Ruining the barrel

While I'm always pleased when someone gives Apple—a company that seems monomaniacally determined to dull their customers' intellect—a good bashing, this site run by Greenpeace is perhaps too depressing to be purely amusing. Despite my utter disdain for iPods, iTunes, and Mac OS, I've been very impressed with the new MacBook's size and power, so I'm frustrated to learn that it's a mini eco-disaster. Hopefully Apple will clean up their act soon: I'd like to have my options wide open when I buy my next notebook in three or four years.

The reel deal

After two or three years of gentle pestering, I finally convinced my dad to buy a reel mower for our lawn. He took the first crack at it over the weekend when I was busy working at the pond, but tonight I got a chance to try it out, and I was as pleased as I anticipated. It didn't cut quite as perfectly as the gas-powered Lawn Boy, but it didn't do too shabbily either. It was quiet, consumed no gas, and generated no exhaust (which I missed slightly, as the fumes tend to keep the skeeters away). Perhaps the best part was the increased work-out; after a school year of minimal activity every little bit of exercise is welcome this summer.

Oddly enough, I can't find even the slightest mention of their "Classic" mower on the Scotts website. Goodness knows I can find as many chemicals as I could possibly want to spread around my lawn. I'm glad to see Scotts has their priorities in order.

Troublemakers

One of the themes of my Environmental Conservation class that I'm hoping we'll investigate more is the rift between the academic elite and the working class that often occurs when the environment is concerned. Based on comments I hear in discussion, I think that many of the students have little grasp of how their proposed environmental policies will appear to those affected. Still, sometimes you just want to side with the academic elite outright. This is an extract from "Fear In The Fields" by Duff Wilson, originally published in the 3 July 1997 edition of the Seattle Times:

[Mayor] Patty Martin is not a popular politician in parts of Grant County these days.

Since she began raising the alarm about the use of toxic waste as fertilizer, she has been threatened with a lawsuit by a local farmer, been verbally attacked in town meetings and seen the City Council - led by a son-in-law of the local manager of the Cenex fertilizer company - pressure her to shut up or quit.

Many farmers in and around Quincy, a town of 4,030, say they're doing very well, thank you, with the fertilizer and the help and advice they've received from Cenex Supply and Marketing, which sells expertise, financing and farm supplies in the West and Midwest.

They call Martin a troublemaker and fear she's fomenting a scare akin to the Alar alarm that nearly ruined Washington's apple industry in 1989.

In that case, the CBS television show "60 Minutes" reported that a substance sprayed on Washington apples to preserve them in packing was dangerous to consumers. CBS later admitted it had made some mistakes in the story, and the Washington apple growers sued the network. But the suit was dismissed, and in the end, Alar was classified by EPA as a carcinogen and banned for all food uses.

"We had a woman starting that one, too, and a lot of people got hurt by it," Bill Weber, an apple and potato farmer, said at one council meeting, bringing nods and laughter.

I suspect that Mr. Weber is one of the many people who believe that women and apples have had troubled history (pretty much right from the start, I mean), but this kind of comment still gets me.

KO'd

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings have established themselves as sleepy-time. I have two fifty-minute lectures back to back. This first one (Environmental Conservation) moves very slowly and puts me in a state of drowsiness. The second one (Ancient and Medieval Art) is reasonably interesting but takes place in a dark room with padded chairs, which thus far has made sleep unavoidable. I do not want to sleep through Art History; I want to learn the material. I'm considering two option to amend the present situation. I can start drinking a glass with Mountain Dew with breakfast, hoping that the caffeine will keep me awake without making me to antsy to focus. I'm not keen on this idea, since caffeine sometimes makes me feel irrationally trapped. The other option that readily presents itself is to start skipping the first class some days, and just reading the lecture outlines off of the website. I'm not thrilled with this plan either, since I don't like to miss lectures, but I have to say that today's class encouraged me to go in this direction.

The instructor's prepared lecture ended when we still had ten minutes remaining. He managed to start up a loose discussion among the students about Native American's effect on the land and whether European travelers were coming to a largely natural or a substantially cultivated landscape. The lecture had covered shifting agriculture, controlled burns, irrigation and other methods employed by the indigenous peoples, and the following discussion revolved around how invasive or how "natural" the techniques were. Opinions varied widely. One male student argued that it's better to compare Native Americans to river-damming beavers that to the Europeans that invaded the continent. One female student said that the excessive hunting of beavers by natives during the fur trading era proves that Native Americans never had any more respect for the land than Europeans. I tend to fall in between these two views, for I feel that both have merit. But I was annoyed when one girl said she wondered what "the Native American perspective on the matter" was. Our instructor (I won't call him a professor because he had yet to earn is PhD) said that she presented an interesting question, and then he asked if anyone in the room was of Native American heritage. I didn't like where this was heading, so I interrupted, "I'd like to point out that the various nations and tribes of North America would likely have widely varying views on this matter. I've been researching the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; there are two groups of people living there, the Gwich'in and the Iñupiat. The the Iñupiat are the poster tribe of Big Oil and firmly support drilling in the area, and the Gwich'in are fighting tooth and nail to preserve the land. I think it's too simple to think of there being a single 'Native American perspective.'" The instructor said that I had an excellent point. He continued on that his own wife was one-eighth Native American, and that she had been surprised to learn that her ancestors had employed substantial landscape-altering techniques, so we shouldn't assume there is a single view. I didn't try to participate after that.

Jamba Juicing

About a week ago, I left a note on the Jamba Juice website expressing my concerns about the material they use for their cups. I just got a very nice response with the following attachment, which I found to be quite interesting.

Since we opened our first store in 1990, we have strived for Jamba Juice to be an environmentally conscious business. We recycle our cardboard, glass, paper, plastic, and polystyrene when it is possible. However, we have found that in some areas it has been challenging to find recycling, and therefore, one of our most effective actions to protect the environment has been to offer you our reusable mug and a discount every time you bring your mug back.

When using one of our mugs is not possible, we have chosen to use polystyrene cups as the best option for our packaging. Although we originally had reservations about using polystyrene, we did some extensive research comparing polystyrene cups vs. paper cups and have concluded that polystyrene is the best choice for Jamba Juice, our customers, and the environment. Here's what we found out:

+ Paper cups consume 6 times more raw materials.
+ Paper cups consume 36 times more electricity to manufacture.
+ Paper cups consume twice as much cooling water and 58 times more waste water.
+ Paper cups produce 10 to 100 times the amount of residual contaminants in waste water.
+ Paper cups require 33 times more chemicals by weight to manufacture.
+ Paper cups produce 3 times more air pollution emissions to manufacture.
+ Paper cups are typically coated with a non-biodegradable material, making them no more bio-degradable than paper cups in modern landfills.
+ Polystyrene cups do not contain or use any ozone depleting gases in their manufacturing process.
+ Polystyrene cups are in fact more easily recycled than paper cups.

Additionally, to properly serve our cold, fresh, blended-to-order smoothies, we need a cup that can both insulate and seal. Polystyrene cups are significantly more effective in maintaining the quality of our smoothies than paper cups.

It is for these reasons: the overall environmental impact, recyclability, insulating ability, and cost that Jamba Juice has decided to use polystyrene cups for our products. We hope that you find this information as helpful as we did in deciding what packaging choices are best for you.

I've got to look into getting one of those mugs if they have 'em in the Madison store. Alhough financially, maybe I shouldn't dare...