Young greenies

I saw the article “In the Book Bag, More Garden Tools” on the New York Times a week or two ago and meant to point it out, but it kind of fell off my radar. Finals are coming up and the spouse is concentrating on studying. Thereby leaving me to do more of the necessary cleaning, childcare, etc. things around the house. Enough excuses. This is something very cool happening in New York City. I worry about nature deficit in my own child, but for these kids it’s much more of a problem. We drive by farms and cows, garden in our backyard and go to the farmers’ market on a regular basis. My kid doesn’t interact with nature as much as I’d like him to, but really, he’d have to work pretty hard to avoid nature all together in the area where we live. For kids growing up in New York City, that isn’t the case. Schools are stepping in to fill the void and help kids understand the natural world and natural cycles through school gardens. Some of them have to be located on rooftops for lack of space on the ground. They’re working very hard to use those spaces for all sorts of classes. Art classes go and draw the plants and the skyline, math classes go on the roof to study angles, science classes go up and talk about the weather, ecology, agriculture and any number of other topics. I’m so glad they are giving kids these opportunities and I hope more schools figure out how to create these types of spaces for their own students.

Another New York Times article I came across earlier today is “To Stop Climate Change, Students Aim at College Portfolios.” The article is about college students putting pressure on their institutions to sell off endowment holdings in fossil fuel companies. I’m not really old enough to remember it, but apparently students did something similar in the eighties with regard to institutions selling off stock in companies that worked with the apartheid government of South Africa. It’s unclear whether students’ efforts in the eighties had any impact on the South African government, but it did get the conversation started on what could be done to pressure South Africa to end apartheid. Many endowments have vast amounts of money and coal, oil, and gas companies are usually part of the investment mix. Perhaps universities selling off their holdings in these companies won’t force change on them, but after this last election where climate change was all but ignored, this action would (hopefully) get the government moving on climate action again. I admire these students’ verve and hope their idea spreads. Read more about the divest from fossil fuel movement at www.350.org.

 

Reflections on my foray into sustainability in academia

Finished my Introduction to Sustainability class. Woohoo! It was a pretty good class, and I’m glad I did it. My final thoughts from the class forum:

“In my first week thread, I talked about deforestation and how that creates a cycle of warming because water cycling can’t occur on the same scale or can’t occur at all because so much of a forest has been destroyed.

And honestly, I’m still not terribly optimistic about our chances. We’re continuing to pump more and more carbon dioxide into the air while destroying the environment (and the ecosystem services that would be a huge help in saving the planet) at an alarming rate.

And going back to a point I raised in my original posting about ebooks: Professor Tomkin used ebooks as an example of a technology that’s more sustainable than the old alternative (paper books). If a sustainability expert doesn’t realize which is more sustainable in the long term (which is, in fact, paper books in most cases) then how can we rely on individuals with a lot less knowledge and concern to know what the best choices are? I know we discussed this in Week 7, but it’s a huge problem of education and buy-in to get people to change how they interact with and think about the natural environment, and this is just one stand-out example of misinformation.

One thing I am taking from this class is that I now know about more options available to prevent catastrophic climate change. And we now actually have an example of someone who went off illegally to try geoengineering. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/15/pacific-iron-fertilisation-geoengineering So now we can see if it works! Let’s hope it doesn’t cause a huge dead zone.

I’m also taking more hope because of the number of like-minded people I interacted with over the past 8 weeks who are just as concerned with the environment and sustainability as I am. So thank you to everyone for the great discussions and all the new ideas!”

One of the best things about this class was hearing about local initiatives (like this one in Canada) from other students. Even if the U.S. as a whole isn’t getting behind clean energy, there are loads of cities and regions working on becoming more efficient and environmentally friendly. I learned that places like Nashville are working very hard to conserve water, another participant in the class talked about solar energy in Colorado. I wrote about Cyride (the AMAZING bus system in my hometown) and how great a system it is for a small city and got some wonderful feedback from other students. It was nice to interact with so many like-minded people who know that climate change is a huge threat to the future of the world.

I think I might try to learn some programming on udacity next (because it’s self-paced and I’m rather busy). Anyone else taking advantage of all these recent free educational opportunities? Some upcoming class on coursera that might be of interest: Climate Literacy in May of 2013, Climate Change (date to be announced) and Global Sustainable Energy (date to be announced).

Sharing time!

These are some interesting/cool things I have seen on the interwebs recently.

Still pretty busy with my class. We watched this TED Talk last week that people may find interesting. I also just watched another (short) TED Talk that people might enjoy.

The New York Times also ran an interesting article in early September that others might want to check out that is about climate change and health.

And I took a great class in graduate school about library buildings and overseeing library construction projects and best practices for creating welcoming library spaces. It was probably one of my favorite classes. After that experience, I tend to keep an eye out for cool things libraries are doing in terms of space and building construction. There was an Inhabitat article about the new Los Gatos library building that ran awhile ago. The library is pursuing LEED Gold certification and the pictures definitely make the building interior look bright and welcoming. Check out the window seating in the children’s area. I want that in my house.

Lifelong Learning

One of my professional (and personal) interests is lifelong learning. Librarians tend to be interested in a whole range of different topics, which is often one of the reasons they become librarians in the first place. I am not the exception to that rule. Part of the reason I started this blog was to make sure I was pushing myself to learn new things and to hone my writing skills. Another reason I continue to write this blog is that I know climate change and environmental degradation are important topics.

I’ve been interested in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for awhile as one possibility for lifelong learners, and I decided to sign up for a class on coursera to find out a bit more about that educational model and to see if I could learn more about one of my many interests through one of their courses. I decided to take Introduction to Sustainability since I’ve never really looked at sustainability from an academic perspective and thought it might give me new insight. So far I’m a lot less concerned about global population than I used to be. But I still think it’s an important issue for women worldwide to have access to birth control RIGHT NOW to be able to limit the number of children they have to the number of children they want. This week we’re covering “The Tragedy of the Commons,” an idea originated by Garrett Hardin, and more recent examples related to this idea, such as over fishing.

I’m really enjoying taking this course. With my husband in school full time at a private graduate program, we obviously can’t afford to pay for me to take a class. This is an awesome way to learn something new from an expert in the field without having to put us even further into debt. I’m obviously not getting any credit hours for this, but I will get a badge of completion when I’m done to show that I learned the material.

I probably won’t be blogging much over the next 6ish weeks. This is a 10-12 hour per week commitment. Gotta go. I have homework.

 

 

A bit too…forceful

Don’t remember where I first saw a review of Luz Sees the Light by Claudia Davila (maybe Shelf Awareness?) but wherever I saw it, the review was pretty positive, so I picked it up. I felt like this book was wacking me over the head with sustainability and environmental issues. Yes, that is sometimes necessary, but I remember being a preteen and wishing for a bit more subtlety from the educational books/films aimed at my age group. Luz whips out sentences like “Well, this park is proof that we’re not alone, and we can all work together and help each other to learn stuff and grow stuff and make stuff and build stuff… So that in the end, whatever happens, we can rely on ourselves for the things we really need! No more imports or giant malls!” Definitely no subtlety there. Another character, Gord (a twenty-something?), is learning how to garden, build things from scraps, etc. and is very vocal about the need to stop being dependent on fossil fuels. He is scruffy, with long hair and acts kind of nuts. Not a great representation of the green movement. He’s too forceful and grumpy. He gets better in the way he acts towards Luz and her friends over the course of the book, but a less stereotypical representation of someone concerned about the end of oil would have been better, in my opinion.

The plot of the book is that three young people work to bring together their community to clean up a vacant lot and turn it into a park. Great premise and shows that kids can organize and make a difference. I would have strongly disliked this book as a preteen, though (and am still obviously not crazy about it today). I already had a problem with adults condescending to me, I didn’t need the books I read in my free time to do so also.

eReaders and greenies

As a librarian, I read a lot about ebooks and ebook readers to stay up-to-date on what library patrons/customers might be using when they try to borrow ebooks from the library. I’ve read about the environmental friendliness (or lack thereof) of ereaders a few times now. But I ran across this article over on a blog I read and thought I’d share it.

Sometimes, the old, reliable technology really is the best. And I’m not just saying that because I’m a librarian. I have technolust as much as the next pseudo-tech geek, and keeping my desire for new gadgets in check has become one of the things I’m trying to be more aware of. We definitely have too many gadgets in my household. I have a five-year-old iMac I need to back up and then take to recycle sitting in my living room, a desktop on which I’m currently typing, a first-generation iPad (even though I totally lust after a newer iPad, even an iPad 2, that has a camera) a Nook Color and a laptop my husband has for his graduate program. We obviously can’t use all of these devices at one time. It’s kind of ridiculous that we have all of them. Oy vey.

Slow Fashion

I spent quite a bit of time about a week ago going through the entire backlog of posts over at ReFashionista, a very cool blog by South Carolinian Jillian Owens (my favorite refashion). It just so happened that I had Overdressed on hold at the library and that it came in for me not long after I finished reading the ReFashionista archives.

Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L. Cline is mostly about (you guessed it) fast fashion and the like. This means the ultra-cheap clothing available at such retailers as Wal Mart, Target, Zara’s, Aeropostale, etc. Elizabeth Cline was a devoted patron of stores like H & M and Forever 21 at the start of her research for this book. She counted 354 articles of clothing (excluding socks and underwear) in her possession at that time (2009). This was about in line with the American habit of purchasing 64 items of clothing per year. Everywhere Cline looked, even outside of her closet, there were signs of over-consumption of clothing. She interviewed a few of the 20-somethings who post haul videos on YouTube for this book. She also browsed H & M and Forever 21, Target and Wal Mart and observed how quickly stock changed and how poor the quality of each article of clothing was.

She contrasted this with high-end boutiques, vintage clothing sellers, the clothing produced by U.S. companies that pay living wages and a number of other sources that don’t use the cheapest fabric and labor that can be found anywhere on earth. The differences were astounding. And fast fashion obviously has a huge environmental impact. Much of the fabric is polyester or other petroleum-based fibers and people throw out their clothing very quickly because seams rip after just a few wears, buttons fall off and fabric tears. The clothing is meant to be disposable so people have to buy more of it, but it’s getting to the point where it’s completely ridiculous. Who wants to buy a shirt and only be able to wear it once before it falls apart?

The quality of our clothing has been steadily deteriorating, particularly since the early ’90s when NAFTA was ratified and import limitations on clothing were pronounced an unfair advantage to developed countries. Major companies with the resources immediately started moving production overseas and lowering prices. This increased the speed of the downward spiral of clothing quality and number of jobs in the textile industry in the United States. Consumer demand for lower and lower prices have forced retailers to make clothing out of cheaper and cheaper fabric and forced producers to make garments faster and faster without regard to any standards of quality. United States retailers are also starting to leave China (which is becoming a more expensive place to produce clothing as labor prices and materials prices have risen) for the ultra-cheap countries such as Bangladesh and India. This means quality is even worse because those countries don’t have the state-of-the-art machinery and level of skilled labor that China now has.

One of the great things about this book is how much research Cline did, including traveling to places like China and Bangladesh, in order to write it. It’s obviously rather depressing reading about the factories in Bangladesh that pay the mandated minimum wage that isn’t actually a living wage (but the minimum wage in the U.S. isn’t a living wage, so maybe my hopes are too high). Cline does leave us with some glimmer of hope, though. Some consumers are starting to revolt against fast fashion and university fashion programs are emphasizing sustainability and minimal waste in a big way in recent years. Boutiques have opened in places like L.A. and NYC that only carry brands with ethically sourced materials, sewn by people payed a decent wage, and these boutiques are popular and starting to be able to make greater demands concerning sustainability on designers wanting to be carried in their shops. Hopefully this trend continues (and reaches my mid-sized town in the Midwest sometime sooner rather than later).

After looking through the archives at ReFashionista, I hit the secondhand clothing stores in town. That’s normal for me. I did something I wouldn’t normally do, though. I bought a white shirt. As a pale-skinned person with auburn hair, I DO NOT wear white. I also bought a package of dye. I now have a dark green new-to-me shirt that I got multiple compliments on at work the first time I wore it. I think I caught the refashion bug. Not such a bad one to catch.

P.S. Pictures of my newly dyed shirt to follow. My husband is currently out of town (orientation for his pharmacy program!), and I’m pretty sure he has the camera. And if he doesn’t, then hopefully he knows where it is, ’cause I sure don’t.