EPA's Cleanups in My Community map for St. Louis and its western suburbs.
Want to find your nearest superfund site? The EPA has an interactive page called, Clean Up My Community, that maps brownfields, hazardous waste, and superfund sites anywhere in the U.S.
Note:
Brownfields are places, usually in cities, that can’t be easily re-developed because there’s some existing pollution on the site.
Superfund sites are places where there is hazardous pollution that the government is cleaning up because the companies that caused the pollution have gone out of business, or because the government caused the pollution in the first place. The military is probably the biggest source of government pollution, particularly from fuel leaks and radioactive waste.
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).
