Inconsistency

Often in this job I find myself doing inconsistent things. It worries me, sometimes, that I’m not really sticking to my principles, that we are somehow compromising ourselves by attempting to work with companies or organizations I don’t hold with. For example, Coke. The Coca Cola company gives out a rather wide variety of grant funding to various institutions, and we have been known to apply for them. But- it’s Coca Cola. Coke is not an environmentally friendly product, let me tell you. Start with the fact that the main ingredients in Coke are derived from corn. Not to mention the number of questionable labor practices of the companies foreign arms…

But that you can research yourself. The point, really, is that very often we are susceptible to making major compromises to reach our ends- but is this the right way to go about it? Just because someone is offering grant funding, does that absolve the fact that they are otherwise one of the major polluters to the environment? A lot of major corporations, particularly the oil companies, try and improve their image by providing funding to alternative energy projects, planting trees, and all the rest of the highly marketable band-aid actions. And in the meantime, they march onward without changing their practices in the slightest.

This is another one of those what-do-you-really-value questions. Yes, tree plantings are generally a good idea, and they look especially good in a press release. But what’s planting twenty or so trees when the company that paid for them may be cutting down thousands more? We in the environmental advocacy business tend to get so caught up on funding that we fail to question where we get it from. Real community action, I suspect, is the kind that doesn’t require any money at all, except maybe to support the people doing it so they don’t have to work three other jobs in addition to community advocacy. No, funding, in the large part, honestly goes toward making things look good. Adverts, board dinners, and endless presentations and powerpoints and pages of plans. It’s the difference between doing a demonstration artificial wetland in a fancy wooden barrel as opposed to just using a bathtub- or whatever else may have been lying around.

I haven’t been convinced this is entirely necessary. And maybe this is why we overlook the failings of some of the funders we regularly beseech for more money: we know that we ourselves are failing to uphold the tenants at the heart of sustainability. What compromises are we really willing to make when it comes to the future of the world as we know it?

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Recyclemania

For the fourth year running, Washington College is participating in Recyclemania. This is a national competition among colleges to encourage campus recycling and waste minimization. We are participating in the Per Capita Classic competition, along with rival colleges from our athletic conference including Gettysburg, Dickinson, McDaniel and Hopkins- all of whom are currently beating us except Hopkins- so get recycling!

You can help by using the recycling bins around campus, and encouraging your hallmates to put out their green county bins every week. If you don't have one, ask your RA to contact the recycling coordinator at recycling_coordinator@washcoll.edu.

You can keep updated on the results here.

You can find out more information about campus recycling at George Goes Green

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Public Space

Over the holiday I went shopping with my little sister. Normally I do not do any shopping, unless I need something very specific, or am inspired to browse the dress section at Goodwill. I definitely do not go in malls, especially of the strip variety. But quite a few people gave me gift certificates for Christmas, and unfortunately they were for places I would never go of my own volition- Barnes and Noble and Borders. There’s actually a funny story there but that isn’t the point of this entry.

While in one of these places, I started thinking about bathrooms. If you are in the middle of a city, ninety percent of the time there is no place to pee. Think about it. All the bathrooms are locked up in people’s houses, or in restaurants that won’t let you pee unless you are a “patron”. We had this problem over the summer during Artscape, when the lines for the portable bathrooms were horrendous, and the heat made them impossible to get near anyway. Where in heavens name are you supposed to pee?

You may be wondering how this relates to the environment, but think about it for a minute. When did this become an issue? When did it become illegal to pee wherever you could, behind a bush, on a tree, what have you? (Also, why is it so satisfying to pee outside behind a bush when you’re camping?) In Europe, you even have to pay to use the public bathrooms (which leads to some inventive methods of getting around the system, let me tell you).

One of our biggest expenses, or at least for most of us, is for space. Simply to have space to live, we shell out several hundred dollars per month. Sometimes several thousand. For- space? (We call it rent.) This really seems illogical, if you start to think about it. When this country was first settled, you could tramp out to the Midwest and drop yourself down and call it your own. You wouldn’t imagine paying anyone for the land, so long as you could survive on it. (I am temporarily ignoring the fact that there were in fact people living there already.)

This has led us to become rather possessive of our space. This is my space. This is your space. Do not cross the line into my space. But what of the other spaces? Could this be the source of some of our inaction so far as environmental degradation to the ocean, or the air? It’s not “our” space, after all. We didn’t pay for it. Someone else will deal with it.

But our spaces intertwine- the air and water from neighboring spaces have an effect on what happens in your space, frequently invading in the form of rain and wind and temperature changes- the natural world disregards boundaries such as property lines, which are irrelevant when it comes to the natural course of a breeze. And why is it that we pay such attention to them? How is it that we’ve come to find it acceptable that we have to pay for space to live, and frequently find ourselves without a place to pee? It certainly doesn’t make much sense to me.

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In Defense of Food

I recently finished Michael Pollan’s latest book, In Defense of Food. In it he argues that eating well is actually relatively simple, once you cut through the combined forces of the food industry, food scientists, and the media (which is maybe not so easy to do). I thought at first this book was not going to be as good as his last few (how could you top Omnivore’s Dilemma?) and in a way it’s not. It lacks the narrative that drives Omnivore’s Dilemma, the actual human drama of searching for a meal- something that we can all, on a very intrinsic level, relate to.

Though In Defense of Food is based more on science than human interest, it remains profound in that it is really a culmination of Pollan’s work to date. Starting with the story of the deeply symbiotic relationship between humans and certain plants in The Botany of Desire and progressing through how we get those plants to our plate in Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan finally comes full circle in his latest book, looking again at our relationship with plants from the biological perspective of nutrition, and combining this with how the way we raise our plants affects the nutritional quality of our food. It is worth reading if only to see these pieces fall into place. A quote:

“Health is, among other things, the product of being in these sorts of relationships in a food chain… It follows that when the health of one part of the food chain is disturbed, it can affect all the other creatures in it. If the soil is sick or in some way deficient, so will be the grasses that grow in that soil and the cattle that eat the grasses and the people who drink the milk from them.”

In addition, the book provides up to date information about the fallacies of nutritional science that will have you throwing all your other “nutrition” books out the window- and rightfully so, as it has always seemed absurd to eat by attempting to figure out the nutritional content of food, when for thousands of years people have got on by eating based on food combinations their culture has worked out, over thousands of years. The olive oil/ tomato combination, for example: olive oil makes the lycopene in tomatoes more available, but when it comes down to it, who the hell cares? The two work well together, and people have survived for centuries eating those two foods in combination. As Pollan says:

“You would not have bought this book and read this far into it if your food culture was intact and healthy. And while it is true that most of us unthinkingly place the authority of science above culture in all matters having to do with our health, that prejudice should at least be examined. The question we need to ask is, Are we better off with these new authorities telling us how to eat than we were with the traditional authorities they supplanted?”

Really, as he concludes, you only need nutritional science if you are eating industrial, processed foods, which don’t have much in the way of nutrition- unless you extract it from something else and add it in. His rules for eating well are sensible and don’t require a calculator, or much in the way of label reading, because when it comes down to it, if it has a label, it’s probably not something you want to be eating. I most enjoyed the rule of thumb, don’t eat it if your great grandmother wouldn’t have recognized it as a food, as this is one of my personal rules of thumb. He means, of course, if you took your great grandmother to the grocery store and handed her a tube of Go-Gurt, or whatever the hell it’s called- would she recognize it as a food?

Probably not. And maybe, neither should you.

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Hooks and needles

I like to crochet. I find its repetitive weaving motions cathartic, and I tend to see it as my little own way of fighting the system. Until recently, however, I never took the time to question how my hobby has effected the environment.
It didn't take me long to stumble upon some studies showing how the wool industry is linked to pesticide and insecticide use. Such chemicals have not only been linked to harmful algae blooms, but also to neurological damage in both sheep and humans. I was alarmed.
Because I have never been one to advocate commercialism, I sought to find some cheap and ec0-friendly ways of producing my own crocheting fibers. Luckily, because of the wonderful invention of the internet, it didn't take me long. I had never thought of unraveling old knits (sweaters, hats) for their wool, but the idea seemed pretty awesome. I was able to ransack my basement for some outdated accessories and put them to good use. Even more amazing to me, though, is the use of old disposable plastic bags to make long-lasting totes. It's a fun project, and has freed me from green guilt.

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