Warren Wilson's new environmental curriculum

You all know that I'm a Vandy grad (yes, yes, boo-hiss, where's my trust fund...), but before I fell into the VandyBubble, I was considering going to a small private school in North Carolina - Warren Wilson.

My parents went there and loved it. Sometimes, like when I'm in bumper-to-bumper traffic headed home from work, or when the sky is matte purple and not deep blue with stars because of all the sodium lights in the city, or when I think about what a lazy-butt I am, I wish I'd gone there too.

Warren Wilson is, period, end of story, AWESOME. Their little tagline says it all: "We're not for everyone... but then, maybe you're not everyone." Not only do you go to class, but you spend 15 hours a week on a work crew, and you do 100 hours of service over your 4 years there. It's in the middle of the Appalachian mountains in NC and it is so beautiful it will make you cry.

Obviously, it's a pretty hippy, granola, green place to be anyway, but they're worth mention here and now because, in October, they were awarded a $193,265 grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations develop an environmental curriculum, Advancing Environmental Literacy.

Using the concept of "full cost accounting," the Advancing Environmental Literacy project will provide an opportunity for interdisciplinary study of the broad implications of critical environmental concerns. The goal is to better understand issues within a framework of sustainability - a "full cost accounting" that considers the environmental, economic and social/cultural impacts of realities and remedies.
- from the press release

I am so excited to hear more about this, because this topic has not yet been fully explored. We know now that scope is important, but we don't yet have an established framework through which businesses and governments can operate. It's not very effective to go to your local government and say, "Hey, this proposed housing development has broad-reaching implications on our quality of life! We should study this further!" but not have a way to actually, effectively study it and weigh the actual cost.

It's a bit out of our purview here in Nashvegas at the moment, but NC is close enough that this curriculum could spread here with a little push. After all, it was largely that Oil and Water class that got me thinking seriously about all of this stuff.

Vegetarianism, Veganism, and the "All-American" Hamburger, part 2

So, I told you all about how the chicken made me queasy the other night. Yeah, it might have been that fast-food fried chicken isn't exactly at the top of the healthy-eating list. Also, like LisaT suggested, had I taken the time to actually sit down and thoughtfully eat, perhaps I would have either a) gotten queasy earlier or b) STOPPED EATING THE DAMNED THING. But I think that really, in that moment, it was because i couldn't stop imagining the live chicken. Not that I have some emotional connection to chickens. Mostly, I hate them, thanks to an evil rooster my cousins had when we were kids that would fly maniacally at you whenever you went to collect the eggs from the coop. But still, something about that live chicken image in my head...

Now, like Mr. Franklin explained, since I am a rational creature, I can surely come up with a way to convince myself that eating meat is ethically okay in regards to my relation to the animal (animals eat other animals; people have been doing it forever; our bodies need the protein; the animal was killed humanely; this is my chance to take revenge on the poultry population; etc etc etc).

But what about the staggering economic & health impact of eating animal products?

Here's where, for me, it gets pretty clear.
- It takes 990 gallons of water to get you one gallon of milk (Thanks, AnimalBlawg! Click here for a citation... fact is on page 167)
- Livestock is responsible for 18% of the greenhouse gas emissions worldwide (Thanks, NoImpactMan)
- Hog Farms don't have to treat the hog waste; plus, they're helping to grow antibiotic-resistant bacteria (check out this article from Rolling Stone)

There are lots of ways to rationalize these problems - sure, water is a renewable resource; sure, humans are causing a lot of greenhouse gas emissions just by breathing...

But the more that I read, the more I want to just opt out. Thinking about the vastness of these problems and how they affect just me, just this one body, really freaks me out.

So maybe going vegetarian and/or vegan is something that I should do out of respect for myself; putting aside my respect for the environment, or animals, or my fellow man, shouldn't I try to take care of my own body first? If I am going to start eating thoughtfully (O, were there more than 24 hours in a day - an additional 4 hours for yoga and thoughtful eating would be a true blessing), why don't I use that brain-power to hunt down green foods? Eating those free sandwiches from the BEC was definitely not a thoughtful act - it was "easy" and "free". We come back to the idea of scope versus scale here - sure it was, on the "scale" scale, easy and free, but on the "scope" scale, I actually paid for that food with my own body. I sold out. I spent myself instead of money... and we are spending our planet, instead of our time and money, on all of that meat.

I am feeling quite trapped by this problem, because I have always had a hard enough time respecting my own body without bringing green into it. The last time I did hot yoga was two weeks ago (Hey, I rationalize, sleep is more important and I don't have the money to go). Last night I ate three packaged, mass-produced, white bread dinner rolls (they were free). This morning I ate a Little Debbie snack (no excuse there other than i could find 75 cents in the floorboard of my car).

This is all, for me, like a drug addiction! But unlike heroin, the price of this addiction is "cheaper" than the alternative. Additionally, there seems to be little societal support for someone who wants to break the oil/sugar/processed-food/animal-products/waste/mass-production addiction. My job, the media, my financial life, and people around me all make it difficult to do what, if I weren't so implicated in this bizzare system, I would choose to do.

So, economics play a HUGE part in this for me. All of the immediate things, like the balance in my bank account and the time i have in a day, completely occlude the big picture cost of what I'm doing to myself by persisting in these very un-green habits.

Well, I certainly didn't intend this post to be quite such a whine-fest as it turned out to be, but I do want to ask for help in this sense - do you all have any ideas how to quantify your choices? It is easy for me to quantify the price of a lunch (free sandwich from BEC = $5 at least still in the bank). It has not been so easy for me to quantify the cost of that sandwich (that roast beef and the styrofoam packaging - how much is that costing my body and my world?).

That's why I'm super excited about a new curriculum at my parents' Alma Mater, Warren Wilson College, which I'll talk about in my next post. Maybe it will help us quantify scope in a way that our over-stressed brains can actually understand.

How very un-green my relatively green job is

Happy post-Turkey day to you all! I must say that I am very thankful for many things, including being in control of my own bowel movements, the luxury of being able to travel to see family, and the game of football. Anyhow, here's my belated offering from last week that, in a haze of sugar and pigskin, I didn't post :)


Most of you know my many and varied feelings about my Day Job, and this isn't exactly the forum to discuss it, but a week or so ago, an email came through the pipeline that seemed relevant to this discussion.

-----Original Message-----
...
Sent: Fri 11/16/2007 1:27 PM
Subject: It's easy being green...

I know that with all of our busy schedules, thinking about what we can do for the environment isn't exactly top of mind. But did you know that by reducing power consumption and monitoring paper usage we can help save money - and the planet?

* 10,000 sheets of paper are used by a single office worker every year and 95% of it is thrown away without being recycled. Businesses that actively manage their printing infrastructures can reduce their overall cost of printing by up to 30%.
* Companies can save 40% to 80% of their energy costs simply by adopting conservation practices like making sure lights are turned off when not in use. Something as simple as making sure you turn off your monitor at night and shutting down your computer completely will really add up if everyone participates.

Please look for ways to save electricity and paper over the next year - it really can make a difference.

Thanks,

Now, I should be happy about this, right? Well, yes, in a sense I am. I appreciate that someone other than me is saying something about this. Since I started work there last November, I have desperately tried to reduce the amount of paper I use. It was just getting ridiculous, printing out every step of the processing for sending out an e-mail. Still, though, we are required to print 3-5 sheets of paper for every eBlast we process, and that's just for the client I work on. I've noticed that, for other clients, there's even more paper. And this is just for e-mail. This is to say nothing of the junk mail they print and mail from the back warehouse.

I don't know much about the environmental impact associated with the energy & resources used for electronic file storage, but at first glance it seems that storing all of these files electronically, on an external jump drive or something, would HAVE to be less impactful than printing out the documentation! Yes, like with my Prius, there is an environmental cost to the production of the microchips, and to the energy supply needed to run the electronics.
However, we can't assume that business will simply stop. So can't we use the reusable microchips to store our documentation? I am sure that the answer lies in the fact that it is "more expensive" to store the data electronically. Which touches back on the idea of economies of scope - the cost of the paper appears less than the cost of the microchips, even though ultimately we are paying a huge price that isn't readily quantifiable.

I asked if we couldn't do all of the documentation electronically, but was told that there still had to be paper documentation of some sort. ::sigh::

So that's my two cents on the first "*". On the second "*", I began to recognize that this person was appealing to people's sense of "cost". But in reality, people don't understand that energy cost as being borne by THEM! They see the Giant Corporation as bearing the "cost," and this has no real impact on their paychecks or their consciouses.

I think that this person's email would have been much more effective had s/he appealed to the employee's sense of morality.

Economy of Scale vs. Economy of Scope

Now, I am not an economics-savvy person - I never even took Econ 101 as an undergrad (a fact I am sorely regretting, to the point of contemplating buying a textbook or auditing a class).

However, one of the points that was brought up in that Oil and Water Use class way-back-when was the idea of Economies of Scale vs. Economies of Scope. (links are to Wikipedia, which I only found mildly helpful, but a decent intro nonetheless. This article might be useful, too.)

The Scale vs. Scope thing has really been in my head lately in general; it's a big reason why I want to buy local and one of the business-related ideas that preoccupies a lot of my brain cells.

Anyway, the best way I can explain Scale vs. Scope as it matters to me is this:
An economy of scale principle means that the bigger the number of widgets your produce, the lower the cost of producing one individual widget. Because you would already have a widget factory built, you could buy more supplies at once (perhaps allowing you to negotiate the price of those supplies lower), and you could run the factory for longer each day, using a resource you already have to produce more widgets. It's kind of the idea behind buying in bulk as Sam's Club.

However, there are inherent problems when operating on the idea of more-is-cheaper. There's the obvious problem of the gallon of mayo going bad before you can use it all - the price-per-ounce actually goes up but that cost is masked by your initial thought process in the purchase. I'm reminded of the Seinfeld episode "The Rye," where Kramer goes to Costco and feeds the horse Beef-a-Reeno.

Like from the rear of that horse, there's a more insidious problem that emerges. When we try to drive down prices using the Scale concept, we often don't take into account the actual cost. The dollar amount of producing one widget may go down, but there are other tangential costs that don't appear in that lovely little price-per-widget spreadsheet. For instance, what is the impact on the environment of more widgets being produced? Are we also creating more carbon emissions along with those widgets? What is the impact as opposed to the dollar amount?

Now, an Economy of Scale isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I do see the benefits of it on paper not really reflected in real life. In trying to drive that dollar number down by making things bigger, we can end up really displacing that cost into other areas, like worker quality of life or environmental impact.

This is where my take on Economy of Scope comes in. Wikipedia's explanation of it is interesting, but I'm thinking in bigger terms, here. I'm thinking cost as opposed to price. Operating under the Scope idea, we would take into account ways to reduce the cost of things by trying to have an overall positive impact. We wouldn't displace the cost so that our dollar amount looks good on paper but someone else, somewhere else is actually paying the cost.

This is a big reason why I'm making an effort to "go green" or "reduce my carbon footprint" ... however you want to phrase it, I don't want to be pushing the cost of my life off on someone else, just so that the price of my life is low.