Choosing to Participate:
A Social Justice Service Project on Sustainability

Without a doubt, I learned way more about teaching yesterday than the 5th, 6th, and 7th graders did about sustainability. The first workshop didn’t go so well, with one group just playing around and eating candy, and the other group doing exactly what we wanted them to do. We (Quinn, Cole, Manny, and I) realized that it had less to do with the children (although it did a bit) than with our actions. Cole prepped one group, going down the list we had given them and giving them certain tasks, while the other group was immediately given a house and started working. They were floundering, and in the end, barely ended up with a house. Some part of it was definitely due to the children, and apparently they annoyed other groups too, but I definitely learned a bit. For the second group, we talked to them both individually before hand, and had two people with each group throughout the workshop. Another thing I learned was that if something doesn’t go as planned, you have to accomodate quickly. Originally it was planned for each workshop to be working on one house, and so only two were built. Somehow, the first workshop ended up with both, and each group (one meant to be working on the outside of one house, and the other on the inside) worked on one whole house. With no houses for the second house, Cole had to create a haphazard nightmare of a house to work on in under 10 minutes, and we had to scrap the house of the group that didn’t work and make it new again. In the end, both groups pulled through better than we had ever expected, and I think they enjoyed the workshop. If Victor and Janis hadn’t monitored the kids and helped out a tremendous amount, it wouldn’t have ended up nearly as well.
In reflection, I thought that although the Day of Learning was good, it could’ve been much better, and things like the film should’ve been better organized.

-The Rob

This post and the following post were saved as word documents on my computer.  I added one or two sentences at the end.

Today after school, I went to the center of architecture for an interview with a woman named Grace Huan.  I had never been there before, but I had the general whereabouts of where it was.  Sadly, I was kept in study group so I got there late.  I missed part of the interview, but I got the gist of what happened while I was gone.  Grace was very charismatic and easy to talk to.  We kept coming up for questions for her, even when we were finished with the ones we had prepared.  She was also informative, and explained many things I knew nothing about.  For example, I now understand more how the LEED system works, and how it is enforced.  It went very well overall, and it went by a lot quicker than I expected.  I learned quite a bit from the interview, and was able to use most of it in my exposé.

 -The Rob

I’ve wondered this for a bit: how cost/energy effective is it really to “go green”?  For example, my dad told me about a woman who had a sort of well built 1,100 feet into the ground to use the natural heat of the Earth to heat her house/water.  This provided her with much lower fees on the fuels normally required, however, it had other monetary problems.  First was the obvious cost of drilling a hole 1,100 feet deep, next was the cost of the pumps used to bring the hot water up to her house, skyrocketing her electrical bill.  In the end, she wasn’t sure if it was truly cheaper to heat her house in the sustainable way. Similarly, when the New York City government was contemplating whether or not to have an official recycling program, it seemed like a perfect, cost and energy saving plan, but there were many hidden drawbacks.  There was of course the cost (both monetary and energy-related) of buying more bags and bins for recycling, and the costs of the water to wash out recyclable bottles and cans.  It also requires different trucks, which have all sorts of costs (workers’ pay, fuel, production, etc.).  Finally, they needed to build and run places to actually reuse the materials, which have even more costs than the trucks. More related to the energy than to money, I recently read an article published in a university newsletter (Link to PDF) by David Pimentel dealing with ethanol (which is extracted from corn) as a fuel for cars.  He concluded, “Ethanol production is wasteful of fossil energy resources and does not increase energy security… about 71% more energy is used to produce a gallon of ethanol than the energy contained in a gallon of ethanol” (5).  Needless to say we’re improving, as in a more recent article he wrote that only 29% more energy is used (the previous article was written 10 years ago).  In relation to that last statistic, I’d like to say that this is just me questioning the apparent perfection of the green movement, not me trying to oppose it.  However, continuing on, he also stated (in the older article) that “Increasing ethanol production will increase degradation of vital agricultural land and water resources and will seriously contribute to the pollution of the environment” (5).  This comes as a bit of a surprise but as a continuing theme that it may not be quite as green to be green. To tie this post in with my last, my involvement in the green architecture group has made me realize that our school, which has throughout the past few years become environmentally aware/zealous, isn’t all that much of a green building.  This adds to the already overflowing list of synonyms for “green”, which includes “environmentally conscious” and “sustainable”, the word “pompous”.  Once again, save for the last comment, this isn’t intended to directly oppose sustainability, but rather inquire and challenge those who know more than I do about it.  Anyway, that’s just my 3.4 cents (the cost to make 2).  –The Rob

As a note, I posted this originally on the 24th or 25th of January, but the post has been lost in the void of the blog, so here’s roughly what I wrote:

After my last post on Tuesday, I sent each of the grocery chains that I checked that didn’t have RA certified bananas identical business letters (I believe I sent two). In case they didn’t receive it as with the rest of my emails, I sent them through different addresses. Still, neither of them responded, not even with an automated message. I guess that’s for the better in the sense that they actually look through most of their comments as opposed to just sending out an automatic email explaining to us that they thank us for our concern. Still, they clearly didn’t have anything to say to a 14-year-old commenting on the production of their produce, which is kind of what I expected. What’s depressing is that it doesn’t matter to them anyway, not enough people know about the Ranforest Alliance to stop buying their bananas, and either way, they can live without a few customers.

–The Rob

The Rainforest Alliance emailed me several sites full of information, but they didn’t give our group very clear information on what actions to take. After reading through it, I asked several grocery stores if they had RA certified bananas. It was kind of frustrating cause most of the people there didn’t know what the Rainforest Alliance was. Unsure of where to go from there, I sent Maria Ghiso (who will be our main correspondent) the email seen in Ama’s journal entry. She hasn’t responded yet, but I’m sure she will soon. I now plan on writing a business letter to the grocery stores who didn’t have bananas with the RA seal encouraging them to use RA certified produce.

-The Rob