Tag: discussion

“World Trade Center – Preliminary Observations on EPA’s Second Program to Address Indoor Contamination” Response

While many of our past readings have shown that government policies and regulations to combat ecological issues have been largely successful and are expected to continue, this GAO report begs to differ, explaining how the EPA has been inadequate in protecting the public from air pollutants after the September 11th attacks and questioning the effectiveness of its future programs. The psychological and physical effects of the attacks still last today, more than fourteen years after they occurred; it is simply mind-boggling how much smoke and dust entered the air and clouded New York City’s bright skyline for days on end. Being interested in weather, I looked up the weather for September 11, 2001, and noticed that it was a beautifully sunny late-summer day with a wind blowing from the north; if the wind had instead come from the south or west, the entire metropolitan area would have been covered in the debris, but this should not draw attention away from what actually happened, which was still devastating beyond compare.

The winds blew the ash down towards Brooklyn, Staten Island, and parts of New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean, but it always seems that the government prefers Manhattan over the outer boroughs, as can be seen here in the cleanup efforts and even in snowstorms. Nevertheless, residents of Lower Manhattan still had to deal with the incompetence of the EPA, which “did not begin examining methods for differentiating between normal urban dust and WTC dust until May 2004 – nearly 3 years after the disaster” (5). Also, after stating that most of its samples did not exceed a high-risk level for asbestos, it was found that “this conclusion was to be expected because it took over 80% of the samples after residences were professionally cleaned” (5) and was “based on participation from only 20% of the eligible residences” (5).

By falsifying and contaminating their data, perhaps deliberately, the EPA consequently put thousands of people at risk. This may be one of the first readings where ethics and accountability play a large role. Even if they did not want to report the harsh truth that there were still harmful particulates in the air possibly to avoid causing mass hysteria, to save cleanup costs, or to garner support from the public for a “job well done”, the truth, as painful as it may have been, could have led to so much less suffering if it was told clearly and not covered up. Despite this controversy, people should remember that the government has still done a lot to mitigate pollution over the past few decades, but transparency is still important, and people always deserve to know the truth.

“Mapping New York’s Noisiest Neighborhoods” Response

Noise pollution is not something that we can easily see, like air or water pollution, but its effects can still be very damaging, disrupting sleep cycles, causing deafness, and overall just being unpleasant and psychologically disturbing. We all deal with it to some extent on a daily basis, given the traffic on the streets and the screeching from the trains on the subways, and some of us (like me) are unlucky enough to live close to airports. Regardless of where we live, we have unfortunately become accustomed to the noise. Just taking a day trip to the suburbs or countryside shows how much quieter and peaceful it can be there, but the relative silence becomes uncomfortable, and we sometimes miss all of the honking and music that we loathe when we are in the city. But just as all cities have extraordinarily high levels of noise, they all differ in their sources, and this article showed how even small neighborhoods, some of which border each other, can have drastically different sources of noise pollution as well.

The most interesting statistic that I found was that “311 logged more than a hundred and forty thousand noise-related complaints between the winter of 2013 and the fall of 2014. That works out to one complaint every four minutes, day in and day out, all year”, and represents one call for every sixty people, assuming that nobody made multiple calls. The article’s graphs and charts were very helpful in terms of visualizing the geography and frequency of these complaints, and it came as no surprise that most were made during the late night hours; for the city that never sleeps, it seems that sleep is one of the most important things that a New Yorker can have. Even though highly commercialized neighborhoods, especially in parts of Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, have the highest number of complaints, probably given the large amounts of taxis and construction going on, residential neighborhoods in eastern Queens near Long Island or parts of Staten Island have their own sources of noise, primarily since many have single-family houses that can afford to have dogs roaming outside instead of apartments.

While the article went extremely in depth in terms of mapping the loudest areas of the city and briefly mentioned solutions, it neglected to show that noise pollution can have devastating effects on animals. Common pets like dogs and cats have a much stronger sense of hearing than we do, so we can just imagine how stressed out they can become from noises that we disregard as minimal. Even heavy vibrations from bass subwoofers in cars can reverberate in the streets and damage the ground and any habitats for animals in those areas, and they may be forced to move to new locations that are very hard for them to adjust to. This just shows how noise pollution, despite not being as tangible as other ecological problems that our city battles, is just as destructive. After reading the article, it is definitely a very broad issue that will require many different solutions catered to specific neighborhoods, but any change, no matter how small, is better than no change at all.

“Resource Management as a Key Factor for Sustainable Urban Planning” Response

While most of the readings we have read have focused on New York City, specifically in terms of its ecological history from the Native Americans to the European colonists to the present times, this journal discussed civilizations and groups of people from thousands of years ago to mindsets that the authors hope will be adopted by future generations. This hope for change stems from the fact that cities use resources at monumental rates, but they have caused drastic changes in their surrounding environments. For example, New York City may have a land area of just over 300 square miles, but it has approximately 8.5 million people, and a lot of its water supply comes from the Catskills, part of which are not even in the metropolitan area. From a global perspective, the human population is growing exponentially, reaching seven billion just a few years ago, and it shows no signs of slowing down. We will torture nature to reveal its secrets just to support us and our insatiable needs, but we only look at short-term solutions and ways that we can personally benefit rather than how we have affected the natural cycles of organisms and non-living portions of ecosystems. Our resources are finite, and at this point, it looks like only a catastrophe of epic proportions will change our behaviors, even if it may be too late to reverse the damage that we have done.

The authors are a bit more optimistic than this, striving for the implementation of greater resource management into urban planning. Urban planning nowadays is only done for people, not the environment. We focus on building cities that are efficient for commuting, commerce, and social functions, and try to tackle issues such as racism, poverty, and gender inequality, but this is only one slice of the pie. We must include environmental factors as well for the sake of the organisms that we have symbiotic relationships with, since their extinction will ultimately lead to our own downfall as well. Interestingly, our distant ancestors were looked at in the most positive light, being described as “hunters and gatherers … [who] collected resources in different places, migrating when resources became scarce. The energetic metabolism of hunters and gatherers has been described as an ‘uncontrolled solar energy system’.” (2297). Now, with the advent of agriculture and industrialization, people have chosen to stay put and expect resources to come to them, and use them at faster rates than at any other time in the past; the inventions of the automobile, plane, and other forms of transportation may be the primary reasons behind this.

The journal is very well-organized, given the two diagrams describing the holistic relationship between urban planning, resource management, and sustainable development, and how all of them have changed dramatically over the past millennia. The recycling of waste and nutrients is alluded to, and a real-life example, even if it is a bit gruesome, is Bill Gate’s Omni Processor, which converts fecal matter and sewage into drinking water. However, environmentalists, businessmen, and politicians can only do so much to encourage change by giving thoughtful directions; people themselves have to take the wheel and drive.