Plastic Everywhere!

Look around you right now. What do you see? I’m in my living room where I see children’s furniture, toys, and books, wooden furniture, an acoustic guitar, a stereo, a tiny TV, a few hundred CDs and a handful of DVDs, books on shelves. There’s a fair amount of wood and plastic.

Plastic is everywhere. Grocery store? Plastic everywhere from bottled water to the bags we put things in to the individual wrappers for the fruit snacks or candy bars to peanut butter jars to kitty litter bags. Your car? Plastic. Computer? Plastic. Toys? Plastic.

Most of us take plastic for granted. But people in places like Corpus Christi suffer the ill effects. The Natural Resources Defense Council has reported that children born near chemical plants, refineries, and incinerators are much more likely to be born with a wide variety of birth defects than children in comparable communities. Similarly, adults in these areas are more likely to develop cancer and immune-compromising chronic or terminal diseases, leading to the term “cancer cluster.”

Consider climate forcing impacts on climate change. In 2007, the EPA reported, "CO2 emissions from incineration of waste (20.8 Tg CO2 Eq. in 2007) increased by 9.8 Tg CO2 Eq. (90 percent) from 1990 through 2007, as the volume of plastics and other fossil carbon-containing materials in the waste stream grew." We know that from 1990 to 2007 time single-use plastic water bottle use has at least doubled. World Watch reported that from 1997 to 2005 the market's volume doubled to 164 billion liters. PR Inside estimated that the volume increased to over 174 billion liters in 2011, though public awareness campaigns, bans, and the economic downturn could disrupt this trend. Nonetheless, billions of single-use plastic water bottles in the U.S. have ended up in landfills. [Image courtesy of Huff Post Green.]

And we have the famous expanding garbage patches in the oceans. The most famous is featured in this video of the patch in the North Pacific Gyre.




What an incredible mess.

I myself have been quite active on this issue over the years. As the former president of 3E-COE, I worked with students and the Office of Physical Plant to work on reducing Penn State’s plastic water bottle use. Those bottle-filling stations around University Park campus (now over 20 of them) came about because of that collaboration (read about the clubs work on water and plastic bottles).

Some people are taking steps to change all of this and we will talk to them today at 4 pm.

Ben Bezark works for the Plastic Pollution Coalition on the Plastic Free Campuses program. PPC seeks to “end the global dependence on disposable plastic, the primary source of plastic pollution” and “reduce the overall global plastic footprint for individuals, businesses and organizations.” And students at University of Vermont are doing just that. Gregory Francese will join us mid-show to tell us about their incredible work to ban bottled water there. Last, but not least, we will be joined by Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, professor of Women’s Studies at Penn State who hosted a TEDx event at Penn State last year on plastic pollution.

As always, listen in on your local dial at 90.7 fm or stream us online. Call in with questions or comments: (814) 865-9477.

Consider donating to The Lion

For three years Mike and Peter have been afforded the opportunity to occupy air space each week because of a consistent signal from our radio station, from the good will of the program managers and directors, and good relationships with other DJs and hosts on The Lion 90.7 fm. If you've listened over the years, consider a small donation, even just $5 to our endowment. Make a donation today and sustain some good college radio alive at Penn State.

What if Paris floods from climate change?

Since Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth came out a few years ago, people in the United States have idly entertained the idea that Miami or New Orleans could flood. In worst-case scenarios, New York City could be submerged - a story made morbidly fascinating in Alan Weisman's The World Without Us. But in the world of history and culture, few cities hold water (no pun intended) like Paris.

What if it floods from climate change? This is a scenario eerily represented in this video.



As TreeHugger notes:

More than 100 miles from the Atlantic, Paris is safe from rising sea levels for the foreseeable future, but coastal cities around the world aren't as lucky. The entire population of the nation of Kiribati, in the Maldives, is relocating to Fiji as its 32 islands disappear under the water. They are not the first rising-sea refugees, either.

To put the video's version of Paris in perspective, the best case scenario for this century is a 50cm rise in global sea levels. New reports show things will likely be worse.

Rising seas not only make coastal areas uninhabitable, they compromise drinking water supplies. The use of Paris, the famously beautiful city, as the potential victim could bring attention to a climate issue that is largely ignored.

Where would the art go? Berlin? Basel? Vienna? I have to admit a certain fascination and interest in such a problem. What kind of transition of culture would have to occur? I'm envisaging a modern version of the Irish monks of the medieval period who preserved so much in their cloistered corner of the world while Europe's powers plundered one another. Imagine the contingencies for the Mona Lisa. What about what's in New York's Museum of Modern Art? What future scenarios will there be besides A World Without Us or John Carpenter's campy Escape from New York?

A lot of people will argue New York is safe for a long time. And they may be right. The pumps that free the subways (and all of the island from the daily deluge of water that made the island a meadowland) run, more than likely, on coal. Coal, left unchecked, will power our machines for a long time. Maybe nuclear power fuels them. Maybe it will more. Maybe tidal will one day do it. But if its coal, and coal is left unchecked, that means an escalation of climate change. A real double bind. And one that makes for great apocalyptic story telling. I'm not saying the stories will necessarily or really won't happen. I don't know.

Right now, they're just stories. But each day with more coal dumping millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, the more traction the doom scenarios will get more traction and the more the Mad Max fans will say that thunderdome is on its way. Others will watch this video and think, there must be a different way to do things so that doesn't happen.

What is an educated person?

I've been teaching at Penn State for going on 9 years. This summer will mark the end of my teaching here and the last time I'll have the opportunity to teach Philosophy of Education here. It would be great if you would join me. We'll have class outside every day unless it rains...or it's really way too hot.

EDTHP 440: Philosophy of Education
Summer 2012, First Session

What is a happy life? What is the purpose of society? What is nature and what is our place in it?

Register for this course and explore these questions to develop your philosophy of education and your philosophy of living. When you register for this course you will have the opportunity to be both teacher and student, be free to question and answer, and explore the work of our local culture and local natural environment. By course’s end, you will have written and presented your personal philosophy of education.

Following in the thousands of years of tradition of people who learned by listening and speaking, the majority of student evaluation is based on the cultivated ability to carefully and clearly speak your ideas and feelings so that you mean what you say and say what you mean.

Reading list:

• Ursula LeGuin, The Wizard of Earthsea
  
• J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
• Wendell Berry, What Are People For?
• John Dewey, Moral Principles in Education and Experience and Education
• Thomas Princen, Treading Softly
  
• David Orr, Hope is an Imperative

Additional readings come from Peter Singer, Derrick Jensen, Madhu Prakash, Vandana Shiva, Parker Palmer, Yes! Magazine, Alan Watts, Christopher Uhl and Dana Stuchul, and others.

Students from across the university, including graduate students, are invited to this class.
Registration #871396

For more information contact Peter Buckland via email: pdb118@psu.edu

Faces in Gasland

Come to Mark Schmerling's event depicting the the effects of shale gas drilling in Pennsylvania on March 22nd. He will briefly trace his immersion into the environmental documentary field, and then discuss his Marcellus images and the stories of the people in the photos.

To learn more, visit Sierra Club Moshannon's website.

We are all Earthlings

Sometimes it's nice to just remember that kid's songs have great wisdom.

Searching beneath our feet, working with our hands, and moving from the heart.

Do you ever wonder why lawns sit empty? Have you looked at your neighbors' yards or pieces of the park and thought, "What else could be there?"

I know I often think about what it would be like to see stands of maples, oaks, walnuts, and cherry trees where sprawling lawns sit. And other times I envision lawns surrounded by wildflower meadows where bees and butterflies dance. Or I see beds of rich loam with intermingled vegetables in rows arranged in beautiful arrangements with compost chambers, piles of leaves, and jumbled pile of hand tools.

Do you wonder what it would be like to be invited into that place if it isn't your property? Or what if the people who owned the garden asked you to eat some produce by just putting out there for you? Or what if you wanted to do it with your own lawn but weren't sure where to begin? Maybe all you want is a beautiful place that nurtures your spirit and gives you peace of mind and, you hope, a smile to others. A food commons. A beauty commons. A peaceful commons.

Today's guests are taking some of those ideas and feelings and bringing them to life. Dana Stuchul started something she calls Veggie Commons, "is to join together (as kids, teens, beginning farmers and gardeners, dwellers, and elders) in the cultivation, harvest, and enjoyment of wholesome, locally nurtured food. Utilyzing food, labor, land, and love, we endeavor to fortify our community, transforming lawnscapes into foodscapes." [Garden pictured at right.] Dana, like our previous guests Asher Miller of the Post Carbon Institute, Katherine Watt of Spring Creek Homesteading and formerly of the Transition Town Initiative, is something of radical re-localizer. There is great promise in meaningful work with the land, something our mechanized and digitized society has lost but can regain through work in the commons.

And maybe you want to take a crack at creating your beautiful space but aren't sure where to begin. Woody Wilson has started Home Grown Farms (Facebook page here), a company that designs, installs, and manages residential and company gardens in State College. Wilson says, "Home Grown Farms bridges the gap between where food is grown and where people consume it."

Both are grounded (pardon the pun) in a love of our place, love of the land, and the possibility of local resilience. Rather than fret and kvetch about sprawl, climate change, peak oil, and the destructive nature of our stuffing and starving food system, they have gotten their hands dirty. Quite literally, this is labor of love and labor for love.

Dana posted the words of Ivan Illich on the Veggie Commons blog a few days ago. He said,

As philosophers, we search below our feet because our generation has lost its grounding in both soil and virtue. By virtue, we mean that shape, order and direction of action informed by tradition, bounded by place, and qualified by choices made within the habitual reach of the actor; we mean practice mutually recognized as being good within a shared local culture that enhances the memories of a place.

What is happening here with Dana and Woody? What if more of us recognized and nurtured our relationship with the soil to which all terrestrial life owes its existence?

So join us today on the Lion 90.7 fm. As always, feel free to call in (814) 895-9577 with comments and questions. You can also find us on Facebook where you can post articles and interact with other SN listeners and readers or join us on Twitter at SustainNowRadio.