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?

This week’s discussion on the waste that we produce might have been the one that has resonated with me the most.  I feel that in the past few months of trying to leave class more in the know than before, this lesson has given me the most perspective on the environmental issues we encounter today.  While in previous lessons we have heard numbers in the tens of thousands of tons, the numbers related to garbage produced by the city and each borough have struck me as the most relevant to my life specifically.  I feel know that I have a better awareness of what exactly is happening around me, or even a better awareness of how I act.  I have always known that plastic bags from supermarkets accumulate and are harmful to the environment if overused, but only since this past Monday have I been conscious of my intake, and rejecting the store’s plastic bags.  The portion of the lecture devoted to Tullytown opened my eyes to the problems that us elitist New Yorkers have in regards to waste.  I have never considered the effects of the waste we produce, as I never see where the garbage goes, past the garbage trucks.  It is unfortunate that our waste is not our problem, because I feel that if we had the waste sites in our neighborhoods, for example on 91^st street, we would be significantly more conscious of our waste.  The sheer vastness of the quantities of waste we produce is not known to the average New Yorker, and I believe that if we were constantly reminded with transfer sites, it is likely that we would be more hesitant to throw away water bottles instead of recycle them, or even stop taking plastic bags from the supermarket.  I do not think that New Yorkers are against the environment, I just believe we need to be reminded that we are apart of the world outside of New York.  As for the citizens of Tullytown, as cynical and harsh as it sounds, it seems that they are actually benefitting from our trash.  In that I mean that there are many people in this country who suffer from being below the poverty line, and I believe that this relationship we have with Tullytown might actually be symbiotic.  Now I do not believe that it is fair to have to live next to a waste site, nor do I think anyone should have to be exposed to such health dangers.  However, there are people in this country who struggle to make ends meet, and while we have the luxury of choosing where we put our waste, others do not have any leftovers to waste.  As awful as it sounds, it seems that there are people in the country who would gladly take the money and bribes from our waste companies just so that they have the resources to keep their homes and feed their families.  Would it not be better to live next to garbage than to not live at all? These are the notions I am wrestling at the moment.

Reva McAulay

12.3.12

MHC 200

Weekly Response #13

It’s astonishing that 75% of New York City’s garbage is not residential.  I mean, yes, there is a lot of business and construction and what-not around, but that they create three times as much trash as New York’s 8 million residents is amazing.  Having garbage processed in-borough makes sense in terms of fairness, and not having garbage trucks driving all over the city wasting gas and creating traffic.  However, where it doesn’t necessarily make as much sense is in the case of Manhattan.  If the proposed facility works out that that’s great, but if they can’t find a suitable location, fairness is not enough of a reason to shove a waste transfer station where one won’t fit.  It might be fair to the borough as a whole, but not to the people living there which is what matters more.  If there is a site in another borough where the waste transfer station might effect far fewer people, that would be fair in a different way.  I’m still somewhat confused as to how one station on E 91^st St. is going to replace the 22 in Brooklyn where Manhattan’s waste is currently sent.

As for Tullytown, hopefully soon they won’t need to take our trash, although it seems they might miss it (or at least the money that comes with it).  Then again, the radioactive sludge might make up for it.  Hopefully New York will follow San Francisco’s lead and transition towards a zero-waste system.  They’re success is honestly greater than I would have expected possible, but luckily I see no reason why it should work there but not here.  That’s if the government decides to do it, and actually spend the money instead of half ass it.  Putting recycling cans next to every single trashcan would be a nice start.  An even better one would be recycling all plastic/metal/glass instead of the byzantine system we have now.  Adding a citywide composting program would be interesting since that does not seem to be a thing that is even on most people’s radar.  It might take a little while for people to get used to the idea, but it’s not that hard.  The good thing about all those changes is that they just cost money, they don’t bother people.              Fining people who don’t recycle might not go over so well, but they could frame it as a way to recoup some of the costs for the people who do recycle.  Banning non-recyclable products would be even harder (and if they can’t get that in San Francisco, what are the odds here?).  I still think charging for waste pick up would be a more palatable and more effective solution, although it would still be tricky.  Another idea would be subsidizing commercial recycling and/or taxing commercial waste disposal, seeing as that seems to be the majority of the problem.

The ads were great, hopefully we’ll get a chance to see the rest of them.  The government’s ads are usually pretty good but I can’t think of any really attention grabbing ones regarding anything environmentally conscious.  The ones about smoking and the amount of fat and sugar in energy drinks are certainly striking and everybody notices them, but the ones encouraging recycling and reducing you’re energy use are boring.  The ones you guys made are definitely much better; it’s too bad the city doesn’t put the same amount of creativity into theirs.  Showing people that kind of representation of how much garbage this city actually produces might make them think about where it goes and how they contribute to it.  And maybe that would cause more of a change in habits and actions than the bland banners that show how consumers can reduce their energy use.

There should be some sense of urgency to adopt a version of the zero waste policies that have been effectively implemented in San Francisco and Scotland. We, being New York City and the greatest city in the world, should have started are own zero waste policy a long time ago. We should be the model and not have to resort to modeling other cities and countries. There is a parallel here to the space race. We wanted to show our dominance as a nation by becoming supreme in space exploration. It was our duty as one of the world’s superpowers. Well now, it is our duty to set an example of zero waste leading to a more efficient society, rid of the garbage problem. So long, Tullytown!

Life would be so much better without the need for landfills and incinerators. We will no longer have to worry about how to get rid of our trash and the creation of new landfills and incinerators. Debates about where to place these things and who has to suffer for it will become irrelevant. If the Fresh Kills Landfill did not exist, Staten Island would be a much nicer place. Particularly in my early years, I would have enjoyed not having the rotting smell fill the air.

The zero waste policy in San Francisco includes the composting of food waste, mandatory recycling, and laws against items that cannot be recycled. These three features are all actually very realistic. Fertilizer is very essential and many New Yorkers would be very enthusiastic about food composting knowing it will help the growth of organic items. Mandatory recycling is extremely easy to make happen and there is no reason why it should not be happening now. The third item, making laws against items that cannot be recycled sounds initially like it would be difficult to make happen, but after reconsidering, companies are always involving and improving their products, so they could work around these laws.

I am not going to say I am mad as hell about all of these environmental problems and the lack of government help and inability of the government to take rapid action. I am not happy about it either though. I accept is as a way of life, but certain, easy things can be done to improve this like implementing a zero waste policy. Of course money is at the center of this. A lot of money is dependent on the trash we send to Tullytown. Tullytown probably relies on this money, and if their landfill becomes irrelevant, the town may fall apart. Maybe we can use the advertisements created by Jackie and Joe to increase awareness and our need for a zero waste policy. I feel like those advertisements have a chance at being very effective, so why not try it?

The situation in Treece and Picher is very unfortunate. I find almost comedic that with all our advancement in technology nowadays we have a ghost town. These towns were forced to evacuate because of the harmful pollutants, particularly lead in the area. This is a serious matter that should not have been neglected for so long. The EPA should be much quicker responding to serious health hazards like this where lives are at stake. We should from Treece and Picher so we can prevent future mistakes from happening.