Earth Gaze

According to some historians, the publication of the first image of from outer space transformed the way Americans viewed their place on our planet. Once we could gaze back on the Earth from the moon, Earth no longer seemed like a place of abundant resources, but a small and finite dot suspended in a vast emptiness, entirely responsible for its own continuation.

That shift, according to "Earth Days," a documentary currently screening at the Siskel Film Center in the Loop, spurred the modern environmental movement that has been questioning how, and at what cost, we fuel our cars, heat our homes and feed our families, since the 1970s. Weighing the short term gains and long term consequences of everything from spraying DDT and other pesticides to placing solar panels on the roof of the White House, has led to some amazing innovations, and understandably, the sobering realization that "healing" the planet will take a lot more work still.

The environmental movement was one strong voice among the readings I was assigned in Losing the Farm: the Globalization of Food Production in the 20th century, and will inform my final paper for that class.


A photo I took of farmer Steve Tiwald, founder of the Green Earth Institute, with a row of dino-kale, while on a Losing the Farm field-trip. I love kale!

Are we chemists, taming the natural world with new technologies like genetic modification that can increase yields and farm efficiency and cheapen the cost of mono-cropping, or is it time to "make peace with nature," as President Richard Nixon (who surprisingly signed the Clean Air Act into law) advocated in early 1970s?

Is a new era of innovation just around the corner, promising to increase the urban standard of living by exponential degrees, or is the future of a prosperous and healthy human race actually tied up in the trope of the New England village, where everyone knows their neighbors, has a real stake in community affairs, and strives for communal sufficiency?

These are a couple of the very difficult conceptual questions this movie and my class are concerned with. Answering them is a tall order (made taller still by the pressing issue of over-consumption--Uh, can I super-size that conceptual question?) I'm writing my final paper about the farmers' market as a tool to reconcile the community, environmental and personal health benefits of receiving locally-produced goods with the autonomy of the urban sprawl. To have your city, and eat your farm too, so to speak. I'll post my findings later.

Regardless, I took away from this movie that it's time to change the rhetoric of sustainability from "Stop what you're doing, you bad person, you!" to one that is constantly and non-judgmentally suggesting alternatives, suggesting that yes, you really can drive an electric car around the world; yes, we really can reduce air and water pollution without sacrificing our quality of life.

It amazes me how much I am, especially at the University of Chicago, limited by institutional imagination, or lack thereof; there are so many aspects of life directly tied to mental and physical well-being here I would change if I could, but how often do I question that they don't necessarily have to be so? For example, I have a lot of criticism about the Core curriculum, which I hope to write about after finals week. Well, Femmaj, one of the RSOs in which I'm involved, is starting a campaign to change diversity in the Core, which we believe is riddled with tokenism and unimaginative curricula for engaging with big picture concepts like "Power, Identity and Resistance." What made me think I couldn't criticize this before now? What makes me think there are other parts of this University that are immutable, like the almost-universally decried dining hall food?

A University with this kind of intellectual clout, money and resources should not be stuck with archaic practices, like the mass-waste generated by 3 inefficient dining halls that serve low-quality, conventional produce and over-processed frozen foods. Could change really be as simple as standing up and suggesting an alternative?

UChicago in the news: some tidbits from my job

One part of my summer internship in the University of Chicago News Office that I have been loath to mention here (it's mostly grunt work) is the Daily Clips Blast. Basically, I or my awesome co-worker Susie will take a couple hours each day to search for all the recent news articles that substantively mention the University of Chicago or quote a professor or administrator, archive them, and mail out the top 7-12 stories to about 200 University personnel.

Lucky for me, this means I get paid to read the news, and today's clips blast was chock-full of cool stories. Here are a few that I enjoyed:


*Dr. Stefano Allesina discusses the algorithm he devised to study food webs, based on an algorithm Google uses to order pages in its search engine.

*Former Dean of Admissions Ted O'Neill answers questions about applying to college. I couldn't get enough of articles like this one when I was applying to College three years ago, and I wish I had known that it was okay, even expected of me, not to have a major! I arrived on campus 2 years ago—minus a week or two—the quintessential type-A kid, with everything in its right place from my resume to my course-schedule, and it stressed me out to no end that I was missing The Perfect Double-Major program. Since then, I've obviously bounced from Spanish Lang. and Lit. to Art History to Law, Letters and Society and Gender Studies, and I don't think I'm too worse for wear, do you?

*Prof. Jens Ludwig examines Chicago Public School plan to combat youth violence. 320 CPS students were shot last year—that's a huge figure. This plan is definitely worth keeping an eye on, since it would identify at-risk kids and give them more attention, in the form of job-training and mentoring.

*Sr. Lecturer Allen Sanderson criticizes a recent survey on the economic impact of Chicago's Olympic bid. When I interviewed Allen Sanderson for my other blog, No Small Plans, he said he was incredulous about the economic impact survey and was certain that the consultants Chicago 2016 hired were the only people who would have produced such a stellar prognosis. I wish I could talk to consultants at other firms to create a comparison.

Chicago says: Bisphenol, Eh?

If you drank from a plastic water bottle, ate lunch from a take-out container, or nuked yesterday's leftover lasagna in a plastic bowl, you may have ingested some bisphenol-A. Bisphenol-A, or BPA, is a chemical compound commonly used to line food containers and harden the plastic used to make baby bottles, sippy cups and other consumer goods. But yesterday Chicago became the first city in the U.S. to ban the sale of baby feeding products containing the chemical.

I wrote an article about bisphenol-A leaching into San Diego's oceans a couple of years ago, and part of that story hinged on environmentalists' and surfers' concerns over the hormone-like effects of chemicals in plastics:

... the plastics used to make bags, clear bottles and food packaging contain controversial hormones like Bisphenol A, a chemical that mimics the sex hormone estrogen, and whose health effects are disputed by scientists and the plastics industry. Some animal studies have shown Bisphenol A to cause certain types of cancer, affect brain functions and cause miscarriages and infertility, but FDA regulators have found it to be harmless at the levels found in plastic packaging. Nonetheless, Moore charged that Bisphenol A and similar chemicals leach from plastic debris into the ocean and put surfers' health at risk.

The controversial nature of these chemicals drove me to purchase my much-loved aluminum Sigg bottle (now on its third incarnation thanks to my carelessness), which now replaces the four to six plastic water bottles I went through each week of high school. I commend the City Council for their decision, which signals the usefulness of more critical inquiry into the health effects of consumer goods.

Of course, the American Chemistry Council has already released a statement deriding the new law as "contrary to the global consensus on the safety of BPA" and charging that the Council ignores the expert evaluations that have deemed the compound safe. This argument too thoroughly to privilege studies of chemicals and consumer products conducted for the purpose of legitimizing products of dubious safety, so it really heartens me to see a governing body put the question of public awareness and consumer safety over the product.

Earth gets its week in the sun on campus

Here's an article that appeared this week on the University's homepage. Please check it out-- there's even a cool video for which [you can't tell that] I interviewed people.

Claire Feinberg’s unofficial job as an intern for the University of Chicago’s Sustainability Council is to turn off the lights and encourage other students to do the same.

“My biggest pet peeve is when people leave [my dorm’s] laundry room lights on all the time,” she says. “It seems so absurd to me to have the lights shining on your laundry while no one’s there, so I always turn that off.”

Feinberg, a first-year in the College, is already well versed in the discipline of green living. Besides hitting the lights when she leaves a room, Feinberg air-dries clothes in her dorm room and carries her food without a tray at the dining hall. These may be only baby steps down the long road of conservation, but fostering simple habits like these in students is a goal of the Sustainability Council.

The council shared its message on green living through a week of campus activities during the University’s annual observation of Earth Day. This year, the University hosted a series of eco-conscious activities that began Saturday, April 18 with volunteer work in community gardens and area parks sponsored by the University Community Service Center.

Highlighting Greener Choices

Earth Week 2009 culminated Friday, April 24 on the Main Quadrangle with “EarthFest”—an outdoor party with music, organic food, and information about what students and community members are doing to “green up” their lives.

Registered Student Organizations and community groups set up tables with information and freebies to raise awareness about sustainability practices, and to spark conversation and new ideas.

In April, the Office of Sustainability launched Sustainable Actions for a Greener Environment, a new campus-wide initiative to offer “SAGE advice” for how to be both green and smart in making everyday choices. Students manned a table for the office and shared some of their ideas.

Earth Week 2009 offered workshops and lectures on raising worms for composting, growing culinary herbs, issues in urban agriculture, the environment in United States law, and sustainable urbanism and green buildings. Speakers included Sadhu Johnston, Chief Environmental Officer for the City of Chicago; Doug Farr of Farr Associates, which specializes in construction of LEED-certified buildings; Esther Bowen, a graduate student in Geophysical Sciences and teaching assistant for the course “Feeding the City;” and Cecelia Ungari, Director of Education and Outreach at Healthy Green Goods.

A collaborative effort among the Office of Sustainability, the University Sustainability Council, the University Medical Center, the Green Campus Initiative, the Program on the Global Environment, the College, the Civic Knowledge Project, and several student organizations, Earth Week 2009 helped students think about their role in promoting sustainability.

“It’s our one opportunity to make people who normally wouldn’t be interested in environmental initiatives take notice,” says Feinberg.

Code Green: Thomas Friedman puts America on the Alternative Energy Alert

The Midway Review, the journal of politics and culture I edit and design, is out on campus today, and here's a copy of my article. The whole magazine can be found at midwayreview.uchicago.edu as a PDF.

Hot, Flat and Crowded:
Why We Need a Green
Revolution—and How
It Can Renew America
by Thomas L. Friedman
Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
448 pp., $27.95


If you ask Thomas Friedman, thanks to climate change, globalization and climbing population rates, the earth looks hotter, flatter and more crowded than ever before. It also looks like a self-indulgent scene out of The Garden of Earthly Delights. Hieronymus Bosch’s fifteenth-century triptych of excess and greed decorates the cover of Friedman’s newest book, Hot, Flat and Crowded, suggesting that the way the United States has been tearing through global resources is finally catching up with us.

In the first half of his book, Friedman recounts the development of the global energy crisis. In responding to the crisis, he claims, the United States has done more to isolate itself from the rest of the world and deepen its dependency on foreign oil than promote innovation. Meanwhile, Denmark’s booming wind turbine industry, Brazil’s emphasis on ethanol production, and Japan’s high fuel efficiency standards are each propelling their respective nations into the future a lot faster than we Americans can manage, even with the help of our high powered SUVs. And if we don’t pull our heads out of the ground, where no doubt we’ve been poking around for oil.

Friedman warns that we as a nation risk falling hopelessly behind in technological innovation. In particular, Friedman fears the convergence of three global he says, for which he coins the mnemonic “hot, flat and crowded.” In the next fifty years, he claims, the world’s population will swell 45%, from 6.7 to 9 billion. Outsourcing of business will likewise increase, causing the numbers and spending power of the world’s middle class to rise in turn. Meanwhile, fossil fuels like oil, coal and natural gas will add CO2 to the atmosphere and fuel global warming. These developments together will produce a greater strain on the Earth’s ecosystem than it has ever felt before.

The thesis isn’t new. Friedman, a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, walked his American readers through the leveling of the economic playing field in his bestseller The World is Flat, and cautioned them not to rest on the laurels of the business and political tactics that served us so well through the 20th century. And writers as diverse as Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, and Al Gore have been decrying the culture of over-consumption for years. But this time, Friedman is hoping to lure the audience of entrepreneurs he snagged with The World is Flat into thinking about the environment, even if their concerns have more to do with profit margins than polar bears.

So what’s different about Friedman’s solution? First, it does not sound much like “205 Easy Ways to Save the Earth,” or any other magazine features telling consumers what cars to drive or light bulbs to buy. Friedman knows going green won’t be easy, simple, or fun for the nation, and insists that only drastic changes in policy can make a lasting impact.

Second, and perhaps more importantly for Friedman, green is no longer synonymous with Birkenstocks and tofu. In one of the many anecdotes that punctuate Friedman’s arguments, he explains how even the U.S. Army has cause for concern: at one point an officer observed that transporting oil across the Iraqi desert puts men needlessly at risk of enemy attack. As he says, “[alternative energy] is now a core national security and economic interest.”

Friedman is calling for U.S. business and governments, and not just hemp-wearing, hybrid-driving consumers, to lead a “Green Revolution.” In doing so, he hopes the United States can set an example for developing nations like China and India, who tend otherwise to envy the U.S.’s trajectory of industrialization, despite its history of utter disregard for environmental matters. This process would involve imposing serious gasoline taxes like Denmark’s to encourage consumer restraint, building masstransit systems to rival Europe’s, and trading in our present dependence on dirty energy for cleaner biofuels and more efficient power plants.

Friedman borrows a number of suggestions from the “Carbon Migration Initiative” proposed by Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, both professors at Princeton University: replace 1,400 large coal-fired electric plants with facilities powered by natural gas; double the output of today’s nuclear power facilities to replace coal-based electricity; increase wind power eightyfold to make hydrogen for clean cars; double the fuel efficiency of two billion cars from thirty to sixty miles per gallon.

Again, not the kind of prescription you’ll read in Working Mother magazine. To accomplish all this, Friedman wants to tap into a history of American ingenuity—the panache for self-reinvention that made Americans the pioneers of global industry, put a man on the moon and invented the Internet. He wants green to mean more to the country than the color of Jay Gatsby’s light, but knows it will take the leadership of an FDR or JFK to make this happen.

But just as Ronald Reagan stripped the White House of Jimmy Carter’s solar panels when he took office, it is doubtful whether twenty-first century Americans will take heed should the government tell them to green up their lives. When the Soviets launched Sputnik, Friedman applauded America for successfully spurring itself to surpass the U.S.S.R. in space- exploration. But after the events of September 11th shook America to attention again, in a way much more immediate and devastating than the threat of communism had ever been, the opposite happened. Americans were encouraged to spend more, travel more, and ignore the fact that their nation was at war.

Friedman mocks the low-impact, consumerist trends that have made Green a glamorous color in niche markets. But there is one central question he doesn’t fully answer: How readily will Americans, so accustomed to free-market-forces, support this dramatic shift in federal policy, when they could just as easily switch from incandescent light bulbs to LEDs and call it a day?
Only the next ten years will tell. I’m going to hold on to that article, “205 Easy Ways to Save the Earth,” just in case.

The First 79 Stories Down

I plan to review Thomas Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat and Crowded for the Midway Review this October, so I’m paying attention to what he has to say about “ET,” Energy Technology, this month in his New York Times columns and television interviews.

Here are some highlights from his interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN this morning:

*On the Georgia-Russia Conflict: “I mean, the worst thing about this story, Fareed, is that you have to kind of defend Putin's Russia, which you really don't want to do. But how would we feel if Russia were striking a deal with Mexico to extend the old Warsaw Pact to the U.S.-Mexico border? I mean, you know, why don't we understand that maybe from Moscow that looks a little unnerving.”

*On America’s Role as a World Superpower: “I think the issue for most Americans, Fareed, is nation- building at home. Americans want nation-building in America -- not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, or not only in Iraq, not only in Afghanistan”

Quoting environmentalist Rob Watson: “If you jump out of an 80-story building, from the 80th floor, for 79 stories you can think you're flying. It's just the sudden stop at the end that gets you."

*On Energy Technology: “Have you ever been to a revolution, Fareed, where no one got hurt? That's the green revolution. In the green revolution, everyone's a winner. Exxon's green. GM's green. They've got a little cap now, a yellow cap on those flex fuel cars that they're making for 10 years -- never told anybody, so they could make more Hummers. Yes, everybody's green now. But when everyone's green, Fareed, that's not a revolution. That's a party.”

FZ: “We can put those nice light bulbs in, drive hybrids. The reality is that China and India's growth is going to consume so much in terms of fossil fuels, that the world is going to get polluted, the price of oil is going to stay high. Is this hopeless in a sense?
TF: No. Young Chinese say to me, "Mr. Friedman, you know, you guys got to grow dirty for 150 years. Now it's our turn." To which I say to them, "Absolutely. You're absolutely right. It's your turn. Grow as dirty as you want, for as long as you want. "Because I think in about five years, by then I'll have invented all the clean power technologies you're going to need as you choke to death. And then we're going to clean your clock in the next great global industry -- ET, energy technology, clean power."

*On the Presidential Election: “Well, if you're interested in whether or not you should have an abortion, this is the campaign for you. But, you know, I've kind of made up my mind on that issue.”

“I thought we were going to have two green candidates, but now we only have one, and his name is Barack Obama. McCain supports lifting the gasoline tax, which would increase pollution and gasoline consumption. He didn’t show up on any of the votes on alternative energy and fuel. He missed all eight votes and the senate bill still hasn’t passed.“