Intro to Environmental Studies 24

     I recently read an article on the research being done to investigate the sustainability of DMC. This article highlighted recent research on the application of dimethyl carbonate, its benefits, how it works, and what it can be used for by reviewing studies on DMC. DMC is a fuel additive and the article states that it is incredibly useful in enhancing sustainability because it addresses pollution issues head-on. It “holds excellent standing due to its sustainable synthesis (using CO2 as the building block), tunable reactivity, high biodegradability, and low toxicity”. Environmental companies are looking to use “environmentally benign strategies” (EBS) and green chemicals to address sustainability issues from their root and DMC seems to be a new option. This article went in depth about the DMC reaction and the studies done to test its sustainability, but I think research like this is a very important topic to discuss in classes like ours because it shows hard sciences, ...

  I traveled to New Orleans this weekend and learned a lot about the culture there and how it was influenced by the environment, which I feel relates to discussions from class. I learned that a large portion of the city is below sea level and is surrounded by swamps and bogs. This caused a problem for cemeteries because if they tried to bury people, they would not stay buried for long because of the flooding and rain. Because of this, they created mausoleum-type plots for families to place their loved ones. They call these “cities of the dead” because there are rows and rows of small plots and it is a huge part of the cities' culture. They even offer tours of the cemeteries and it is a huge tourist attraction. I attached a picture below. This shows how an adaptation to their environment influenced the culture there. Another example of them adapting to the environment in Louisiana is the building of a levee system to combat flooding. New Orleans is surrounded by swamp land, the Miss...

 I recently read Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring,’ a book that is said to have initiated the environmental movement in the 1960s. It was written to awaken the general public to the danger of pesticides on the environment after she studied a noticeably large loss of birds that were exposed to DDT. She argues that poisoning the natural world—and humanity in the process—is not a civilized or ethical action. To live on earth, humanity must recognize its place within nature rather than seeing itself as above it. Her goal was to educate the public on this subject that they may not have considered before because they were not experiencing immediate effects of the action of spraying pesticides. At first, Carson took a lot of backlash for publishing this book, as a woman and for being a controversial topic as it threatened large chemical industries. This pesticide had been considered one of the greatest discoveries since WWII so a lot of people didn’t want to believe it was harmful. However,...

 Last year, I took Environmental Ethics with Dr. Balay. For this class, we were put into groups for a semester long project where we were tasked with creating a plan to improve a select property owned by the Newport News Green Foundation, a non-profit organization. Each group was given a different property and my group's was 315 Center Avenue. The property was essentially just a small empty field towards the front of a neighborhood. My group surveyed the surrounding homes to get an idea of what the community wanted the property to be by handing out flyers. We didn't receive a lot of responses but the majority of people who responded said that they would like to see park benches and tables put on the property. My group also observed that kids were often playing on the field, so in our initial design we thought leaving the field mostly open was a good idea. After coming up with a plan, we did research on what plants would do the best in the soil in the area and picked out some th...

     On Tuesday, the 22nd of October, I attended a virtual Going Greener Task Force meeting. The meeting  discussed the sustainable changes that CNU is making or planning on making on campus to reach a goal  of Net Zero by 2035. Several different speakers discussed their progress on their specific CNU  sustainable project, including the Green to-go boxes, which have helped CNU avoid 3,000 disposables in  two months. They also mentioned that CNU plans to get six new EV chargers on campus in the parking  lot behind the new extension of Forbes. I think this is great because it is an incentive for students and  faculty who want to invest in EV cars. Next, the Grounds team talked about reducing the use of nitrogen on the great lawn and getting an electric lawn mower/s. As a student, it is hard to know what else is going  on around campus, especially with faculty, so I am amazed that the CNU is doing so much to be  sustainable and reach N...

While looking for research articles for another class, I found an article on China's marine park industry and whale trade. A documentary called Blackfish was released in 2013 that was centered around SeaWorld and the death of one of its trainers by drowning from a whale. This caused outrage in the general public because it showed the poor living conditions of the whales. But this reaction isn't occurring in China, where instead the demand for these entertainment parks is increasing. This is due to the government having control over the media in China and limiting the information about the poor conditions and whale trade. The article states that there are 44 ocean theme parks operating in China with 18 more being constructed/scheduled to open soon. The article also discusses the number of whales being exported from Russia to China was a total of 84 live mammals since 2016. This is causing concern due to the unknown number of orca whales left in Russia and the lack of regulation ...

 In class, we discussed the impact of the Columbian Exchange and how it has influenced the environment. The Columbian Exchange had profound effects on future ecosystems, significantly altering biodiversity, agricultural practices, and the balance of natural systems. The exchange brought new plants and animals to different continents. For example, crops like potatoes, tomatoes, and maize were introduced to Europe, while wheat and horses were brought to the Americas. This led to changes in farming practices and dietary habits, ultimately transforming local economies. Many species introduced during the Columbian Exchange became invasive, disrupting local ecosystems. For instance, European weeds and pests outcompeted native flora and fauna, leading to declines in native species and changes in habitat dynamics. The movement of people and animals also facilitated the spread of diseases, particularly in the Americas, where Indigenous populations had no immunity to European diseases. This ...

       In a newsletter published by Science Daily, author Rebecca Selden shared the results from her group's massive five year spanning research project which synthesized reports from fishing communities scattered across the northeastern seaboard in the United States. These reports included what fishing communities, whether large or small, are doing to their practices in order to accommodate changes caused by climate change. As oceans continue to warm and more sustainable methods of energy development like oceanic windmills are constructed, the behavior and range of the fish that are caught an used in the commercial fishing trade are going to change, which will affect the fishermen who collect them. Harvesting changes done by fishermen include changing the method of extraction, the location, or the species all together. These changes will also affect larger ports and smaller communities much differently, and although not significant now as the ocean's climate continu...

 While I was looking for articles for my independent research project, I came across an article about environmental injustice. It caught my eye because I learned about it in my Environmental Ethics class two semesters ago and I had thought it was a very interesting subject. In "The Threat of Environmental Racism" by Robert D. Bullard, the author discusses how environmental issues, specifically lead poisoning and the placement of waste facilities, impact African Americans so much more negatively than other races. African American children experience lead poisoning at a disproportionate rate compared to white children no matter their family income. According to the article, for families earning less than $6,000, 68% of African American children had lead poisoning in comparison to 36% of white children. This is due to the fact that African American communities still experience the effects of redlining, which places them closer to waste facilities and other environmental hazards....

 I read The Call of the Wild by Jack London a few years ago and read it a second time a few months ago. It is one of my favorite books, not only because it involves the wilderness, dogs, and wolves but also because of the bond between Buck and John Thornton. At the beginning of the book, we learn that Buck is taken from his home in California and was sold as a sled dog in the Klondike Gold Rush. I remember the book being difficult to read at times due to the abuse that Buck and the other dogs faced, but it also opened my eyes to how important it is to respect every form of life, including a dog’s. While he was cared for and treated well in California, his master, Judge Miller, treated him more as a friend rather than a beloved companion, hence the lack of homesickness expressed by Buck. Even though Buck was a suburban dog, there was always something different about him, he was strong, brave, and fierce. I loved how the book was told from Buck’s perspective, there was so much he did...

     After our trip to the Anna Hyatt Huntington Exhibit in the Torggler I was captivated by Hyatt Huntington’s style. I was eager to learn more about her character as a person and the experience’s that shaped her and her art work. I did my research to learn more about her life and spent a few minutes in reflection, admiring nature from her lens based on her experiences I read about. It seems that Hyatt Huntington had always had a love for nature and animals and her passion was encouraged significantly by her father, a zoologist and paleantologist. She spent many hours examining animals’ anatomy and analyzing their behaviors. She studied every movement of these animals and reflected these behaviors in her sculptures. Some behaviors less majestic looking than others, she found beauty in every one. She had always loved to work with her hands. As a teen, she was a violinist. Eventually she got bored of that and picked up sculpting in her early 20s creating masterpieces ...

 In Chapter 2 of American Camino , Redick discusses the difference between aesthetic tourism and a spiritual journey. Aesthetic tourism is when a person decides to go on a hike in nature with the intentions of viewing beautiful, or aesthetically pleasing, scenery rather than fully taking in their surroundings and reflecting while they are hiking. When a person partakes in aesthetic tourism, they are not getting anything out of their hike because they are only concerned with the surface instead of the deeper feelings and emotions they could feel if they take a moment to understand the complexity and interconnectedness of the nature they are within. Redick emphasizes the importance of a spiritual journey because it allows for self-discovery due to the challenges, both mental and physical, that the hiker may face on their hike. It leads to personal growth. Before reading this chapter, I never really thought about how there were different ways you could go about doing a hike. This real...

     In Chapter 2 of American Camino there is a discussion on the difference between aesthetic tourism and a spiritual journey, and in that debate Dr. Redick includes a quote on pages 67-68 by Norman Wirzba which states "When we desire our relationship to nature to be mediated be the expectation that only placed deemed pretty or spectacular are worthy of our attention, then we do witness as idolatry that condemns much of the world to neglect or even disparagement. While we often fail to realize is that our worship of nature's beauty, especially our designations of certain kinds of landscapes or creatures as beautiful, is also fundamentally a reduction of the world to the expectations that we bring to it. In this reduction great stretches of the world and a multitude of its creatures are abandoned by us as unworthy and thus unlovable." When I first read this passage, it fundamentally changed my perspective on nature's beauty and relevance. The fact that human beings s...

 When thinking about my involvements in environmental issues, I remembered that when I was a part of a Girl Scout Troop in middle school we had to complete the Take Action activity. This activity earns a Girl Scout a very important badge. We were required to create a plan to improve a local issue and then work to implement that plan. My troop decided to focus on single-use plastic pollution within the school. The hot lunches would always be served in excessive plastic. Sometimes plastic containers would be inside plastic bags and then handed to the students. We decided to make a presentation for our principle explaining the bad effects plastic pollution has had on the planet, especially on marine life. We also introduced an alternative to the plastic containers, which would be cardboard or paper-based containers for hot lunches to reduce plastic waste. We included in our presentation the cost to switch from single use plastic to something more environmentally friendly. The principa...

 In class, we discussed the correlation between nature and the sublime and how they are always intertwined. Nature through art became a mix of wild and mythology. In chapter 4 of American Camino by Dr. Redick, he quotes J.R.R Tolkien's view of the importance of myth in language and its connection to worlds.  Tolkien claims that “in the creation of these imaginative works, human beings become sub-creators”, Martin Heidegger also voices his opinion on nature and art and that “ the artwork opens up in its own way the Being of beings”( Redick, p.170). I found these quotes to symbolize the idea that there is a divinity to nature and that art/ storytelling acts as a gateway to see into the sublimity of nature. During the Westward expansion of America, landscape art became popular. In class, we discussed how these landscape artists were able to capture both the wilderness and the sublime/awe effect of the wild. Artists such as Bierstadt, Cropsey, and Cole helped visualize the concept...

     We have been reading Chapter 2 of American Camino , which discusses aesthetic tourism. It states that people used to associate nature and the wilderness with terror and avoided it. People's perceptions changed over time when artists began painting landscapes and nature. It started to become an aesthetic. People started to be less afraid of the wild due to the making of "domestic landscapes" which are made by man to be a more aesthetic version of nature. Many examples the book gives of aesthetic landscape paintings are from the 17th and 18th centuries. After reading this section of the book, I started to think about how aesthetic tourism and people's perception of nature have changed since the 18th century.      After the Industrial Revolution, a lot of rich people started liking the aesthetics of nature a lot more but more specifically, a people-less nature. I read an article recently about the Los Alamos Ranch School which was founded in 1917. It was ...