Vital Vocab: Biodiversity

This is such a beautiful word, and one everyone should make themselves familiar with.  Ozone depletion, climate change, rising sea levels... these are old buzz words.  "Biodiversity" is the next big thing.

Basically this word refers to the variety of species in an area.  You can have areas with low biodiversity, such as your apartment (a moth, two spiders, your roommate's cat, and the mold on that really old orange) or high biodiversity areas, such as the rainforests of Ecuador, where a mere five acres of jungle can hold over a hundred species of bats (compare that to Northern California, where there are twenty-three bat species over fifty million acres).  The planet as a whole has biodiversity encompassing many millions.

But, as you have probably heard, species all over the world are going extinct.  And it's not just tigers and polar bears.  Over 40% of all species on earth are currently at risk of extinction.  It's also not just in distant areas of the world; in the state of California (one of the world's twenty-five biodiversity hotspots) about 29% of species are at risk.  This is a problem that's devastating the environment right in our own back yards.  The natural rate of extinction throughout most of the planet's history has been one per century; today, between one and one hundred species go extinct each day.  That's between one hundred and one thousand times the natural rate, and it actually puts us right in the middle of the sixth mass extinction in the history of earth.  We're going the way of the dinosaurs, man!  But of course this all begs the question: why should we care?

Well, believe it or not, the earth is run by living things.  You can't grow plants in soil devoid of bacteria.  You can't pollinate crops without bees, bats, butterflies, and birds.  You can't have fish in the seas without plankton for them to eat.  And dead bodies don't just disappear, you know.  They need bacteria, fungi, bugs, and carrion eaters to get rid of 'em.  As all these creatures start to disappear, the natural functions of our world decline, and these are all functions that we as humans rely on to survive.  We have to protect our biodiversity in order to keep our lands and waters alive.

Besides, who knows what amazing uses all these creatures could have for us in future?  Ever heard of biopharmaceuticals?

And the Winner Is...

The $300 award for Sustainable Community Member of the Semester Fall 2012 has been given to:

Yael Ofer

   When reading Yael's application, it was obvious to us that we found someone who really stands out.  Her commitment to sustainability is, well, prize-worthy!  Here's a quick rundown of the details that blew us away:

• Organized voter registration drives in high school, where she was also president of the civil rights club;
• Cleaned beaches and reconstructed homes after Hurricane Ike;
• Was involved in inspiring student-led campaigns as an undergrad at UC Santa Cruz;
• Conducted primate ecology research in the Costa Rican rainforest;
• Has campaigned since Fall '11 for the implementation of The Green Initiative Fund here at SFSU;
• Works daily on a personal scale to reduce her own impact, and the impacts of the people around her.

   Yael is truly an engine of change, at our school and in the world.  She advocates reforming our school's health programs in the direction of sustainability, and alternative transportation, particularly for her fellow students.  She moves forward with her education with a passionate commitment to catalyzing the spread of a globally sustainable medical paradigm.  It's plain that she's going to continue making changes in the world. Congratulations, Yael!

What type of Christmas tree should I buy?

   It may have occured to you that growing a tree specifically to cut it down might be just a little bit wasteful. They're like any other crop, only they take many years to "ripen." On the other hand, plastic Christmas trees are, well, plastic. We're meant to be producing as little of that as possible, right? Petroleum is bad and so on? Can you even recycle a fake Christmas tree?
   These are kind of an odd questions to tackle, but with all the extra consumption going on around the holidays it's important to at least try to work them out. Fake trees are made from a plastic that cannot be recycled; their only pro is that you could potentially keep using them for the next few hundred Christmases, but in actuality people only keep them for an average of six. Real trees that are cut down have the pro of being compostable, but since they are grown in monocultures, that is large tracts of land devoted to, only one crop, they tend to guzzle a lot of pesticides and other resources and degrade the land as they grow. They do sell organic cut trees, which are an excellent option, though in my experience they're about twice as expensive.

   There is a fourth option, the one I went with this year. Just buy a living tree! When the holidays are up you can either plant it or keep it in the pot for next year. If you use it for more than two Christmases, it will be saving you money. And as a bonus, you'll never again have to deal with messy needles falling all over the place as your tree withers away before you. It's a win-win!

  Anyway, here are a couple more quick tips for lowering your impact this holiday season:

•  Buy reusable decorations. Apparently, roughly two thirds of American household buy new decorations each year! That's over $7.5 billion spent and tons of waste produced. 
• Buy greeting cards that are made from recycled material. This could make a bigger difference than you make think as statistically Americans send two billion holiday cards a year. 
• Try to get presents with little or no packaging, and rather than wrapping them in paper present them in a reusable bag or basket. Americans produce an extra two billion pounds of garbage per week over the holidays, and most of it is wrapping paper. With a little care we can easily get that number down.

 That's all folks.  Happy holidays!

Campus Sustainability Member of the Semester

Do you love the environment? Do you care about sustainability and social justice? Are you an active community member on and of campus?The Cesar Chavez Student Center invites you to participate in our sustainable community member of the semester award! We want to hear what you are doing on and off campus to help achieve more sustainability. 

Top applicants will be entered in a drawing to win a $300 gift certificate to the SFSU bookstore! To apply fill out our questionnaire here and email it to sustainability@sfsustudentcenter.com. The deadline to submit is Wednesday, December 12th at 12:00pm. 

Questions? Email us at sustainability@sfsustudentcenter.com

Bottled Water

In the 1970s, ironically the same decade which marks the environmental movement, bottled water made its debut. Since this time, bottled water sales have exponentially grown, and are continuing to do so. In a matter of three decades, Americans have managed to inflate their consumption from zero to 50 billion plastic water bottles (as of 2006). With any product consumed at such a large rate, it is important to ask yourself whether the product is doing more harm or more good. I found an article by Charles Fishman that does a great job of weighing out the costs and benefits of bottled water. All of my facts were derived from this article (see link at the bottom).

First off, let’s consider the cost of bottled water. Before the bottled water boom, water was always considered a free resource, and in some countries, a luxury. So why do so many people pay a dollar for this free resource? As Americans have become increasingly busier with work, school and extracurricular activities, bottled water has gained popularity due to the convenience factor. But what are we really paying for? Half of the price of a water bottle goes to the retailer, a third to distribute and transport, and only 12-15 cents for the actual water. In the article, Fishman put the price we pay into perspective, referring to a $1.35 bottle of Evian.

“In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite

National Park. It's so good the EPA doesn't require San Francisco to

filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that

bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco

tap water before that water would cost $1.35. Put another way, if the

water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our

monthly water bills would run $9,000.”

It is clear that we are significantly overpaying for water, but how is the quality of this water? I think this is one of the biggest myths of bottled water which has made many people almost scared to use water from tap. The two largest companies selling bottled water, Pepsi and Coke, together account for 24% of the bottled water sold. These two companies both implement similar practices; with bottling stations throughout the United States, Pepsi and Coke fill their bottles with tap water, purified by reverse osmosis. Coke and Pepsi are putting perfectly drinkable tap water through a process which consumes great amounts of energy just to be able to put on their label that the water has been purified. Even though our tap water is of exceptional quality, other companies import water from outside of the country. Fiji, for example, uses its out-of-country origin to market as luxurious bottled water to its consumers. Ironically, more than half of the citizens in Fiji do not have access to safe drinking water.

The example of Fiji brings up another problem with bottled water. Not only is bottled water pricey and not necessarily any better for you than tap, it also travels great distances to reach you. First, the plastic for the water must first be sent to where it is bottled, in this case Fiji. The bottles are then filled and sent back to their destination in the United States.  As the Fiji factory produces over one million bottles a day, transporting the heavy bottles imposes a significant impact.

Not only transportation affects the environment. The material that the water is delivered in also poses a major threat to the environment. Though the plastic used is made of a material that can be recycled, this is not always the case. As of 2006, only 23% of the plastic used was recycled, leaving 38 billion bottles in landfills for the year. Fishman states that in 2006 the amount of plastic bottles used in the United States came out to 167/person.

Considering all the information in this article, it is extremely important to start cutting our dependence on plastic water bottles. The Cesar Chavez Student Center has water bottle refill stations on the top floor and on the main level adjacent to the seating area. Start bringing your own reusable water bottles to school! It is a great way to reduce your environmental footprint and help our campus reach zero waste. 

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=environmental+impact+of+plastic+water+bottles&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5

Bioneers!

Last weekend a few of us Environmental Studies got free tickets to the renowned Bioneers Conference, courtesy of our lovely school! The conference was comprised of influential speakers from environmental and social justice movements all over the world. The mood was distinctly directed toward rejuvenation. It wasn't just about hearing news and learning technical information. It was about convening with like-minded, like-valued people who you could connect with professionally and emotionally.  It was so inspirational for me to hear such a diversity of people with such immense experience share their deepest concerns and hopes with us. There was much that I took away from the conference, but I think these principles pretty much sum it all up:

1. Turn to nature for inspiration and guidance (for example, nature allows no waste).
2. Exposure to diversity will lend you perspective and adaptability; be willing to collaborate with anyone.
3. Empathize with and preserve the rights and dignity of all that lives.
4. Health of body, health of mind, and health of environment are all interrelated.
5. Life, including your own, is reproductive and regenerative of itself.
6. Realize that the current status quo is in its infancy, and that it is in drastic opposition to most what preceded it.
7. Study and have respect for the values, wisdom, and ecological knowledge, our ancestors developed in ages past.
8. Bring global ideals to local arenas; generally speaking, no good is universal.
9. Understand that each problem has ten thousand causes and ten thousand victims - it takes cooperation and integration across disciplines and movements to aid them all.
10. Don't blame yourself for what this world has done to you, and be compassionate for what the world has done to others.
11. Nature is within us, and if we are unjust to nature (or even to each other) it is because we have been alienated from it; alienation causes suffering within the self.
12. Know that change is coming; all the innovation and determination we could possibly need is already out there.

 During the course of it all, I wrote down many quotes from my favorite speakers (they're well worth looking up: Bill McKibben, Fletcher Harper, Gabor Mate whose books I bought...) but the most eloquent and on point was probably Marina Silva, an associate of the late Chico Mendes (you may have seen her carrying the Olympic flag in London this past summer). I think this motley pile of her poignant words describes the direction of twenty-first century activism very aptly: "If the current model cannot be universalized, it cannot be defended ethically... This is a type of activism that is at the altar of the self... It is a leadership that is multicentric... People no longer want to be spectators of politics; they want to be the protagonists." I for one certainly feel this way, especially after the conference. How about you?

Campus Sustainability Day

Thanks to everyone who participated in Campus Sustainability Day! It was a great success and we are so happy that we were able to work with such great people and to meet new people while promoting sustainability efforts here on campus!

We hope you had a great day. Please keep updated on upcoming events by following us on our blog and Facebook.

Check out GREEN SFSU's Facebook for more AWESOME pictures from the day!