Hospitals Jump on the Bandwagon

I've seen a couple interesting news articles on hospitals and sustainability lately, so I figured I'd devote a blog post to it, which will also help lead into 2 other issues I haven't yet discussed.

The first story is found here:

http://earth911.com/blog/2009/01/23/dell-childrens-first-leed-hospital-in-world/

The gist of it is that a children's hospital in Texas received a LEED platinum designation - the world's first for a hospital. They will be implementing such things as reusing 47,000 tonnes of material originally used on airport runways, using water-conserving utilities, xeriscaping, using 40% fly ash in the concrete instead of Portland cement, and installing locally made / eco-friendly / low VOC products throughout.


While interesting in itself, I think this relates strongly to the larger issue of "hospital health" (which can be tied in closely to community health). I remember reading an article in the Macleans magazine a year or two ago that discussed how the design of a hospital (in every sense of the word) actually has a very significant impact on things like how fast patients recover or whether they get sicker by contracting other disease or infections. The article claimed that the classically designed hospital, with the long hallways, multiple patients per room, etc. had shown to be a bad design for keeping people healthy in hospitals and that architects and designers were now looking to totally redesign new and old hospitals with this in mind. So with that in mind, I think its great that new hospitals also include sustainability measures, as I have no doubt that the cleaner, greener environment would help both the physical and mental recovery of the patients ('mental' meaning - you'd probably feel better psychologically if you were in a beautiful room with fresh air flow and feel-good green products everywhere than you would stuck in a 4-bed per room, industrial feeling, sickly room). As the president and CEO of the children's hospital says, "Our motivation to pursue LEED Platinum was not just environmental. Being a ‘green’ hospital has a profound, measurable effect on healing. What’s good for the environment and good for our Mueller neighbors is also good for our patients."

The health of the hospital, of course, directly impacts the health of one's community as well. If people end up stuck in a hospital for longer than anticipated due to illness from the hospital itself, this not only has an economic cost (of the hospital needing to continue to support the patient, and of the patient not working), but also a strong social cost (stories are spread about the hospital and it comes to be seen as a place to be avoided, an illness in itself) (also, more directly, it translates into time spent away from friends and family and what would likely be an increase in the patient's risk of depression or other psychological ailments). So the moral of the story is: everything is interconnected and a healthy and sustainable hospital contributes to a healthy and sustainable community!

The second story is found here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/jan/26/hospitals-nhs-meat-carbon

This article takes the issue of hospital sustainability beyond that of simply patient health and focuses on the emissions that hospitals produce. Since health care is something we classify as an 'essential service', we tend to not talk much about its environmental impact, but this article highlights an interesting study done by the National Health Service (in the UK) that looked at health care's environmental impacts and is proposing actions to help mitigate them. The article mentions that a recent study published by the NHS showed that the sum total of CO2 emissions for all of its outposts in the UK produced more than 3% of the country's total, meaning that, if it were itself a country, it would be the 81st biggest polluter in the world! Fascinating stuff, which is why the NHS began proposing a wide range of solutions to lower its impacts, which include a whole slew of things, in the hopes that it can cut its emissions by 80% by 2050.

One of the highlights of the plan, and the title of the article, was that the NHS would encourage hospitals to take meat off their menus or to offer fewer meat and dairy products in general. This of course, makes me very excited, as I recently became a vegetarian and speak highly of it as a way of life. Animal welfare and ethics aside, most people don't realize the huge environmental impacts of the meat industry. I had the unfortunate chance to talk about this with an average North American hick, whose response was, "What, cow farts? Hahaha" (he said a bunch of other stupid sh*t too, but I won't pain your eyes with it). Yes, cow farts, but also huge issues with land degradation and advancement of farmland onto natural areas, highly polluted runoff from the combination of animal waste and fertilizers, the energy costs of producing animal feed, and emissions from the transportation of animals and meat products to and from the processing facility.

See this article for the impacts of meat on a purely CO2-based level: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-greenhouse-hamburger

More and more scientists are coming out in favour of a vegetarian diet as the best way that an average person can make a difference both on their CO2 emissions and also on their health. Nobel Peace Prize winner R.K Pachauri, head of the IPCC, and one of my role models, is a strict vegetarian and recently began advocating it on the global stage.


While I could go on (and I most certainly will in the future), I will simply sum up by saying that, yes, meat is delicious, but we are (both fortunately and unfortunately) the transition generation - the one that has to change and break with old ways or else risk extinction from global ecological collapse. Perhaps in the future, when everything gets sorted out, we will be able to raise animals for meat in a sustainable way, but for now, we must do all we can to reduce our emissions, and refraining from meat (and not driving, obviously) is a great start to this, so I am pleased and heartened by the NHS's move towards this. Hopefully other meal-providing services, like the airline industry, will move towards this as well!


More resources for all of you who are considering the switch (don't worry, none of these links contain pictures of animals being killed or any of that stuff):
http://www.alternet.org/story/12162/?page=entire
http://www.vegpledge.com/
http://www.hippy.com/article-22.html
http://www.vegcooking.com/
http://www.petaliterature.com/VEG297.pdf

I know myself that, while I endorsed vegetarianism for awhile, I was always held back by the question of "what do I cook?". While there will no doubt be a rocky transition period, its actually very easy to find and cook good vegetarian meals. Buy a couple cookbooks that catch your eye (Chapters has a good vegetarian section, or use Amazon), or just hit up Google! I'm always happy to provide help / moral support as well! :)

Vertical Farming and Other Agriculture Stuff

Food, agriculture, and food security are hot topics these days, with good reason. One of the problems with cities has always been that we rely on food to be grown elsewhere and shipped / trucked to us. This creates all sorts of problems with respect to costs and the stability of the system. Cities allow us to live at a much greater population density than what could be supported by the physical area of the city's footprint, and as this density increases, we rely on increasingly complex and expensive supply chains to be able to get all the food into the city that is needed to sustain us. This makes for an unstable system, for if the supply chain ever broke down, the collective millions of us in cities would essentially have no way of getting food.

What could cause such an instability? Climate change, of course!
Check this article out:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/09/food-climate-change

Thanks to rising temperatures and changing weather patterns, scientists predict that half of the world's population could face food shortages by 2100. Half! (Which will be around 4.5 billion by then, at least, if the population growth models hold.) This is no laughing matter and we're going to need big solutions fast, otherwise these food shortages will likely hit our cities especially hard.

So how can we approach this issue? Well, I came across 3 neat ways via the news in the last few days, and I'm sure there's many more. The most important thing, of course, is that we gain the willingness to act - once we have motivation, ideas soon follow. It is, of course, excellent then that we now have Mr. Obama as President of the US, as his leadership will hopefully spur the developed world into tackling issues like these. His speech today regarding his climate and energy plan was particularly compelling, and involved phrases like, "no single issue is as fundamental to our future as energy" , "The days of Washington dragging its heels are over" , and "We will not be put off from action because action is hard." Woohoo!

Anyways, back to the ideas:
For an issue as huge as food security, we need action on an international and national level, but also on a local community level. For example:

http://www.enn.com/lifestyle/article/39052

The city of Seattle recently extended its program known as "Green Seattle Partnership", which is an urban reforestation project with the Cascade Land Conservancy that aims to restore 2,500 acres of parkland by 2025. This is a good thing because not only does increased parkland "'improve our infrastructure and strengthen the social fabric of the city'" (Gene Duvernoy, from the article), but it could also be used for local food production. While such an idea would still require some hurdles to jump over, it at least retains the biodiversity in place so that, if a disaster struck, the city wouldn't be completely screwed!

Change also needs to occur on an individual level, by getting people inspired about growing their own food. See, for example, this article:

http://www.enn.com/agriculture/article/39054

While it does take time, growing food is still easier than one would think and every little bit you can contribute brings you one step closer to self-sufficiency should a disaster occur. Of course, getting people motivated to get their hands dirty is the hard part, especially when there's upfront expenses involved. As well, we North Americans have grown fond of having exotic fruits and vegetables available to us all through the year, so convincing people to switch back to the good ol' potatoes and carrots all through winter would be no easy task. But again, I think the goal here is not necessarily to become wholly self-sufficient, but to simply to be able to provide at least some of your food (I certainly wouldn't mind living off potatoes if a disaster struck and there was nothing else to eat!) and to get back in touch with our food and how it is grown, which is a whole other issue occurring in developed societies.

Finally, and my favourite - why not build farms like we build apartment buildings?
"Levels Jerry!" (Kramer) :)


http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/12/24/cities-may-sprout-vertical-farms/

While this idea faces a vast array of technical challenges, if we could pull it off, it would potentially be able to not only make our cities self-sufficient, but also allow us to decommission a lot of our farmland in the country and allow this land to return to nature!

Ahhh the optimism. :)

What Community Means to Me

I figured its probably about time that I do a post that has some direct relevance to our course, so here's one about the topic that Chris addressed to us in lecture 2.

What does community mean to me?



This is a difficult question for me to answer, mainly because of who I am as a person. I generally define myself as a very 'hard logical' person (i.e. the bottom-right quadrant of the BCHC's integral process diagram), to which things are black or white, with anything in the middle being hypocrisy - a trait that I detest. Because of this, I essentially view almost every human being (myself included) as a hypocrite in some way or another. This causes me to often judge people very harshly and cut through the bullsh*t in any situation. These traits, coupled with a slight superiority complex and a healthy dose of introversion means that I don't talk much and form close-relationships far less frequently than others. Now before you start thinking that I'm about to break out in tears or something - I'm quite content in my current situation, since, again, I feel that my way is the only way and the best way! :)

So how does all that sentimental stuff help to answer the question? Well, it helps to explain the fact that I really don't identify with any "community" that I can think of, and so it means nothing to me. Sure, I have friends in the environmental community, the video gaming / nerd community, the popular kids community, but no matter what group I get involved with, I always feel like the outsider. Perhaps this isolation is purely mental and self-imposed, but I feel that I only really connect with people if I can hang out with them on a 1-on-1 basis (and I don't do that with many people, as I would probably find their company insufferable).

At the same time, I am a big-picture thinker and a strong environmentalist, which raises an interesting discordance within me. I have devoted my life to conserving the planet for ourselves and the next generations (and other similar collective, left-wing type principles), yet most of these people that I am trying to save do nothing but irritate or anger me. In that respect, I relate myself a lot to Paul Watson, the infamous captain of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, except that I still view environmentalism from an anthropocentric (rather than an ecocentric) perspective. But why am I anthropocentric if I generally dislike people? ...
Perhaps it is more that I "love the sinner, hate the sin" or what have you. I do think that there is good in people, but that from the point of birth onwards, we all get progressively more f*cked up thanks to every aspect of our society and culture, and once you're screwed up, there's no fix for it (Well, maybe there is, but it would probably take years of intensive counselling-type stuff to get you to change all of your values).

I don't really know how to explain it better than that, and, of course, as soon as I hit "Publish", I'm likely to feel slightly differently, as my philosophies change on nearly a daily basis (although, no matter how much my paradigms may shift, I doubt I'll ever be an outgoing, touchy-feely, top-left quadrant-type person). In short, though, I currently have no meaning associated with 'community' in my life. In a perfect world where we weren't all messed up, I think I might enjoy being in one, but for now, I know that it is not to be, as my judgemental attitude would immediately cause me to self-isolate whenever I came across someone with a different (i.e. flawed! haha) value system than my own.

Now let's just pretend this post never happened and head back to your regularly scheduled interesting news stories...

Masdar City - A Good or Bad Idea?

Perhaps you've heard of Masdar City, but if not, I figure that this blog would be a good place to discuss it as a community issue.

http://www.masdar.ae/home/index.aspx

The brainchild of the Mubadala Development Company, Masdar will be a city that is rising from scratch, essentially in the middle of the desert, just a few kilometres outside of the existing Abu Dhabi metropolitan area.
It is envisioned to be a "zero-carbon" city, utilising all sorts of interesting new technologies, including large scale solar panels for powering both the city and a desalination plant, wind farms, geothermal usage, greywater recycling, advanced waste management (composting, waste-to-energy incineration), and what will be the world's largest hydrogen power plant. The neatest part of all is that no automobiles at all will be allowed into the city - instead, mass transit and something called "personal rapid transit" (i.e. individual podcars on tram lines!) will be used. This allows the streets themselves to be narrow and shaded, which will create nice breezes via the wind tunneling effect (remember that this city is essentially going to be in a desert). To reduce the heat and save energy, the city will also be walled and extensively shaded.

In short, sounds awesome right? The concept art that is currently out looks sweet too. However, it raises a fundamental ethical question in my mind - is it really "sustainable development"? This is a topic we discussed in lecture 2, with some criteria being listed as: - concern for equity and fairness, - has a long term view, and - uses systems thinking. I have little doubt that, once built, its carbon and waste footprints will be minimal (and I'm sure that their Agenda 21 indicators will be stellar), but it is development itself that bothers me.

I generally disagree with the entire concept of 'sustainable development' and do not think that those above-listed criteria could ever solve our problems. Every action that human beings take has an impact on the natural world - the only way to truly be sustainable is for us to drastically reduce our population and revert to a tribalistic hunter-gather existence. This sounds like a strong statement, but think about it in terms of Masdar: once up and running, the city may, for example, not emit a single tonne of waste and be completely energy independent (it actually won't be, as it will still need to rely on gas-fired power from Abu Dhabi at night), but what about all the impacts that occurred up to that point? They always say that 95% of the waste and energy created in automobile production occurs before you ever even buy the vehicle, and this is likewise for all other materials that this city would use as well. For example, the shiny new solar panels and wind towers had to be made from something, probably in an energy intensive way, and by doing so, we continue to create demand for base metals, wood, and plastics, the mining and refining processes of which cause huge environmental degradation.

And so we are left in a troubling dilemma - no one (myself included) would ever agree to abandon our society and revert to tribalism, yet no other option is as perfect. Once we reach this realization, I suppose that we are forced to accept technological innovation as the only feasible answer. While a wind-powered city is still unsustainable as long as our population (and therefore our need for continued development) increases, it is indeed better than the alternative and so should be begrudgingly accepted until we can think of an even better alternative.

However, this too has problems. Firstly, due to lack of manpower and possible permanent physical constraints, I don't see technology keeping pace with the world's increasing number and scale of problems, especially as we begin to lose more species that may have proven useful in medicine or biomimicry. Secondly, as we have read in our "Fostering Sustainable Behavior" book for environmental economics, inducing behavioural change to adopt these new technologies is difficult at best and requires multifaceted, audience-specific, incentive-based campaigns (which of course, take lots of time and money - both of which are of increasing scarcity).

So, in short, we're probably f*cked... But at least Masdar is cool!

Economic Incentives in Action with Ecoelce!

From time to time I enjoy watching the informational videos put out by the UNEP and I stumbled across this one a couple months ago:

http://www.unep.org/NewsCentre/videos/player.asp?w=640&h=480&f=shortfilms/2008-09-15_Endessa

(can't seem to find a way to post this straight to this blog, so you'll have to view it offsite)

Essentially, this video documents what I deem to be a very innovative community project occurring in Fortaleza, Brazil. This city of 3 million had a serious waste issue - generating 3,300 tonnes of waste every day, with much of it collecting on the streets and not being properly landfilled. That was until Professor Gradvohl of the Universidade de Fortaleza had an idea: along with this waste, Fortaleza's poor had great troubles paying their energy bills, so why not create a system to collect the waste in exchange for energy? He and his group essentially created a "garbage for energy" program called Ecoelce, opening collection centres around the city for residents to bring various types of recyclables. Each type of material had a credited value and the more the residents brought in, the higher reductions they would see on their energy bills (the energy utility company of the city obviously had a stake in the project). With a little work, many residents were seeing a lovely "$0" on their monthly statements (with any excess being carried forward to the next month)! Note that the recyclables themselves weren't being melted down for energy production (they were just being recycled like usual), but this increased recycling likely saves energy in the manufacturing sector, so it makes sense to pass these savings along to consumers as the incentive of the program.

Essentially, the moral here is an economic one. Before, the residents saw the waste as useless, and made no effort to clean it up, as the benefits that would come to the community from decreased curbside waste were outweighed by the individual cost of the effort required to do the clean-up. This, of course, hurt everyone by degrading the environmental quality of the community, but not enough for any single person to see clean-up as being in their best interests (tragedy of the commons). However, when this program put a price on the waste, residents immediately began bringing huge bags of the stuff to the centres so that their energy bills would decrease. While this certainly does not change the moral underpinnings of any of the citizens (i.e. it is a "first order change", and the citizens would likely return to their old ways if the economic incentive was ceased), it was nonetheless highly effective.

My question now is, could this program be implemented more widely than it currently is? What barriers would have to be overcome? And, if it *could* be implemented, since it is only a first-order change, *should* it be? I, for one, think it would be a useful thing to have in our community. It would certainly give us all more motivation to recycle (rather than the present situation of no motivation at all except that of guilt) and, for the poor among us, it could help have a significant increase in their amount of monthly disposable income. As well, pragmatically speaking, our planet cannot wait for us to invest the time needed to bring about second-order change, so every little bit helps!

However, the disconnect that exists in this province between the recycling industry and BC Hydro might cause a legislative headache for a project like this, and, as well, at the recent tour of the Metro Waste Recycling Depot for ENSC 301, the supervisor there stated that his operation is actually losing money on nearly all of the recyclable material they send out (and are relying on government subsidies), due to the falling commodity markets. So there may not actually be enough revenue generated to be able to offer this discount here. I also wonder if this recession has affected the Ecoelce program, as the video was posted in September, which means it was likely filmed before the proverbial sh*t hit the fan.

At any rate, the project is a neat economic experiment and is definitely worth further investigating for broader implementation!

An example of a community sustainability failure..

For my inaugural content post, I figured I would post an interesting story I came across the other day (as you will rapidly become aware, I read the news a LOT):

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2009/01/07/bc-victoria-sewage-overflows.html?ref=rss

Essentially, the article discusses how the recent heavy rainfalls in the Victoria area, combined with excessive snow melt, have caused sewer overflows in a number of areas, spilling raw sewage onto the coastlines and therefore contaminating the areas with fecal coliforms, amongst other things.

The theme here is sewer infrastructure, a very local-style issue that all communities probably grapple with. Its safe to claim that in most older cities, the sewer and stormwater infrastructure is similarly aged and not built to deal with either the increased capacity nor the relatively recent public concern over the environmental damage associated with untreated sewage and stormwater discharge. Unfortunately, the extensive and subterreanean nature of our sewer system means that modifications and upgrades are costly, time consuming, and disruptive, which essentially leads to only the bare minimum of replacement work being done on them. This approach by local governments will not likely change any time soon, as there is neither a huge public demand for it nor a huge excess of funds.

So what to do? While lobbying for infrastructure upgrades to be included in the Official Community Plans of your local municipality is, of course, an important factor, it cannot be the only avenue used to reduce sewage and stormwater waste into our oceans and rivers. With this long-term shift must also come short-term action, mainly in the form of public awareness and exhortation campaigns.

For example, my summer job last year was to develop a series of informational bulletins to give to local municipalities, for them to give to business owners, regarding specific best management practices that various business categories could use to reduce their inputs to the storm drainage system. For example, telling painters to not wash their brushes over a gutter, but rather in the sink. (I did my best to give appropriate economic and efficiency justifications for these actions whenever possible.) The goal with this and with any other awareness campaign is that: if the public can be more conscious of what they flush, what they rinse down the sink, and what they let run into storm drains, it is a safe bet that the resulting stormwater and sewage outputs would be far less toxic and environmentally damaging than they are now. While this certainly doesn't solve the world's problems, it buys time until municipalities can scrape together enough funds to install a higher capacity and less leak-prone sewer infrastructure.

Unlike an issue like climate change, which essentially requires us to make a fundamental lifestyle shift, a local issue like sewerage can be very easily improved upon, with results that are immediately noticeable to local residents (e.g. no more sewage spilling onto the beach = a clean beach open for swimming). This should mean that it is also easier to motivate public opinion and promote community engagement on an issue like this. Now, if only we could do the same for climate change!

Welcome!

This is my inaugural post for the ENSC 409 blog assignment! I'm looking forward to sharing some interesting environmental events, technologies, and observations with you over the next 4 months.
Still figuring this whole system out, so my content-related posts will follow shortly..

Edit: I'd also like to note that I've made the colour scheme of this blog black for a reason! Apparently computer monitors use less energy to display black pixels than white or coloured pixels (thus the upswing in popularity of www.blackle.com as an alternative to Google), so I figured that there could be no better option for an environmentally-themed blog!