ppt lecture

Hi Everyone:

This is just to alert you that we will be having a very full and tight class schedule this coming Tuesday.   Arrive on time and be prepared to stay until 2:05.  The program for the class is as follows:

1. General remarks on presenting in groups at the Macaulay conference.

2.  Guest speaker: We are honored to have Jonathan Krones, a PhD student from MIT, here to discuss the concept of urban metabolism and how it relates to his research.  Give him your full attention and ask questions.

3.  Collaborative Learning Contributions –

Lawrence – the Right to the City

Kelly – Green Accounting

Richard – Plastic bags

This will lead into my discussion of plastics and environmental justice.  I will be calling on Group 2 members at random during this discussion, although I encourage everyone, as usual, to participate.

Let me know if you have questions.

SM

Pellow’s “Ch.4: The Global Village Dump” points out how prevalent and dominant environmental racism can be, happening on local, national, and global levels. Poor waste management techniques encourage the “out of sight, out of mind” mentality that contributes even more to the problem. As MacBride’s “Ch.5: Extended Plastics Responsibility” says, “the handling of modern discards frequently entail the slow or rapid release of uncertain risks to health and ecosystems at multiple points on local and global scales.” The waste generated by cities might be out of sight and out of mind to many, but someone forgotten eventually reaps the negative costs. In terms of New York City, what can the city government do to eliminate this “out of side, out of mind” mentality within New Yorkers? Unfortunately, our waste does not and will not magically disappear. Are there other waste management techniques that can be more suitable? How can we “rewrite those rules” of environmental racism?

On a national level, certain cities and towns have been specialized to process, incinerate, reclaim, and recycle waste that is both local to the area and often sent from other states. This allows for a larger and more centralized operation but increases pollution from the movement of the waste. The international level is pretty similar in these regards, garbage is shipped to poorer countries en masse as if swept under the carpet of the planet. The people of these countries are tasked with tedious and hazardous task of sorting and reclaiming whatever they can before incinerating the rest. Do you think that countries or states have a moral obligation to deal with their own waste or is the current model of collecting and centralizing the waste worth improving upon?