Environment170's Weblog

beach clean-up redux and more

environment170 — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 03:55:44 +0000

I completed my community service event for this class through the community service fraternity I am a part of called Alpha Phi Omega. I did many different community service related activities throughout the quarter, two of which related to the environment.
The first took place on Saturday April 4th during a retreat to the beach. This took place at Point Mugu not far past Malibu. The second day of camping we walked a couple miles down the road to the nearby beach and did a beach cleanup. There we a lot of us there (about 45) so we ended up picking up much of the trash that was strewn across the beach. Some of the items we found included car parts, bottles, cans, food wrappers, and old construction material. The purpose of this event was to clean up a beach and help to preserve the habitat of the wildlife as well as promote awareness about how our actions affect the environment around us. The waste that we cleaned came not only from the beach dwellers who left their trash there, but also from the sewage systems that empty their contents into the beach. This has disastrous effects on ocean ecosystems as the pollution from chemicals kills the natural wildlife and objects that can also be found in the sewage can be swallowed by animals and kill them. It is important for us to remember this and accordingly change our actions to prevent damaging the ocean. This activity was effective in that we picked up much of the trash lying on the beach, but it was ineffective in several ways. One, we only tackled the surface of what was polluting that beach. We did not venture into the water to see what was lying underneath nor could we clean up the chemicals in the water itself. Also, we may have become more aware of the dangers beaches are facing, but our group is miniscule compared to the millions of other people on earth who are as of yet unaware of their actions. To fix this awareness must be spread throughout the population.
The other event took place on Sunday May 3rd on Hollywood Boulevard at a local shrine. The name of the even I attended was “Big Sunday.” It was basically an event where we took materials people donated such as overstocked books from local bookstores and clothed that were donated and packed them into boxes to give out to families who are less fortunate and have come across hard times and need the help.

-Ashton Yoon

Action Research Teams- Waste Watchers

edempsey — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 01:20:40 +0000

On Wednesday, May 27, the Action Research Team at UCLA held group presentations about eco-friendly experiments and suggestions for improving human activities and the environment. Of the 8 research programs presented, I wanted to focus on one, Waste Watchers, because I found it most interesting and insightful to my own daily practices.

Through sampling of the De Neve Dining Hall at UCLA, Waste Watchers found that the average student in the dinning hall (for dinner hour) wastes about 0.18 pounds of food, the equivalent of three slices of bread. Because 20,000 people a day are served in the dining hall, that equals to about 3,600 pounds of food per every dinner session! This project started, I believe, 4 years back, and has continued this year into the Action Research Teams to help create ways for students to be more conscious of their wasteful tendencies in the dining halls, for both the benefit of the dining hall budget and the environment.

While weighing in the dining hall scraps, the members of this group found that most of the waste consisted of side dishes, such as peas and carrots. To implement this data into service, De Neve dining hall has plans to offer dishes to students without side dishes. While customizing your food order is already in place, may students don’t realize it or are to lazy to wait for their own personal plate.

Currently, the team is also working with ORL to get pictures of wasted food up on the TV screens outside the dining halls, to remind students not to waste. The team conducted a All-Hill challenge to curb waste one night in the dining halls to raise awareness as well, which resulted in a substantial decrease in food waste for the night.

Food waste is an important issues to our school, both economically and environmentally. Most students don’t realize that the dining hall is a non-profit organization. By wasting this large amount of food, and money, the dining hall is less able to incorporate organic or locally grown food into the dining hall diet. Incorporation of these foods not only supports local economy, but also lowers pollution due to shipping and pesticide use. Environmentally, food waste plays a major role in the bulk mass that is destined for landfills. Currently, the closest landfill to UCLA is about to close within the next few years, so transport costs to move waste to the landfill will drastically increase. My wasting less (or by composting, as other groups mentioned) students can play an active role in reducing costs and the environmental impact of wasted material.

Overall, I found Waste Watchers presentation an eye opener. I have noticed that the dining halls do tend to have a lot of food waste (because it is like all you can eat buffet every day) but I didn’t realize just how much waste there was, and what the impact of this waste would be.

-Ellen Dempsey 703452670

Wangari Maathi Lecture

environment170 — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:15:46 +0000

This is a review of the talk with Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathi and her effort in community environmental restoration and awareness in her country of Kenya and the whole of Africa itself. Her background as a biologist and founder of the Green Belt Movement as well as her election into Kenyan parliament have garnered her many accolades and prestige. Her initial foray into environmental conservation began with the first United Nations women’s conference in Mexico in 1975; at this summit, her and her fellow colleagues realized the environment was drastically changing and began a program led by women to plant tree’s. This became the Green Belt Movement. However, since then he has met with vigorous opposition from her government, because she began looking into environmental causes and asking questions about how government had been managing resources. Her fight has been devoted to make both government and citizens aware about the destruction and mismanagement of environment and resources. However, her restoration of the environment started from the top down with the need for a responsible government and “bottlenecks” in the development of Kenya. She spoke of how ill left mother countries had left their colonies, which beget a cycle of disrepair and elite uncommitted to the welfare of the people and the natural resources. Another topic that tied into mismanagement was the constant debt of the countries, the lack of fair trade and failures in accountability for the government. During the question portion of the talk, she spoke of the role of women in environmental reconstruction. Her point was that while men and women clearly had a role, women had a larger and perhaps more important role as they where closely tied to agriculture and the land. In the Green Belt Movement, women mostly plant the tree’s and use the money they earn to supplant the household. Maathi also promoted the idea of resource conservation and organizing scientific methods to conserve water in times of draught now more frequent due to depleting resources.

I found that a great deal of Wangari Maathi’s lecture dealt more with political aspects in terms of the pit falls she had to overcome for environmental restoration rather than the how her programs have been implemented. Concurrently, she spoke of the history of her country and the recurring theme of how indebt and her country has been because of previous government which has forced the country to sell its raw resources at extremely low prices to the same countries the owe money to thus creating a vicious cycle they can never get out of. In terms of women’s role in environment conservation, her comments reminded me of the lecture given by Dr. Sandra Harding whom spoke of feminist science and the different role that women take in environmental study and the different methodologies. Both Dr. Harding and Maathi view the role of women in science and more specifically environmental science as working closer to the land and the agriculture which I found to be a very interesting correlation. Overall, her lecture and the question and answer portion was geared to her general philosophy on how to better Kenya and all of Africa via not just environment but socio-political change. However, she successfully tied all the topics back to the inherent problem the there is indeed a need to reform the environments of Kenya as the majority f the land is becoming deserts and draughts much more frequent because of mismanagement relating to and begetting the severe poverty of the country. She did a rather concise and thorough job of explaining the environmental hardships facing her country and some of the possible resolutions.

Bryan Ali

UCLA sustainability – Sproul Hall

environment170 — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:11:16 +0000

Jason

Sustainability at UCLA

UCLA used to be a campus only composed of four buildings some 75 years ago. Now, the campus is composed of over 190 building and parking structures and still preserves a scenic garden-like environment. UCLA has the larges campus population out of all of the UCs; comprised of more than 60,000 on a daily basis. For over a decade now, UCLA has taken sustainability to a new level, diverting wastes and becoming more energy efficient, and, in 2005, UCLA took it to another level by establishing the sustainability committee on campus after some student brought it to Chancellor Carnesale’s attention back in 2004. This committee, Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Sustainability, is composed of faculty, administration, student affairs, capital programs, general services, communications, chancellor’s office, along with two graduate and two undergraduate student representatives. Their mission is to create a culture of sustainability at UCLA.

A sustainable society is one that is environmentally viable, economically robust, and socially just and equitable one that meets the needs of the present without compromising the resources for future generation. Superior sustainable practices simultaneously consider ecology, economy, social equity, and aesthetic elegance.

With efforts in preserving the ideals of sustainability, UCLA has even brought sustainable practices to the residents who like in the dorms. UCLA Residential Life and Housing are hosting a Sustainability Themed floor in Sproul Hall. This Green Sustainability Theme program offers a living and learning environment for students who are interested in maybe one day entering a career in sustainability and environmental justice. One of the goals of the program is to bring students and faculty together in a variety of structured and informal ways to explore issues such as global environmental change, policy, and management of natural resources, sustainable rural and urban environments, and environmental leadership. These experiences provide students and faculty with way to exchange ideas and to challenge each other. The Green, Sustainable Theme is located in Sproul Hall, second floor.

Heal the Bay and the Pacific trash gyration

environment170 — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:00:45 +0000

April 18, 2009:

Heal the Bay Beach Clean-Up in Santa Monica

Heal the Bay was having a beach clean-up on Saturday April 18, 2009, and my friend and I decided to rally some people to go with us. No one ended up showing up at 9am, so we took the bus over to Santa Monica beach and were given plastic bags and gloves. The beach was extremely clean already in the close proximity so we made an adventure out of going two miles down the beach where there is a roped off area for bird habitat. To our dismay there were piles of trash; plastic bottle caps, straws, balloons, plastic toys, etc, among the piles of seaweed. It was a little bit confusing as to why Heal the Bay did not designate the protected bird area as part of their clean-up because it takes priority over the unprotected areas.

Nonetheless, we stayed until we had picked up every single piece of trash from the area. We then returned to the Heal the Bay tents only to find them already packed up and taken away. The only thing that remained was a giant pile of about 25 black trash bags stacked up and waiting to be hauled away.

Essentially beach clean-ups are a pathetic attempt at environmental remediation. Realistically speaking there is a great pile of garbage circulating around the Pacific Ocean that is about the area of Texas and is responsible for much of the trash that washes ashore. Not to belittle the gallant effort of beach clean-ups because they’re a great way to get communities involved; however, they’re triage approaches to a greater environmental problem. In this day and age, environmental degradation needs to be handled using larger-scale techniques. Again, essentially beach-cleanups are designed to take trash from one place and put it into a landfill. In a landfill, the trash is able to further continue its degradation of the environment by leeching toxins into groundwater and being blown back into the ocean to repeat the cycle.

We achieved our goal by cleaning up the bird habitat, which I’m sure the birds greatly appreciated. However, I would be much more content to participate in a project that is responsible for massive-scale environmental remediation.

Aubrey Michi

Beach clean up – Will Rogers State Beach

environment170 — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 21:12:49 +0000

On Friday, May 22, I organized an event with people on my floor of Rieber Terrace to clean up the visitor section of Will Rogers Beach Cleanup. We realized that a lot of organizations tend to target Santa Monica as a cleanup beach which is likely due to the proximity of Santa Monica. We felt that we should take it upon ourselves to initiate a cleanup of a beach that is not that target of attention. We arrived at the beach in the afternoon where there was little visitation by the public, this allowed us to easily scope out the beach and target areas of high trash density that would benefit from our cleanup. We picked out trash and recyclables and put them in the necessary bins. For the most part, the areas next to the shoreline were very clean, as visitors appeared to be very conscience about their trash. However, as we migrated back to the parking lot, we noticed an extensive amount of waste near plants adjacent to the parking lot and around the trashcans despite the trash cans being so close. When asked what were doing by visitors, we simply stated that we were Environmental Science UCLA students that decided to organize a beach cleanup. Most people who interacted with us were very happy to hear students taking initiatives like this. They applauded us for our contributions and volunteer work. We explained any questions they had regarding trash, pollution, etc, in hoping that they take that back home with them and practice methods that they learned from us. It was an inspiring event, as not only did we help clean a beach that we hear little of, but we also got to spread out knowledge to the community.

Andrew Guerra

Santa Monica Beach is clean

environment170 — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 21:02:13 +0000

Amrit Otal
On May 25th, my fellow classmates and I went to Santa Monica beach to take part in a beach clean-up. As we began walking on the sand, we immediately began to see pieces of litter strewn all across the beach. As we picked up the trash and made our way toward the shore, we began to see more pieces of plastic in addition to aluminum cans. Plastic in particular was the most heavily present. This beach clean-up reinforced that it is imperative that everyone take an active role to clean and preserve the environment in order to ensure that wildlife and its diversity is preserved. Plastic (and other trash) that enters the ocean is difficult for fish to digest. It results in a decline in the fish population because the fish are unable to eat and digest substantial food sources properly due to the wastes that have entered the ocean and our causing their digestive systems to deteriorate or become impaired. Although picking up trash and wastes on the beach and near the shore keeps that trash from entering the ocean, it does not target the root of the problem and eliminate waste from entirely polluting oceans. In order to accomplish this, people need to take personal initiative and participate in eco-friendly activities and simply exercise their role as good citizens and clean up after themselves. This is beneficial not only for the variety of wildlife that is present in oceans but also for us so that our water supply is clean and free of contaminants. In addition, policies and laws aimed at controlling the dispense of waste need to be passed and enforced properly so that future generations can be guaranteed a safe and clean environment.

Dockweiler State Beach and the Green Social Network, May 16

environment170 — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 07:35:28 +0000

Janelle Doi

Beach Clean-Up

On May 16, 2009, I participated in a beach clean-up at Dockweiler State Beach Park with a small group of students from the Environment 170 class. The club that three other students and I recently organized (the Green Social Network) was hosting the event as a kickoff, and it seemed only natural to invite people from the 170 class to join, considering that most of them are environmental science majors and needed to fulfill the volunteer requirement. After getting the word out about both the club and the beach clean-up, I put together a list of interested people and sent out emails to everyone. I organized carpools so that we could be more environmentally friendly in our transportation mode, and also to encourage everyone to get to know each other. After all, this was intended to be a social event as well as a productive one. We arrived at Dockweiler at about 5pm on Saturday, and the other club leaders and I provided all of the gloves and trashbags needed. We set out, and immediately realized that we had our work cut out for us!

Dockweiler is the only local beach that allows bonfires because it has designated pit areas. While this is great for the beachgoing public, it can be devastating for the marine life if trash is not disposed of in a safe manner. Sadly, we found that very few people clean up after themselves. As we walked along the sand, we picked up trash of all shapes and sizes. We found cigarette butts, plastic bottles, paper plates, napkins, childrens’ toys, balloons, straws, and Styrofoam containers to name a few of the more frequent items. It was unbelievable how much was scattered around, and we only covered a couple miles. We managed to fill at least six large garbage bags in the two hours that we were there.

Beach clean-ups are incredibly important for the health of our oceans. Small pieces of plastic can appear to be food to many fish and other marine animals, but once they’ve ingested them, their systems cannot digest them. Their stomachs fill with this plastic and eventually they starve to death because real food cannot fit. Large pieces of trash can trap small creatures, and some of the things that people discard contain toxins that can pollute the water. If we can catch some of these harmful pieces of rubbish before they make it into the ocean, we are saving thousands of lives. Clean-ups are also important in raising awareness. While we were combing the beach, people were paying attention to us. It’s not every day you see a group of college students volunteering and having fun while doing it! We set a really great example for all of the families who were at the beach enjoying their bonfires. In fact, I actually saw one woman turn back towards the pit that she was leaving and clean up her area after she saw us coming through. She even encouraged her children to help. It felt amazing to know that we were making a difference, and that we had just taught someone the value of picking up their trash. I sincerely hope that the next time her and her family decide to go to the beach, they will remember that experience and maybe even set an example for somebody else.

environment170 — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 06:58:32 +0000

Jae Suh

Having our mind towards cleaner environment can exponentially fix our nature’s degradation. From critically thinking of ways to assist that goal from our opportunity, we figured that cleaning up the beach would be a great idea since the beach is a well known area for having pollutions. So we’ve decided to visit Santa Monica beach for our obligation on May 22, 2009. From trying to clean up the beach will not only formulate it cleaner, but it’ll induce the water quality, which eventually comes back to us indirectly. From the visit, we’ve realized that our beaches can furthermore be preserved to keep its beauty. Thus, we began picking up trash along the shore to put in our effort to help as much as possible.
Although we know our ability to clean up the beach is limited due to much needed help by others combined, it is always best to assist in increasing our possibility of better sustainability for the environment. As we know, oceans occupy approximately 70% of our planet’s plane, which coincide our idea of focusing the sustainability along the beaches. In having our beach clean will further improve our water quality because more than 97% of all our water resource contains in the ocean. In addition, preserving our biodiversity will correspond with increasing nature perseveration. Since more than 90 % of the habitats are within the oceanic surface, it is one of the best ideas to preserve the conditions of the beach, thus saving much wildlife. Saving our biodiversity will not only help the natural habitat, but also help us. Materials from marine plants and animals can provide medicine for human health issues and polluting our ocean environment will result in eliminating the species of which contains cures for human diseases. Besides these factors about the oceans, there are many other things the oceans effect upon. By studying ocean sediments, we can learn more about our historical climate and how it has changed throughout time, in which we can prosper our knowledge about present climate.
Policies from our bureaucrats and policy makers for protecting the ocean can strongly help to better our ocean conditions. With their help, pollutants can be decreased by tremendous amount. With a concept of our beach clean up activity as a foundation, we can further narrow down other actions that can be provided for the sustainable ocean (e.g., discontinue dirty fishing, harsh trawling, seafood contamination, protection for the sea turtles for species maintenance , further research on ocean conservation, and eliminate ship pollutions.) These policies can be great leading solutions for our future sustainability for the oceans.

Jae Suh

Action Research Teams, Turfing the field

environment170 — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 06:56:37 +0000

Here at UCLA, students have an amazing opportunity to research different environmental topics with peers and share them with other students and activists in hopes of bringing about change and improving the conditions of the environment from local to global levels. Eight of these action research teams participated in a presentation session in Reiber Fireside Lounge on May 27th which was put on by UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and the Education for Sustainable Living Program. It was free to students and there was a huge variety of topics that were addressed by these research teams, which offered attendees a wide range of ideas to think about and get interested in pursuing as well.
I am the Delta Gamma Director of Intramural Sports, so the presentation on whether or not the installation of Astroturf on the Intramural Field was particularly interesting to me, and the sustainability effects that would result from this effort surprised me. The main argument in favor of laying turf on the field is the amount of water that would be saved since Astroturf does not require watering for its up keeping. As Southern California is constantly in a state of drought and Los Angeles has no local source of fresh water, being smart with our water usage is imperative in keeping the environment strong and respecting its resources. Although the production of Astroturf uses other resources like crude oil to make the plastic that the turf is made of, and the purchase and installation itself can be pricy, the research team showed that it is a smart investment in the long run. In one year, UCLA facilities management would save billions of gallons of water just by ending the need to water the Intramural Fields on a daily basis. Not only does this proposition save immense amounts of water, but it also saves money. California has decided to raise the price of water, so UCLA will save money on its water bills every year after the turf installation. Additionally, the University will save on its human resources as it will require much less maintenance to keep the field alive and functioning for all of the activities that are held on the grass.
This team not only conducted research in regards to the environmental sustainability that will result from Astroturf, but they surveyed the individuals that will be directly affected by this change; the students and athletes of UCLA. They randomly surveyed almost 300 students and found that 71% did not mind or they fully endorsed the installation of turf. They also performed a more narrow survey of the athletes who use the field most often, the rugby, lacrosse, and soccer teams, and the results were almost the same with 70% of these student athletes who do not mind or who support the change to turf.
As long as UCLA has the funds, or can raise enough money to enact this eco-friendly project, it should definitely be considered and worked towards in the near future. As a soccer player, I always enjoy playing games on Astroturf with its divot-free surface and fast pace, but knowing that the Intramural Field’s turf is saving water, money, and the environment would make the game that much better. Thanks to environmentally conscious students and researchers, the University of California Los Angeles is well on it way towards a more sustainable campus and a better future.

Shannon Skelton