Consequence

Fruit Trees and Simple Data

I attend the environmental club at my high school (yes, I know, you readers are acquainted with it, but this is simply clarification for the so called newcomers, the Internet figures who flit in and out of existence in the Google analytics graph). Most notably, our club arranged to get the school a recycling dumpster last year and successfully emptied the recycling conrtainers around the school. This year I would like our environmental club to continue working well with past plans, and also initiate new ones. For you busy readers, here is an outline:

• Improve recycling
  • coordinate the workload between janitors, special ed students, and environmental club volunteers
  • set up cafeteria recycling & composting
  • reorganize locker clean out day
• plant fruit trees
  • this will be coordinated with the lawrence fruit tree organization
  • we need a tree map first
  • we will calculate the cost of planting and details
  • benefit: delicious local fruit in our cafeteria
• Promote environmentalism
  • with simple global warming data
  • easy to understand, yet educational: let’s keep the numbers in context
  • please hold while we wait for our special guests….

We will communicate with the janitors and principal to properly divvy the recycling work between volunteers and school staff. We will place recycling containers in the commons area for lunch. I would like a mandatory compostable, reyclable, and trash system in the lunch room because it generates an enormous¹ amount of trash every year, and from what I have seen, most of that trash is either food (compost) or paper and plastic (recycling). I recently read about a similar recycling program at a middle school. If ten-year-olds can sort their lunch leftovers, high schoolers are more than capable. Locker clean out day has always seemed particularly wasteful because many students, fraught with end-of-school spirit, decide throw every item from their locker into the trash. Not only could we recycle most of their old materials, but we could reuse them as well. Remember that recycling comes last in the chain of Rs: reduce, reuse, recycle. They’re in that order for a purpose. First we must be careful not to generate useless crap, next we must insure that what we do make can be reused (preferably for more than 10 years), and finally, once all hope is lost and we are stuck with something useless, we must break down its raw materials for the construction of new products. Locker clean out day is a potential gold mine for school supplies. It’s logical to offer “re-use” bins to the frenzied students, in place of the ubiquitous black trash can. They could simply take one extra minute to sort through their lockers, and place their extra school supplies in the re-use bins, while placing any unusable materials in the recycling. We could then have a post-locker-clean-out rummage, which would provide students with a jump start to their back-to-school shopping (completely free of charge, too).

I am extremely passionate about the fruit tree project, and as I explain it, I will be writing with unbridled excitement. This is a volunteer organization in Lawrence, aimed at planting fruit trees around town. I think Free State High School is an ideal location because they have wide open spaces, a whole lot of sunshine, and hungry students. The city is hesitant to plant fruit trees because they always worry about the mess fruit can make. Fortunately for us, the hungry student aspect of our plan will take care of any fruit before it has the chance to fall on the ground and create a mushy, sticky insect pie. In order to plant fruit trees at Free State, we must do three things: create a map of the area, and evaluate the best locations; talk to the principal and other people in charge, presenting our case, so we can approve the project; rally the volunteers and the money to plant and care for the trees. Once the fruit trees are rooted and strapping, the second stage of the project can begin: the fruit harvesting—this stage will occur years from now when I am gone from the school so I am counting on new members of environmental club to carry it through. Harvesting can be both official, and unofficial. Unofficially, students will be able to walk outside, and pluck fruit from the trees. Officially, school staff can harvest the fruit to sell in the school cafeteria.

The last branch of environmental club is the outgoing, advertising, yelling, information-giving, promotion side. Not only will we try to find new members this year, but we will also try educate non-members to be conscientious, earth-friendly citizens. The more informative our advertisements become, the less likely people will pay attention. We have a trade off between the effectiveness of education, and the amount of people we educate. We will also generate trash with any sort of pamphlet or hallway sign, so whatever signs we make, we need some environmental hocus-pocus simply to restore the resources used to create them, let alone gain a net benefit. To optimize the effectiveness of education, I would like to present important data in a manageable (i.e. understandable) form. One educational opportunity I would like to seize, is to put global warming data in perspective. I recently read an article in Make Magazine by Saul Griffith, who made a really compelling argument that despite the mass-media attention given to global warming, most people still don’t know how much energy the world is using, how much carbon dioxide results from this energy use, and what temperature correlates to what concentration of carbon dioxide. These are debatably three of the most important facts in the grand scope of global warming, but people haven’t managed to memorize them (why don’t we learn this in school?). In case you were wondering, here’s the cheat sheet:

CO₂ levels in the atmosphere are often measured in parts per million (ppm)
Preindustrial levels: 280ppm
Year 2000 levels: 368ppm
Today: 387ppm
Goal to stop before: 450ppm (at this level, global warming gets really nasty)

+100ppm = +1°C

1 billion tons CO₂ = 0.260 parts per million CO₂
1 Terawatt-year of coal = 0.198 parts per million CO₂
1 Terawatt-year of oil = 0.155 parts per million CO₂
1 Terawatt-year of gas = 0.112 parts per million CO₂

People use over 10 Terawatts of fossil fuels, meaning we add from 1ppm - 2ppm of CO₂ every year.
It will cost over 25ppm of CO₂ to build alternative energy infrastructure.
450ppm - 387ppm -25ppm = 38ppm
38ppm/1ppm to 2ppm per year = 38 years to 19 years

Basically, we have 38 to 19 years at the current rate of emissions, before we pass the all-feared 450ppm limit. We need to realize that people are using more and more energy every year due to population growth, and modernization. Considering this, we would probably pass the limit before the 19 year mark if we don’t use clean energy, and even if we develop new clean energy sources, we will pass the limit within 38 years unless we replace all our old energy sources.

I imagine other educational opportunities will present themselves as we find guest speakers to lecture for our meetings. Currently, I am talking with Bart Rudolph, who works with the Lawrence Douglas County Metropolitan Planning Organization as a transportation planner.

Footnote: I have no numbers, but every day, about 1000 kids eat lunch and throw away the lunch packaging.