Author: michael woyevodsky

After reading this article about Masdar, I have a few concerns. One of these is that I don’t believe that this can be a model city for the rest of the world. This is because they are starting from scratch rather than just altering an already created city like New York City. I believe that Masdar would serve better as a testing city for different types of programs to test and see what will work and what wont. I believe that that trials that are successful should be implemented into other cities but the ones that don’t should be ignored.

Another issue I have is that I don’t see how a city like this would be popular among regular people. It is a remote city that is away from the rest of the world. Most people dont want to have to take a train or other transit to be a part of normal life. In addition to this, it is hard for humans, creatures of habit, to change the way they live all of a sudden. After learning that there are not many people living there anymore I am not surprised.

While I think that this idea is great for testing different forms of self sustainability, I dont believe that we can mass produce these types of cities because there are so many costs associated with creating a city like this, as well as all land as basically build on already and there is zero possibility of completely changing a city like New York without destroying it and rebuilding. I think that this would be a good idea if something catastrophic would to happen but not right now.

Plastic bags are a huge issue for pollution in all countries around the world because they are so cheap and markets save money by using them instead of paper. I believe this idea to ban plastic bags is a good idea because of how bad it is for the environment. There is a problem with doing this however, plastic is super cheap. Money is the driving force behind the usage of plastics. If we ban plastic, markets and producers will have to turn to a more expensive form of packaging and carrying bags which will drive away the less fortunate consumers who can not afford the increase in prices of goods. One thing that I am afraid of is a catastrophic meltdown of the economy if taxes placed on plastic become out of control where nobody can afford anything that either used to  be packaged in it or still is at a exponentially higher price. Nobody would be able to afford anything anymore causing an economic implosion.

One thing that is a problem with this is the question of who does the government enforce this policy on. There are several options, the producers of the plastic bags, the managers of specific markets, the consumers, or the company that owns several markets supplying these as carrying bags themselves. All these have positive and negative aspects that are associated with them. There is no true answer besides just completely banning plastic as a material of use for things like bags and packaging. By banning it completely, the government can then subsidize the costs of paper or biodegradable material that will then be used. This will save the environment and then make for a better future for our planet.

I enjoyed reading this article a lot because I enjoy biking when I am back on long island where the roads are less polluted with crazy drivers. Ive always wanted to bring my bike to the city but never felt confident enough that there was a safe place to ride. Reading this article was enjoyable because it was nice to see that there is other people out there who believe that there should be more accessible places to bike in major cities as it is truly the best means of transportation. Riding a bike benefits so many things from your health to our planet’s health, there is no reason why it shouldn’t be pushed on people of the US more.

One statistic in this article that I found to be fascinating was that only 0.5% of people in the US ride bikes regularly and a staggering 27% of trips are made by bike in the Netherlands. I agree with the article in that this may be caused by the lack of safe riding tracks that people in major cities, where biking would be the most logical form of transport. Even though a couple avenues and lost of streets have bike lanes, they are basically inside and taken over by the streets and I believe them to be useless. I have been cut off riding my penny board on these lanes by taxis and other vehicles like moving trucks more times than I can count and believe that if NYC was covered in paved and protected biking lanes, like along the west side highway, then there would be a staggering increase in bikers in NYC alone. However, after reading this article and seeing that there is an extremely low rate of crashes, 2.7%, I am considering bringing in my bike for the remaining time it is bearable to ride in this cold weather and for the spring and summer seasons to come.

While reading this post I was thinking to myself, how often have I been in the contaminated area after 9/11 when the air wasn’t officially clean. Due to the failure of the first project, the air was still not clean. Speaking of the first effort to clean, it was very surprising to me that only 20% of people eligible for the service actually refused the building treatment. Other than that I think that it was very smart to test again. Although adding the other bad air tests to the program, I agree with the article in saying that it is still an issue that testing was not ordered upon north of Canal and Brooklyn.

One problem I have is the lack of social awareness that the EPA provided, not giving anyone a fully educated chance to decide if 1. They want their home cleaned and 2. if its safe to be living and breathing where there are. I think they did a really poor job doing the one job they had. One other thing they did wrong was not implementing the new program for such a long time after the collapse of the towers on 9/11. Because the quality of service done the first time was so poor people breathed in hazardous air in for about another 5 years which I definitely dont believe to be a safe amount of time to be exposed to something like asbestos.

Overall I think that if the EPA did the correct job the first time, there would be a lot smaller number of people affected by post 9/11 disease from exposure to bad air toxins. I don’t know why a government agency was allowed to do such a poor job on something like this. Maybe this could lead to a conspiracy theory…

Waste without a doubt is a problem. Specifically waste that has to do with things that should be recycled that aren’t. This is because a few possible things: lack of awareness to which people don’t know what can be recycled and what cannot, as well as the theory of the free rider program that people believe that if they don’t recycle, someone else will somewhere else to balance it out. This percentage of people is astronomical as can be seen on garbage day the amount of bottles and cans that collectors are able to find in the trash to deposit as money.

One thing that stuck out in this article was that only 15% of residential waste is recycled, down from 23% a few years ago. This shows that people just don’t think its a big deal anymore to recycle, because there definitely is not a decrease in the amount of plastics being used as containers for consumer goods from years ago.

I have a few solutions to the recyclable wastes issue:

1. Increase the amount of money awarded per can/bottle that is recycled in the machines
2. If people dont want to make the effort to go to one of the machines, lets have the State fund a service of trucks that drive to residences on a scheduled basis to pick up the cans and pay people for their effort.

I think we all can agree that there is no better incentive than a cash payout or a tax cut. If there was a way to implement an awarding system for people to recycle it will jumpstart a upward trend in the amount of waste properly recycled. Eventually, there can be a decrease in the awards given out but humans are highly influenced by habit and if they are recycling properly for a long time it will become second nature to recycle for no reward just because that is what they are used to doing.

Greetings Class 👽

Here’s my article for Monday’s discussion. Its a little different so enjoy!

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/mapping-new-york-noise-complaints

From clean water to education, river access, recreation and inspiration, all of the six key benefits that the Hudson Estuary Program revolves around are very optimistic and ambitious. As stated in the article, nothing lasts forever, it is time for a change with an advancement of infrastructure of the valley. As increased levels of pollution and potentially hazardous and unwanted species and chemicals spill into our waters, the old technology that is implemented can not keep up with it. There is always going to be something that with be more advanced than something created in the past and that is why this program is vital for the benefit of our ecosystem.

One thing about this article that I liked was the idea of teamwork with government and its people. Like most things, collaboration to get something done effectively is the best way. Governmental intervention is without a doubt the strongest force in our country, but without citizen cooperation and collaboration or ideas, the laws and regulations placed by the government simply isn’t enough. The idea in the article that this program “builds community stewardship by engaging, informing and empowering the people who live, work near and care about the river and its communities to bring about real progress for the river.” Is a great idea because targeting people who will actually positively benefit from the program, or negatively be effected without the program, is the easiest way to spread awareness of the importance of the cause.

I think that if people who live near the Hudson would like to enjoy the cleanliness of the water to drink from then we need to take part in ending the contamination that it has today. Without the people who truly make or break change, the people, this program will be very slow moving and we may not be alive to see it prevail.

 

After reading this article, I was pleased to have finally read more of an optimistic article, as the previous student lead article, rather then an “expert” bashing something about human activity and interaction with the environment and how we are exponentially ruining our ecosystem.

The list of things that were lacking in the preliminary stages of the pilot program were interesting to point out because what I concluded from reading those was that this is essentially a problem with any new technology. Having humans adapt to a new thing is very difficult for the exact reasons listed, lack of funding, awareness, and incentives.

However, when they started to implement these in demo programs and provided results that were positive to say the least, it begins to prove more and more promising for the future. On page eight, where they break down the benefits of implementing a large scale solar system in the city, it seems very enticing to myself and I’m sure whoever else reads them. The benefits such as energy cost savings and job creation are the backbone of fixing the US Economy, saving money and creating jobs. On page 8 it says that implementing it on .5% of the buildings would create roughly 1,200 new jobs. So ideally there is staggering potential job growth of 240,000. There seems to be no reason for this not to become a real life endeavor for the city of New York to implement these panels into a majority of the buildings.

There are several things we can learn from studying footprint fossils of dinosaurs of the Jurassic period. One of these things is how a particular species travels, either alone or in packs. If there are several lines of the same footprint in one space, it indicates that they are all together traveling uniformly, as if there was only 1 track, they travel alone.

Another thing you can learn is weather or not, at that specific time, what kind of activity they were doing. As I learned on the trip, you can notice very random footprint marks that show that the dinosaur was either chasing or being chased in a hunting session.

One thing paleontologists have trouble with sometimes when looking at the fossils are distinguishing which dinosaur exactly made the print. There are several tracks that look similar to each other so choosing which exactly made it nearly impossible sometimes when there are 2 or more species living in the same area with the same type of print.

Quadrangle: the area shown on a standard topographic map sheet of the US Geological Survey.

Lithology (of a rock): description of its physical characteristics visible at outcrop, in hand or core samples or with low magnification microscopy, such as colour, texture, grain size, or composition.

Something I enjoyed about this article is that it gives real numbers on how much actual value there is in the city that could be destroyed or temporarily shut down in event of a very strong hurricane. There is approximately 300,000 people and about $18.3 Billion worth of infrastructure located in the mandatory evacuation flood area of manhattan. These numbers don’t even include buildings and people that are not in as much flood risk but there is never 100% assurance that a storm couldn’t force water into these areas as well. Along with just the value of the buildings, what goes on inside these buildings is of unmeasurable value that if something were to happen to stop business in manhattan for even a couple days or weeks, the economy would take huge hit. Knowing this makes we question why we have not gone out of our way to make sure that no storm can cause serious damage.

Something that I found to be very confusing was how buildings and homes that are in flood-risk zones are encouraged to be built a little higher up than ground level to “proof” them of ground water flood damage but if they do that, they can get penalized for going against zoning hight regulations. This makes builders and owners stuck between a rock and a hard place when deciding to either prevent and pay a penalty or pray and not pay a penalty. I agree with the writer of the article that the zoning regulation should be “lifted for freeboard measures”.

The map in the article showing the 1/100 and 1/500 flood zone areas makes me very worrisome in a sense that nearly 95% of Manhattan Island isn’t zoned in these categories. This means that in the time of a very bad storm, such as a category 5 hurricane, damages will astronomically exceed the government’s and insurance agencies’ preparedness in terms of financials that could cause an out of control downward spiral.