Month: September 2017

Throughout my life, sustainability is not something that I have put on the top of my priorities. However, ever since moving into the Greenbelt community, it has allowed me to expand my horizons and be more consciously aware of how my actions are affecting the environment. There are multiple sustainable habits that I have begun to incorporate into my day to day life. When I go to the grocery store, I remember to bring my reusable bags instead of using the plastic bags. I also am more aware of my energy consumption by unplugging my electrical cords, doing bigger loads of laundry and doing them less often, and turning off the lights when I leave the room. I also try to watch my water consumption, which means taking showers that are shorter and making sure I don’t leave the water running when I brush my teeth or wash the dishes. All of these lifestyle changes seem so small but a collective action by everyone would have an extraordinary impact on the environment.

One of the main reasons that I want to be more sustainable is because I love to spend time in the outdoors. For as long as I can remember, my most memorable vacations with my family are the ones where we visited different locations within the United States National Park Service. My first time going to a National Park was Yellowstone in Wyoming where I got to watch the amazing hot geysers and view the bison roam. From that moment forward I was hooked, and I loved visiting the natural wonders of the place that I call home. Ever since then, I have been on amazing adventures within the National Parks System from star-gazing in Yosemite, kayaking in the Everglades, walking along the water in Acadia, touring a cave in Wind Cave, hiking around Devil’s Tower, and trekking through Badlands. If we do not start practicing sustainable ways of living, then we might not have these amazing places for future generations. As for me, I am going to do my part to ensure that I can continue my love for traveling to all of these places.

– Emily Shafer

When you hear the word “clean”, vinegar probably is not the first thing that comes to mind. Rather, you probably think about bleach, hand sanitizer, or some other popular chemical product. This is a problem. The increased use of products like these is associated with many problems, from bacterial resistance to lung problems to birth defects to ecological damage. Common sense would tell us to stop using these harmful products that are a veritable mix of toxic substances. A sustainability standpoint would also encourage us to eliminate these from our arsenal of cleaning products since bleach is very toxic to waterways, aquatic life, and other ecosystems.

Now that I have scared you into not using bleach and other chemical-ridden products, you may be asking yourself what is left to use for cleaning. Never fear! As we learned in our Sustainability class, Vinegar is one of the super-heros of green cleaning. It is biodegradable, good for the environment, and non-toxic to humans and pets. From personal experience, I have found that it is an incredible cleaner, and I would like to share some of my findings with you.

In class, we made two products with vinegar mixtures, one all-purpose cleaner and one window cleaner.

                                                                          

I will start with the all-purpose cleaner. This was an incredibly simple recipe: equal parts vinegar and water mixed into a spray bottle. I was initially skeptical that this would work, so as soon as we made it in class, I brought it back to my Cabin and tackled the kitchen. Sure enough, this cleaner cut through the grime that accumulates in a kitchen used by eight girls! I will say that, even though we added a few drops of Tea Tree Essential Oil to the mixture (which also has incredible anti-bacterial and cleansing properties on its own), this mixture does not smell very good (unless you like the smell of vinegar). However, I found a natural solution to this! Whenever I sprayed the cleanser, I would add 1-2 drops of Lemon Essential Oil (purchased from the Traveler’s Rest Farmers Market) to the same surface. This greatly improved the smell and made this cleaner exceptional.

The window cleaner was INCREDIBLE. I actually prefer this homemade, eco-friendly window cleaner to Windex. The recipe for this is also fairly simple: 2 cups water, 1/2 cup white or cider vinegar, and 1/4 cup rubbing alcohol (70% concentration). A few drops of your favorite essential oil can also be added to improve the smell. I am incredibly impressed with this window cleaner– it leaves our bathroom mirror streak-free and shiny.

Overall, making green cleaning products was a great experience and showed me that sustainable cleaning products work just as well as store-bought products, but they are healthier for both people and the environment because  they do not use harmful chemicals. This is transferable to many other experiences. The sustainable choice may take a little bit of extra thought or effort, but has many benefits to your health and the health of the environment.

-Catherine Lippert

Background:

Honey bees are responsible for pollinating almost one third of the foods we eat, including avocados, almonds, and apples.  Even if you don’t realize it, everyone relies on honey bees one way or another.  Unfortunately, bees and many other pollinators are on the edge of extinction due to the disease “colony collapse disorder” (CCD).  Which can leave a hive greatly weakened and prone to abandonment during the winter season.  There is no single cause to colony collapse disorder, but instead many possible factors including Varroa/Acarapis mite infestation, loss of habitat, and neonicotinoids exposure(pesticide).  Colony collapse disorder has already claimed nearly 10 million hives since its discovery in 2006.  As well as destroying almost 44% of American colonies from 2015-2016.  It is obvious that bees are too essential to our survival for us to not do anything about CCD; yet each year, up until 2016, we’ve seen more bees die than the last…

Recent News:

It wasn’t until recently have we finally been getting some good news regarding bees.  2017 was the first year since the discovery of CCD that we have seen a lower rate of abandonment than the years before.  Seeing only 226,000 colonies destroyed compared to the 330,000 in 2016. Scientists relate this to new laws banning the use of neonicotinoids after identifying it as the pesticide responsible for bee death in early 2017.  Individual states are also stepping up to introduce new laws designed to protect bees like California’s “Pollinator Protection Act”.  Which requires plants treated with neonicotinoids to be labeled and also protects bee habitats in suburban areas.  The bees still have a far way to go before they’re in the clear but at least were taking a step in the right direction.

How to help:

Plant bee-friendly flowers in your garden

Remove/ limit pesticide use in your yard

Reach out to your local congress representative to express your concern

Protect essential bee habitat

Support local farms and apiaries

– Ty Carlson

Environmental Disasters and the Disadvantaged

As Hurricane Harvey inundated regions of the southern United States with more than 40cm of rain, Hurricane Irma and Jose trailed behind just weeks later, striking Florida and coastal North Carolina. It has now been reported that Hurricane Maria, a Category 5 Hurricane, is positioned to run through Puerto Rico, Turks and Caicos and the Dominican Republic. On top of this exceedingly strong hurricane season, wildfires in Oregon, earthquakes in Mexico, mudslides in Sierra Lione and Colombia, and flooding across South East Asia, have wreaked destruction on a global level. While natural disasters are difficult to predict, their occurrence remains inevitable, demanding heightened attention for disaster relief.

While there are many factors that affect the degree of destruction brought by a natural disaster, poverty remains the central determining variable.  The Brookings Institute identifies this pattern by first pointing out a 1989 earthquake that struck San Francisco at a level of 7.1 on the Richter scale, causing 21 casualties and leaving 1,200 people homeless. By contrast, the Spitak earthquake that famously ravaged Armenia in 1988 killed some 50,000 people and left over 500,000 homeless, yet the disaster only registered a 6.9 on the Richter scale. It remains clear that the poor and marginalized are at a disproportionately higher risk–– particularly in natural disasters.

Nonetheless, while disaster relief programs aim to aid these very populations, evidence overwhelming demonstrates that natural disasters exacerbate these social inequities. Preferential treatment in times of natural disasters may appear in subtle forms, such as providing greater access to aid in safer communities than in at-risk areas. At the same time, overt discrimination also takes place often during natural disasters. Red Cross notes how Dalits in the Hindu caste system were institutionally forbidden from accessing water after the destruction of a major tsunami and how gender-based violence saw a 536% increase in rape cases after Hurricane Katrina.  The issue of social injustice in times of national disaster remains evident, but the role a sustainably-minded individual can play to curb this trend is still a difficult topic to address.

The Importance of Social Participation

One of the most important measures to prevent against discrimination in access to disaster relief aid is to elevate the voices of those disadvantaged. While it might seem like an organizational task to institute overreaching policies for including the opinions of marginalized persons, the individual plays a crucial role in this process as well. Social participation– in the forms of social media involvement and engagement in topical discussions–are two easy ways to help understand complex environmental issues.

Social participation is also crucial for bringing attention to these problems, when those around you may not be aware, and for sharing the opinions of those most deeply affect. In particular, social media is a great tool for discovering how people from various backgrounds are impacted by almost any given issue. Meanwhile, group discussion, whether shared between friends, in a classroom setting, or at the work place, is a necessary action to discover ways you can do to help within your own communities. As natural disasters continue to transpire at alarming rates, it has never been more important for individuals to begin making a commit to center the conversation on helping those most in need. In short, social participation is not just a political point or some humanitarian gesture, but an essential and basic expression of empathy.

-Matt Martin

Sustainability practice in tennis is something that doesn’t really cross many tennis player’s minds, but it really should. When you start to think how many tennis balls we open from a new can, hit as hard as we can with lots of crazy spin, then decide they are not bouncing quite how we want (trust me we are very picky when it comes to what makes the ball good enough) and then replace them. This cycle starts again. Using a basket of balls for practice, which is made up of 24 cans, then 4 balls per can, means we are playing with 96 balls. This is then changed weekly, with a whole new set of balls. So just in this one semester we are using about 1536 tennis balls… and the tennis season hasn’t even begun yet!

Seems like a waste really, so where do all these tennis balls go? If they went in the trash that would be a waste but these tennis balls are then recycled. Some are distributed to the club team, for them to have free and decent balls. The rest are distributed to local schools for children to enjoy and play with.

I know what you’re thinking now though, where do they go after that? Well when they’ve reached the stage of flat and fluffy balls, they can no longer be used for tennis. These tennis balls are then commonly used as dog toys, or more innovatively they are used as decoration. Such as on the outside of trash cans at some local clubs (but not inside the trash can) or as props for tennis scoring, where they don’t need to bounce anymore only required to look like the size of a tennis ball and hopefully still be slightly yellow.

Sadly there will be waste where many balls are put in the trash and not recycled. This is inevitable in our society but I think people are trying harder. The materials in these tennis balls are not easily broken down but there may come a time where the biodegradable tennis ball is invented.

Try picturing the tennis centre at Furman to have every chair like the one pictured below, well stop because we haven’t quite reached that impressive level of being that sustainable. Hopefully, in the near future though I could have some influence in making that happen… not sure they look particularly comfortable though but definitely sustainable.

Hannah Ferrett

Picture yourself walking around Furman’s iconic lake. Those that frequent the lake, will recognize many familiar sites. One of those being families and children clustered around the waters edge, throwing crumbling handfuls of bread to eager waiting waterfowl. Little do they know, they are harming these birds that they feed.

Just as children love sugar, ducks love bread. And why wouldn’t they? It’s an easy food source they don’t even have to work for. However, bread and other processed wheat products are lacking in essential nutrients ducks natural food source contain. Many ducks, like mallards, the most common on our lake, are divers that eat dark green plant material found on the lake floor. As a child, my mother drilled into my head that more colorful foods have higher nutrient counts. So, instead of ducks eating a diet of dark greens rich in vitamins, they’re eating overly processed white bread.

This leads to a condition known as angel wing, which can actually be seen in several ducks on the lake. As they are over consuming processed foods, ducks are not getting their key nutrients, and their bones actually start to warp. This leads to some funky looking wings, and the birds can be severely incapacitated and no longer able to fly.

An additional side effect of the ducks horrible bread diet is their gut bacteria is altered. They cannot properly digest it, and they over produce the bacteria ecology, which they then excrete into the water.

Instead of feeding birds bread or cereal, instead try something less processed. Easy switches can be to whole oats which have more nutrients, seeds (especially reduced sodium ones or preferable all natural mixes) or even split grapes. Some ducks, such as ruddy ducks, prefer a diet of fish. A really enthusiastic duck lover could try and feed these birds sardines, if they really wanted to. – Julia Clements

From the Maillot Jaune to the Lanterne Rouge, cycling presents the constant challenge of who can suffer the most.  Cycling greats such as Eddy Merckx and Bernard Hinault were notorious for their ability to suffer the most. In many ways, cycling can be a microcosm to understanding key competencies in sustainability just as Merckx and Hinault understood how to succeed in cycling.

From a systems perspective, a cyclist performs a reinforcing feedback loop without even realizing it. The simple action of pushing the pedals in a cyclical motion allows them to move from point A to point B. What’s so intriguing about this is that the rate of the feedback loop is either dictated by the cyclist or by the road itself. As an avid cyclist, I am constantly presented with this challenge of riding on the flats or suffering up the mountainside. There have been plenty of times where I could not make it to the summit, but one thing I have understood through all these failures are lessons that have made me stronger.

Cycling can also be described under as normative competency in sustainability. My grandmother was an avid cyclist and she sent me a letter of some lessons she learned on her ride across the country. One example of her trip were the many stories of Americans who helped her along the way. One story was about how, “A Minnesota couple brought us warm cookies in the evening, fed us breakfast the next morning, and later gave us a ride to the train station during a storm. [or a] farm family allowed us to camp in their yard, provided us with lots of scrumptious fresh vegetable, and insisted that we use their shower.” These small acts of kindness that my grandmother experienced exemplify the idea of understanding the values of others. In order to solve many of the ‘wicked’ problems sustainability scientists deal with, we must pay attention to the culture of others.

Sustainability competencies and their similarities to cycling show our connection to the world. We are reliant on one another to push the goals of sustainability forward, but just as in cycling, we are reliant on ourselves in order to succeed. – Austin Powell

 

Meeting Tour de France Winner Bradley Wiggins in the 2010 TDF

(P.S I was stupid and forgot to write down which date I had for blog post, but I think it was this week??? So sorry if it isn’t. I am moronic sometimes.)

Blood and Guts and Chocolate Cake

We all know our food production system in America is quite honestly a disgusting disaster. What I mean is we get what we want to eat, yes. We are, after all, a nation in the throes of an obesity epidemic. But in order to provide all of that meat, all of those juicy, McDonalds hamburgers, all of that finely crafted Gorgonzola cheeses, we needed to engender a monster. And so, America’s agricultural system was born. The CAFO.

Primarily, we utilize CAFOs/AFOs to raise our animals for slaughter. You can think of a CAFO as a large prison, where the cells are tiny, dirty, and beyond crowded. The animals are literally prisoners, sometimes beaten, sometimes driven to cannibalism, and sometimes unable to move for weeks at a time. Their waste trickles down to manure lagoons that occasionally experience major disaster, spewing tons of raw manure into run offs and further polluting water sources. The odor from these lagoons lowers property values, and the pollution causes health problems such as asthma that affects nearby towns, which are generally of the lower class and or poverty stricken. Besides the typical respiratory problems, the pollution also contributes to the spread of disease and pathogens. The large amount of antibiotics being pumped into our animals to keep them somehow somewhat healthy in the pure hell they reside in is affecting us by building up our antibodies to a swathe of antibiotics.

We have created a money making machine, one capable of supplying Americans with the endless amount of eggs, meat, cheese, and milk we desire. But at what cost?

To be sustainable, can we reduce our meat consumption? Can we forgo that delicious bit of goat cheese and instead gradually rid ourselves of animal products? Or maybe we simply could start buying from local farms, where we know the animals have been tended to well and with love. It has to start somewhere. Avoid the McDonald’s and the Burger King and instead head to a local farmer and purchase a portion of a steer there, and make your own steaks, your own burgers.

It is, after all, a step in the right direction, although the wrong path calls to us in its siren song of convenience. It is possible, I promise.

-Camiell Foulger

WORKS CITED

“CAFO vs. Free Range.” CAFOs vs. Free Range, Organic Consumers Association, www.organicconsumers.org/categories/cafos-vs-free-range.

Gurian-Sherman, Doug. CAFOs Uncovered: the Untold Costs of Confined Animal Feeding Operations. Union of Concerned Scientists, 2008.

Unbelievable photographs of the devastation in East Texas have been plastering our screens for over a week now.  Hurricane Harvey is leaving his legacy with record-breaking rain, multiple landfalls, and mindboggling flooding.  It is no doubt one of the worst storms I’ve lived to see, and could be one of the worst in our knowledgeable history.  But before we dismiss this catastrophe as just another natural disaster, we should examine the reason behind the severity of the wide-spread destruction.

          

Before and after pictures of Houston

Houston, where much of the record flooding is taking place, is the United States fourth largest city, home to more than 6 million people in the entire metropolis area.  The founders were looking for a place of opportunity for government and commerce, and the confluence of the White Oak Bayou and the Buffalo Bayou seemed perfect in 1836, until there were 16 major floods in the next 100 years.  This prompted major flood control, which not only helped keep the town together, but also catalyzed major growth.  And with major growth comes less and less pervious space for water to be absorbed.

Since 2001, there have been three 500-year floods in the Houston area.  Now to be fair, if there was no Houston infrastructure and the area was left to be its natural prairie/marsh self, there would still be 500-year floods where the land would be far beyond its capacity to absorb large amounts of water.  However, the increasing flood intensity cannot be ignored.  Houston and many other cities are known for spontaneous and fast development, including major sprawl.  This culture of unlimited development butts heads with nature, and the effects are not trivial.  On top of the increased impervious areas, storms will continue to intensify due to climate change, and coastal cities will experience more powerful storm surges.

While we need to focus on immediate needs and bring people to safety, the situation begs the question of how development will respond to lessen the impacts of inevitable future flooding.  If large cities are home to some of our largest problems, I believe they can produce some of our best solutions.  Our cities aren’t getting any smaller, so we need to think creatively about how to be more resilient.  For example, cities like Houston can encourage increasing and preserving natural prairies, creating green spaces, and restricting development in flood plains.  Even our home of Greenville should exercise caution and thoughtfulness as our population continues to grow and production facilities increase.  We need to become more adaptable and forward thinking because nature is not stopping anytime soon.

View of Greenville’s downtown Falls Park

What do you think Greenville can do to become more resilient?

-Hannah Dailey