The presentation about the mining in Treece, Kansas was really shocking to me. There were many unfair and horrible things done to the people in this town; there is not just one thing that I am mad as hell about. First, I would have to say that I am mad as hell about the fact that no one did anything to prevent this town from getting so polluted, even though mining stopped in the 1970s. The towers of mining “chat” remained looming over the town, continuing to pollute its inhabitants although there was no reason why something could have been done to help these people. As Gigdet stating in her presentation, children were especially at risk for health issues, including asthma, due to the chat and other pollutants in the air from the mining. These children are a special concern because, unlike the adults of the town, they did not choose to live in this area. Children should be given a safe and healthy place to grow up in.

I am also mad as hell about the whole idea behind eminent domain. I understand how it could sometimes be necessary to take people’s land if you need to build a road through it, or accomplish some other goal for the public good. But the government should be required to give the people that they are taking land from sufficient money. The government did not give the people of this town enough money for them to buy adequate houses. They were given about $30,000 I believe, which sounds like an especially low amount of money considering how high the standard of living is in this part of the country. Although this money probably went further where in their part of the country, it was still not enough. The mayor was forced to stay in a trailer park. This is unacceptable; I understand why that one couple chose to stay as the only two residents of Treece, even just to stick it to the government.

This situation reminds me of the proposal for the creation of the garbage-processing center. While I understand that it is hard for the government to solve these issues in a way that satisfies everyone, the government should try to ensure that the least amount of people are inconvenienced. This garbage-processing center will severely decrease the land value of the people living there. Also, there are many public buildings that are used by the community in this area. This is a tough decision for the government to make. However in the case of Treece, the government should definitely have given the citizens more money to buy satisfactory housing.

While we were unable to see all of the advertising campaigns presentation, I really liked the first idea. I think that the collage of images is a good way to make an impact on the masses. The message is clearly delivered, and I think that people will understand it. I also thought it was clever that the images paralleled ad campaigns hailing New York City as the Wonder City. Good advertising is one of the best ways to engage people emotionally, and to help them realize that their actions can make a difference.

Alda Yuan

Professor Alexandratos

MHC 200

Week 13 Response

After hearing about the success of the zero-waste programs in San Francisco and Scotland, Chairman Ard’s claim that the city needs a modern approach to the waste management seems strangely prescient. Of course, he likely meant it as a simple rhetorical device and was using it as an easy way to deflect responsibility for thinking about the hard issues. That is not to say that his argument about waste in residential areas is invalid. The usual protest in response to that is there is often no choice to locating them in residential areas. But the zero-waste program offers a clear alternative.

Were New York City to adopt this program, it would obviously have to adapt the specifics. But it makes sense from a number of perspectives. First and foremost in many official’s minds will be the monetary effects. With respect to that, a zero waste program will seriously reduce, if not eliminate entirely the money that the city needs to spend on waste management. Of course an initial investment might be needed but the city has proved itself capable of looking ahead in the past. It would also have health benefits, not only to people who live near these waste collection sites but to those who eat the food grown using the compost created rather than chemical fertilizers. And the benefits to the environment are of course huge. Here finally, is a real large scale implementation of the cradle to cradle principle. It is all well and good when applied to individual chemicals or even individual industrial processes but these are, in the end, only a small portion of the whole. If we can affect the way people in our largest cities consume and dispose, we create a ripple effect that cannot be halted. Companies, in an effort to cater to consumers in these areas will develop alternate methods of production and would have no reason not to extend them once they realize that they can be economically as well as environmentally efficient.

With regards to the Treece issue, I think the best way to turn it in into something with the semblance of a silver lining is to learn from it. It should be held up and touted as the example of what happens when businesses are not held responsible for the consequences of their actions. It is also a point against those who claim that coal mining is still the direction we should take because jobs are more important than scenic surroundings. But that is a false and misleading dichotomy. Here we see that destroying the earth neither provided permanent jobs nor prosperity. Instead, the lack of forward thinking has caused the destruction of an entire town.

If no other benefits stem from this situation, at the very least, it should lend weight to the imposition of more stringent regulations. For instance, a good idea might be for force companies who wish to engage in activities like mining to pay into a fund expressly reserved for the cleanup and revitalization of such areas. To encourage more cradle-to-cradle practices, credits could be awarded for sustainable practices that the companies enact above and beyond what the regulations require. The political force needed for such changes is of course astronomical and necessitates far more awareness than the average American now possesses. This is where smart ad campaigns like the one exhibited today can become very useful. They go directly to the people, forcing them to confront the hard truths everyone is aware of but prefers to ignore.

This week in seminar we discussed the New York City’s Solid Waste Management Plan. New York City discards about 50,000 tons of waste every day. New York City used to dump it all in Staten Island at Fresh Kill landfill. Eventually in 1997, the landfill closed and once the problem arose of where to put the ridiculous amount of garbage New York City produces. Then the government started creating transfer stations around the city where the garbage would then we shipped elsewhere. This seems like a ridiculous plan. For one, it is out garbage so why are we inflicting our pain onto other places. To be honest we should have kept it in Staten Island and improved the facilities, instead of just moving it.
Anyway, continuing the lack of significant progress, New York City decided to allocate waste management to each of the 5 boroughs to reduce the number of truck trips involved in waste transport. Manhattan, already limited in the amount of space, tried to put a transport center on East 91st Street. It has been over 6 years and still nothing has begun. At this time most of Manhattan’s garbage gets transported through Brooklyn. Once again our garbage is being dealt with elsewhere.
Lastly, after the garbage is collected and transported it is sent out of New York to Pennsylvania. A place called Tullytown collects a large portion of our garbage. Although New York City pays Tullytown’s Waste Management millions of dollars, which is then allocated to the citizens of the town, it still is not right. Is there any amount of money that replaces the pollution we are causing? There is known to be radioactive material in the garbage that can be polluting the land and there is a risk it may reach the Delaware River, polluting the entire ecosystem. I honestly do not understand the people or the government. Who in their right mind would rather have a few thousand dollars at the risk of being infected with radioactive material? And what government would allow this to happen to its people?
I understand that New York is a powerful and important city, but this is almost an abuse of its power. The most brilliant minds and innovative technologies are at our access. I do not understand why we do not use these benefit we have and continue just prolonging our suffering and giving our problems to others. It is not practical at all.
We also discussed the zero-waste policy that is an option for New York to become more sustainability. The policy would require composting of food waste, mandatory recycling, and the elimination of items that cannot be recycled. I think that composting food and mandatory recycling are quite possible. Other countries have just laws in place and they do work. I however think it will be difficult to eliminate all items that cannot be recycled. People would not be okay with eliminating diapers and phones. There should be another way around that drastic of a measure.

         New York City has to be one of the busiest places on earth and while there is a brilliance to that, it is also a fantastic problem. When you are working a 60 hour week, have to take a crowded 6 train to work and have to spend such an amazingly high percent of your time avoiding walking into someone or getting hit by a cab, considering “ your trash is going would seem pretty low on your list of priorities. All you know is you throw it out and it goes somewhere. The public’s detachment is just a product of modern life; division of labor pretty clearly states that a Wall Street investor shouldn’t be bringing his own trash to a dump, but a greater degree of self-awareness within NYC’s residents is important.

            We of course need to look to San Francisco, for their zero waste program is exactly where we need to be going in the future. In the present though, an ad campaign, like the one Daniel Choi and myself created or Joe and Jackie’s ads, simply raising awareness is crucial. Change will be hard if only a small group of honors students and some true believers are behind the cause, real change would come with the masses. The truth is we simply cannot consume at the level we do now, and if the public can accept that maybe we can actually save ourselves from a destroyed environment.

                                    Treece, is a destroyed environment. To even consider that someplace can be that thoroughly wrecked by man, not even for war but for business, is severely depressing. It may a grim thought but I have to wonder how many more “Treece’s” will come to exist in my lifetime. Fracking seems more than capable of destroying large sections of our country and yet no one looks to the mistakes like Treece that have already been made. I can at least perhaps find some solace in that if I continue to live in New York maybe I can stay blissfully ignorant to these horrible events, realistically though I doubt I will be able to.

                                    I don’t want to condemn the earth by any means but I’m getting more and more sold on the idea of firing garbage into space. In my lifetime a space elevator could be possible and if so maybe we can actually do away with some of the damage we have already done. The idea of real change being made just seems pretty unlikely. Then again if San Francisco successfully created a no waste system, I can’t imagine New York isn’t capable of it. The issue is immensely complicated and the stories of Treece and Tullytown are horrifying, I only pray a true, viable solution can be found before the entire world looks a little too much like Treece.

            From this class I can honestly say I have become much more conscious of my recycling and waste habits and try to be responsible with my garbage whenever possible. Although it is nearly impossible in our society to truly avoid creating waste, I try to minimize it as best I can and now often get confused looks at stores when I say I don’t need a bag and just throw it in my backpack. Simply everything you buy comes with huge amounts of packaging, which is often pretty difficult to repurpose or reuse. Hopefully our society will draw back its overuse of resources, but if not I really hope we can figure out how to shoot trash or some other space age solution because with our current patterns the whole earth will just be one great big dump in a hundred years or so.

Seong Im Hong

December 3, 2012

Environmental Egalitarianism?

            We learned about NYC’s Solid Waste Management Plan (SWMP) this week. One thing that was striking about the lesson was the amount of… insatiable greed involved. For example, take the E 91^st Street Transfer Station dilemma. The main opponent, Tony Ard, is obviously well off—he has a condo overlooking the East River in Manhattan. I suspect quite a bit of the loudest opponents are also well off as well. Despite that, however, they oppose the E 91^st Station for reasons that seem not to go beyond property values. I understand that—nobody wants to have their property value lowered—but at the same time, they are using bad logic to mask their actual reason for protesting. The same logic they employ is silenced, of course, when poor neighborhoods where nobody knows someone who can influence the votes are saddled with waste transfer stations.

This controversy made me think about environmental egalitarianism, and whether it is possible, and how we can pursue it. It is clear that there is a need for environmental social justice. (Another thing I learned from this class: things that seem to not relate at all, like environmental justice and social justice, are in fact very much related.) Like we saw before with the NYT article on Rose Gardener, our society’s way of dealing with waste and other undesirable is to simply ship it off to those far away and less well off.

Which is all fine and good, I suppose, if you look at it as a pure exchange of services (serving as a dump) for money. However, I have to wonder if these people have to suffer the consequences of our action while we, the better off, consume and spend wantonly. The consequences can be as superficial as an ugly landscape (the great pyramid of waste in Tullytown comes to mind) or bad smell. You can write them off as occupational hazard. But there must be other consequences that do not seem so obvious. I wonder if being a “dumping town” limits the possibility of growth for Tullytown. I have no hard data on this, but I have to wonder if this main source of economic stability (being a dump) is actually a double-edged sword in terms of Tullytown’s economy’s sustainability. Given that Tullytown is known to smell because of the landfills, Tullytown must not be as attractive to entrepreneurs who wish to open up businesses in the town. And the landfill is not going anywhere even when Tullytown decides that they want to move forward toward some other form of economy. The landfill (and the low property values and the smell) will stay for years and years. So are we, the suppliers of landfill, actually keeping Tullytown stagnant and dependent on our waste? (Maybe even subjugated?) Is this a form of environmental/economical caste system?

(And I guess you can argue that Tullytown as an entity chose to be dependent on our waste. But what was there before that decision? New York City is a financial superpower compared to Tullytown. Maybe Tullytown was strapped for cash, and NYC made a decision that they couldn’t refuse. And even if Tullytown “chose,” is it right for us to dump waste on them? Besides, the fact that NYC is financially well off enough to ship waste to Tullytown isn’t because of us as individuals. Most of us were born here out of sheer luck. Most of us did nothing to significantly impact NYC’s economy. So why do we get to enjoy being on the better end of environmental inequalities that really comes not from us as a generation or individuals but from centuries of development that we had nothing to do about?)

Green engineering and cradle-to-cradle design should stop the cycle of perpetuating environmental inequalities. But what happens to Tullytown after the waste stops coming?