s a fun article to show how much space people take up and how if we didn’t have houses/ personal space/ any reason to function, we could actually fit the whole population in one place.

http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-building.html

Paper for the 21st

Hey guys, here’s the article for discussion along with the hurricane one on the 21st.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/downloads/pdf/environmental/air-quality-report-2013.pdf

If you want a summary of this report/supplemet, this news article helps:

http://www.gothamgazette.com/index.php/government/5111-while-improving-quiet-crisis-air-quality-persists-new-york-city-asthma-air-pollution

Chapter 10 – Weathering Response

This chapter was the perfect way to end the book, in my opinion. Because in the end, everything gets old, wears down, and disappears. We saw it happen with great grassy plains becoming urban centers and forests and marshes being cut down and drained. This, however, is different, because nature is wearing itself out too.

There’s that little thing called global warming. People have been ignoring the melting poles and the starving animals there who struggle in an environment that’s changing too quickly for them to even have a chance of adapting. Temperatures have risen and the melting ice has contributed to sea levels rising. This is some pretty scary stuff happening. Just think of how the sea erodes our beaches when there are storms. It can be dangerous.

No matter how many levees we build or sand walls we pile up on our shores, nature will always overpower it. McCully gave us an example of that island that literally disappeared, totally got swallowed by the sea. I feel like that’s what the end of the world will be like – nature taking back what’s rightfully theirs. It’s as inevitable as anything I’v ever seen. And we kind of deserve it. We build houses on cliffs and beaches without really thinking that not everything is our playground.

Green Roofs Response

As I’ve mentioned many times in class, I am a huge fan of green roofs and a fan of urban vegetation in general in terms of how they can both reduce air pollution and be beautiful while doing it. The article mentions how green roofs replace the plants that the creation of the buildings destroyed. This is what I meant when I ranted about “replacement services” i.e. ways a city can get back the ecosystem services they destroyed. Green roofs are obviously one such way.

Green roofs are good for our health, the air,decreasing the amount of roofing material that ends up in landfills, retaining stormwater, and reducing noise. These are all things we all believe the city needs. However, the paper does include how there needs to be more research into all these topics.

While green roofs are a good idea, they open a new door into whether or not we should go for full on rooftop gardens. This is a whole other can of worms because there would have to be research into which species work best for which climate, etc. But another problem would be that cities would still have pollution and growing food high up where that smog passes through might make that food bad to eat. It’s just something to think about.

Chapter 6 – Muddied Waters – Response

McCully did a pretty good job telling us how much literal crap is dumped into our waterways with this chapter. I feel like this topic, more than the other chapters, is one most of us can relate to. We’ve all spent time by the piers or the beaches so we have seen firsthand how disgusting the water can get because of factories dumping random things into it and people also just throwing things in willy-nilly. It’s hard to imagine it being so bad in the 1920’s that Manhattan was called “a body of land entirely surrounded by sewage.”

This might have to do with how most people think water just washes things away; that if they dump their waste into the water without treating it, it will just go away and not be their problem anymore. As McCully shows us though, this is not the case. We are all hurt by what happens to the water. One of her examples was the nuclear plant in Buchanan, NY which killed millions of fish that got caught in the overheated water in their turbines (88). One accident wiped out millions of living creatures. That’s pretty intense.

Another thing she mentioned was PCB’s and how they infect the fish in the water, fish people eat. Then if these fish are eaten by pregnant women or kids, those people can get sick (90). We depend on the water for so many things, so that by destroying it as a clean source, we slowly destroy ourselves. Yet we’ve been doing just that. We over-harvested oysters, destroyed marshes by draining them, changed the salinity of ecosystems. The latter being especially bad when we increased it and hurt organisms that needed lower levels to survive (93).

Chapter 7 – Footprints – Response

In this chapter, McCully discusses the grasslands and fields that used to make up parts of New York. She mentions Mitchel Field on the Hempstead Plains of Long Island which was utilized during wartime as an Air Force Base. She also talked about how the Plains are full of plants on the endangered, threatened, and vulnerable species list. Yet, like with the base, a lot of the Plains were used for our own human activities. Who knows what happened to those plants? Or if the reason they’re like that now is because of us?

Not to mention all the invasive species that have found their way to our country or the ones that were deliberately planted to get a certain environment. Settlers planted Kentucky bluegrass and clover because they knew that they’d be good forage crops. These crops then spread like crazy throughout our country. It was to the point where later settlers thought those crops were native to the US.

There was one great quote I liked. “A weed is a plant whose virtues we have forgotten.” I think this is insanely accurate. McCully mentions how they used to be valued as food, as medicinal herbs; sassafras used to be known as some miracle cure-all. Samuel Mitchell was surgeon-general of NY and he utilized some of these. This is so different from our stance on weeds today. When you Google it, the first things that come up are products or companies you can use to get rid of “pesky” weeds. But that’s just a matter of opinion. Sure, if you’re a farmer or a gardener I understand how you could be irked by weeds choking out your crops or vegetables. Still, there’s always a good side to the bad.

I found a couple sites that talk about weeds you can actually eat and I thought that was so interesting. Like we can eat dandelions! Which is cool! European settlers used to put them in salads. They have more beta-carotene than carrots. Purslane leaves can be put into sandwiches for vitamin A & C. Boiled bamboo can be used in salads and stir fries. I feel like these are all great things to know so that none of these weeds go to waste. Yet these are the things not taught in classes.

http://www.rodalesorganiclife.com/garden/8-weeds-you-can-eat

http://www.livescience.com/15322-healthiest-backyard-weeds.html

 

Ecosystem Services Response

I really was interested in this article because ecosystem services are basically the answer whenever we pose the question, “Why should we care?” That’s a question people have been asking and will keep asking no matter how many years go by. We talk about immediate gratification all the time and class and this ties into that human need to get an eye for an eye; get what you give and give what you get.

Section 3.1 on air filtering was one I especially liked and I took the time to Google some articles on it. The quantity of filtered air is dependent on leaf area and when you think about, there are so many things we can branch into from there. What trees would be best to plant in areas of high pollution? This article tells us coniferous trees have larger surface area than deciduous trees and therefore have a greater filtering capacity. It is also stated that vegetation is better for filtering air than water or open spaces. (295)

So how can we use this to our advantage? Living in a small apartment near the Javits Center, my grandparents always have their window sills filled by plants. You might think nothing of this, but certain plants provide better indoor air quality than others such as English Ivy, spider plants, peace lilies, and bamboo palms. These are great plants for city apartments and window boxes.  (MNN)

Another article showed that the placement of grass and climbing ivy in urban canyons can reduce the concentration of street level NO2 by 40% and disease-causing particulates by 60%. One of their suggestions was to make “green billboards” in urban areas to help the air. (treehugger) I think these ideas would be more easily taken up by the general populous.

http://www.mnn.com/health/healthy-spaces/photos/15-houseplants-for-improving-indoor-air-quality/a-breath-of-fresh-air

http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/urban-vegetation-reduces-pollution-8x-more-previously-believed.html