The Fulton School has a wonderful music program, so I’m hoping that this video, about how Paraguayan children living in a slum on a landfill have recycled classical instruments out of the trash, resonates with some of my environmental science students.
Of course, we’ve seen other instruments invented out of discarded trash. The BBC has a brief history of the steel pan, but Trinbagopan.com has an much more detail. On the other hand, I prefer my history in a musicalform.
Recycling rates for drink containers in the United States.
A number of my middle-school students seemed to believe that recycling is the be-all and end-all of environmentalism.
In October, 2010, toxic red mud broke through a holding dam and flooded several towns and flowed into the Mercal River. Red mud is a waste product produced when extremely corosive sodium hydroxide is used to dissolve aluminum out of bauxite. In this picture, "A Hungarian soldier wearing chemical protection gear walks through a street flooded by toxic sludge in the town of Devecser, Hungary on Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2010. (AP Photo/Bela Szandelszky)" (image via The Boston Globe)
We were trying to determine what type of material would make for the best drink bottles.
I have a deep reluctance to reflexively consider anything, “good for the environment,” considering that the environmental impact of any particular product is a complex thing to assess. My students, on the other hand, seem to think that recycling is good and all the rest of it can go hang.
I’d want to add up all the environmental costs: the raw materials; the energy input; the sources of the energy input; and the emissions to the air and water, especially all the other external costs of pollutants that people tend not to want to pay for. To my students, these things have been invisible.
Perhaps it’s the success of the environmental movement that’s pushed things to the background. We’re not struggling through smog everyday – although we’ve had some bad days this summer – and even big issues, like the BP oil spill, are a bit remote and seem so far away.
So, I tried showing the Story of Stuff today. It’s definitely a piece with a “point-of-view”, but I was hoping it would be provocative.
At least 4 people and many animals were killed. Many of the 120 injuries from the red mud spill were from chemical burns. "Tunde Erdelyi rescues a cat from the toxic sludge in the village of Devecser, Hngary on October 5, 2010. (REUTERS/Bernadett Szabo)" from The Boston Globe.
And it was.
It certainly got a lot of the students agitated, ready to challenge its assertions about just how bad pollution problems really are today, which created a nice opening for me to point out the need for skepticism in the face of any information received. Of course, at that point they were probably a little skeptical about me too, but reasoned skepticism is at the heart of the scientific perspective I’d like them to learn as “apprentice” scientists.
I’d like them to read Orwell too, but that’s another battle.
One student was stimulated enough that, I hope, they’ll actually do a little research into the facts presented in the video and present their findings to the class.
I’ll also have to do a little follow-up on how to argue. In particular I’ll need to post a picture of Paul Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement and point out that it’s better to try to refute the actual argument rather than attack the messenger.
We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.
Paul Graham's Hierachy of Disagreement (image adapted from Wikipedia).
Plastic bottles take 100 years to break down; styrofoam cups – fifty years; aluminum cans – 200 years; glass bottles, which are made of silica, just like the beach’s white sand – who knows. So we took a little time out of our adventure trip to collect anthropogenic debris as we walked along the beach on Deer Island.
Leather (shoe) - 50 years.Plastic bags - 10 to 20 years.Styrofoam cup - 50 years.Plastic bottles - 100 years.Tin cans - 50 years. Aluminum cans - 200 years.
We picked up stuff on our way out, so we were able to enjoy the fruits of our labours on our walk back to the landing point.
The beautiful beach cleared of garbage.
Note
The degradation times for marine garbage can be found on the SOEST website, but That Danny has an interesting compilation of data that tries to reconcile the different degradation times you can find on the web.
Amargosa Toad (Bufo nelsoni). Photo from US Fish and Wildlife (M. Burroughs).
NPR had facinating story recently about unlikely groups working together. It’s about a town in Nevada that banded together to save a toad from going extinct. The groups working together include environmentalists and the Saving Toads thru Off-Road Racing, Mining and Ranching in Oasis Valley (aka STORM-OV).
