d rt Our green habits
We’re killing how many
From Garbage To Gold:
Composting Lifespan at the dump
trees?
Urban rooftop farms
sustainable community
Green faculty leader: Patty Theodosopoulos Countries with the largest carbon emission
in Vermont
Gowanus Canal Arctic
Oil Drilling
Conservancy Who bikes to school?
d rt Founder, Editor-in-Chief, layout designer
william hartman
Co-editor and writer
maia nelles-sager
Content managers and writers
Juliet breza isabel marvel
Photographer and writer
ruby lang writer
isabel bloom special thanks
patty theodosopoulos vince tompkins linda kaufman dana okeson
Photo by David Attenborough
We’re killing how many trees?
W
hen it came time to decide our Independent Science Research project, Ruby Lang and I chose to calculate Saint Ann’s’ carbon footprint. After discussing the project with Linda Kaufman, Associate Head of School, we realized that the school’s footprint had never been calculated before. In other words, no one knew the precise amount of carbon dioxide that was emitted into the atmosphere in order
to support the school’s operations. Although knowing our carbon footprint may not magically transform all of the carbon-heavy shipments to greener alternatives, the data would point out the supplies with the dirtiest assembly methods, guiding us to strategic resolutions: small changes with large impacts. Because the footprint was unknown, Ruby and I hypothesized it would be bigger than that of other New York City schools, which had calculated their footprint and had already begun to “greenify” the supplies they ordered. In fact, Saint Ann’s is one of six
By william hartman
private schools in New York City that is not a member of the Green Schools Alliance— an international organization for schools that pledge to reduce their footprint. We can’t blame the school for our abstinence, though. To become a champion member, a school must reduce its footprint by thirty percent over five years. Where things stand now, even if Saint Ann’s wants to become a champion member of the organization it can’t. Because we don’t know what our footprint is, we would have no way to verify that we are indeed sticking to our pledge
of a thirty percent reduction.
In the suburbs, children need to be chauffeured. Whenever I’ve driven past a high school in Connecticut, there’s a long line of idling cars filled with parents waiting to drop off their children at the front doors, and an endless cloud of greenhouse gases gushing out of those cars’ tailpipes. Fortunately for us at Saint Ann’s, a lot of students walk or use public transportation to get to school, which significantly cuts down the carbon output. Additionally, as we can all feel, Saint Ann’s doesn’t use air-conditioning in the warmer months. Even though the heat seems to ferociously soak through our skin, the lack of AC is great for our footprint. We’re not consuming any electricity to feed the power-sucking machine that is an air conditioner. Even with energy efficient transportation and no AC, there are still a lot of products that need to be considered when calculating the school’s footprint. Since some things are easier to count up than others, we decided to start small and simple, then slowly work our way up to a comprehensive list: paper, electricity, natural gas, water, forks,
Even though the heat seems to ferociously soak through our skin, the lack of AC is great for our footprint.
knives, spoons, bowls, cups, lids, plates, containers, pencils, markers, computers, books, sticks of chalk, staples, staplers, staple removers, rulers, scissors, erasers, folders, science notebooks, and other small items. Because every object has its own carbon output, the only way to know its footprint is by studying its manufacturing process and recording the amount of CO2 emitted. Then, the data are entered into a carbon calculator that can be accessed online. Essentially, a carbon calculator quantifies the carbon footprint of a given object. Ruby and I neither had the methods nor the machinery to create our own carbon calculator, so our mission was to find a reliable one on the web—one that was somehow programmed to every product the school buys.... After a week of searching, all we could scramble together were calculators that spat out really rough estimates of the footprint. The questions were too general for our calculations: “Do you recycle?” and, “Do you leave the water running when you brush your teeth?” Those weren’t going
to tell us the footprint of a 10-ounce hot cup or a 9-inch paper plate. Two weeks went by until we finally stumbled upon some useful data buried in an article about the environmental efficiency of a printed sheet of text: one sheet of paper has a carbon footprint of 0.0114 pounds. Although this “calculator” didn’t look a whole lot like any calculator we’d ever seen, we were overjoyed with our findings. We finally had some information we could use! The next step was to figure out how many sheets of paper Saint Ann’s buys each year. Ruby and I met with Mary Lou Kylis, Coordinator of Purchasing & Supplies, in the copy center and eagerly
shocked: we estimated that Saint Ann’s buys 204,300 sheets per month—or 2,451,600 sheets per year— just for the copy center alone. When multiplied by the 0.0114 pounds per sheet, we found that 27,948.24 pounds of CO2 were needed to produce these 2.5 millions sheets—roughly 307 trees chopped down!
With the data that Ruby and I continue collecting, Saint Ann’s will hopefully become a member of the Green Schools Alliance by pledging to reduce its carbon footprint. Our results should point out the products with large carbon outputs, making it easy to effectively lower. But Saint Ann’s shouldn’t join this organization just because so many other schools have. Although the cache of becoming a member should 27,948.24 make us proud, the title is irrelevant. The school should pounds of CO2 join because of what the orwere needed ganization symbolizes: a step toward a greener society. to produce Saint Ann’s needs to become these 2.5 a greener school if we want to begin fighting climate millions sheets. change, and the first moves in this fight are to tackled asked her for a few months of and take down its footprint. receipts. Although we were excited to have finally got—William Hartman ten a number, we were also
From Garbage To Gold: Composting Reducing your carbon footprint one peel at a time.
Forty-five percent of food in America is thrown away, making up 14% of the 250 million tons of waste we produce annually. Because Americans don’t recognize any consequences to throwing out huge amounts of garbage, no one gives a second thought to how much they’re throwing away. The govern-
BY Isabel Bloom ment spends more than $1 billion to properly pack landfills, and at this rate, the only way we can avoid something like a garbage tax would be by educating people on their waste. Even scarier, we’re running out of space to put all this garbage. Although the government has begun
implementing composting programs as a way to reduce the amount of garbage going to landfills, they aren’t large enough yet to make a significant impact. In the long run, America needs to streamline its composting programs if it wants a green, sustainable way to dispose of food. What exactly is
Photo by Isabel Bloom
compost? It’s the soil that results from the decomposition of natural substances— like food, flowers, and paper. Gardeners have dubbed compost “black gold” since it contains nutrients that are vital to plant life. Composting is surprisingly common in cities. In fact, New York has plenty of worm bins, which are ideal for small apartments: they take up very little room and can be stored out of the way in a dark closet or cabinet. And don’t worry, as long as there isn’t any meat or dairy in the bin, it won’t attract rats, cockroaches, or (worst of all) lions. Worm bins, also known as vermicompost, use interesting animals called red wrigglers (otherwise known as red worms) to digest the food scraps into nutrient-rich soil; these worms actually spit out compost—and they do it really quickly. The flesh of fruit is broken down within a week or so, and it takes the worms about a month to turn the seeds and pits into soil. With enough compost, someone can easily become a sustainable gardener—one who uses as many natural resources as possible, while keeping his or her soil filled with nutrients. As a sustainable gardener, one avoids
chemical runoff and other threatening consequences that result from artificial fertilizers. Maybe even best of all, composting costs almost nothing: only $10 for the bin and $20 per pound of worms. Then, it’s entirely free. In fact, most people even save money by cutting down on the number of garbage bags they buy. The Environmentalism and Sustainability Seminar
Worm bins, also known as vermicompost, use interesting animals called red wrigglers. has installed three compost bins in Saint Ann’s’ garden behind 122 Pierrepont Street. Every week, a bundle of discarded food from the Farber Building’s kitchen is added to the bins. The kitchen staff loves the idea of reducing the school’s waste, but it’s the students who really adore the project. They enjoy putting their food scraps in
the green compost bins every Friday, and then adding the soil to their plants on the roof garden. We also use the compost in the garden behind 122, where we add it to the flowers and herbs. Now that we’ve recruited a young group of composters at the Lower School, I hope that they’ll continue composting when they move into the Bosworth Building. Once students have composted since they were in lower school, the project will become a normal part of upper school lunch. I’m confident that our compost program will continue for many years to come. Composting doesn’t have to be done on a large scale; it can also be a fun project to do at home. Assembling your bin is like an arts-and-crafts project: you build it from scratch, decorate it, and personalize it. You can even convert your parents into composters! When I first convinced my parents to let me start a worm bin at home, they were skeptical—worried that it would either attract vermin, or that the worms would escape from the bin and would venture to the kitchen. But now, after having had the bin for over a year, my mom is a
Delights of the compost bin
worm fanatic. She treats them like they’re part of our family. When we go away on vacation she makes sure that they’ll have enough to eat. She even maintains a mental list of foods that she considers the worms’ favorites and worries that they won’t like the new food we’ve given them. The only thing I’d worry about when con-
sidering composting would be that you’re not just buying worms to eat your food scraps; you’re also adopting younger siblings. As you get accustomed to your worm bin, you’ll begin to realize the amount of space you’re saving at a landfill. Over the course of a year, you can easily make up to 200 pounds of compost. Now
imagine if everyone in America composted. We’d have somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 billion pounds of food each year diverted from landfills. Composting is definitely not a “garbage waste of time.” So please, start your own bin and be the change. — Isabel Bloom
two farms in the sky
Eagle Street:
6,000 square-feet of rooftop farm located at 44 Eagle St. Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Growing since Arpil 2009.
Photo by Annie Novak, RooftopFarms.org
Eagle Street doesn’t only yield produce. It’s also home to five pecking chickens whose manure is used as a renewable way to revive crummy soil, and of course, they sell the chickens’ eggs to eager visitors.
Photo by heartandsoilfilm.com
Brooklyn Grange:
Located in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. At over 43,000 square-feet, the farm yields 20,000 pounds of fruits and veggies annually. The farm grows rainbow chard, eggplant, salad greens, kale, basil, ground cherries, and cucumbers just to name a few. During the winter when they can’t grow produce, the farmers plant herbs such as clover and vetch both to prevent soil erosion and to restore vital nutrients to the soil.
Photo by Cyrus Dowlatshahi
At its other location, Brooklyn Grange has an apiary, which is home to twentyfive thousand bees who make up to 1,500 pounds of honey per year. Brooklyn Grange sells the honey at a farmers market in Greenpoint.
Photo by Anastasia Plakias, brooklyngrangefarm.com
WHAT THE WRITERS DO Isabel Bloom
William Hartman
1. brings her own 2. composts
1. uses reusable
she’s eating to-go worm bin
containers when
3. considers the carbon footprint
shopping bags at
a brk water
the supermarket
bottle
4. lowers the
3. prefers
4. turns off
thermostat at
walking and
in her
d
of transportation night and when before deciding where to vacation
2. drinks from
no one’s home
maia nelles-sager 1. drinks from
2. turns off
resuable water
the ligths
bottles
when she leaves a room
biking to driving
the ligths when he leaves a room
Isabel Marvel 1. unplugs
electronics
when they’re
2. saves paper by emailing
not in use
3. has toilets
4. has a small
3. uses cloth
4. recycles
that use less
herb garden
towels instead
plastics and
of paper towels
papers
water than most
WHAT Y’ALL DO lilly avram
Bebe bischoff
1. unplugs
2. prefers
1. utilizes wind
2. collects
electronics
walking and
energy to power
eggs from
biking to
her house
her chicken
when they’re not in use
driving
3. uses
4. recycles
3. composts
fluorescent bulbs
plastics and
regularly with her food in glass
instead of
papers
worm bin
coop
4. stores tupperware
incandescent
henry bradley
Spyder Ryder Sloman
1. unplugs
2. has solar
1. unplugs
2. prefers
electronics
panels to heat
electronics
walking and
when they’re not in use
his house’s water.
3. attaches water 4. drives a limiters to his faucets to
reduce flow.
hybrid
when they’re
biking to
not in use
driving
3. turns off the
4. recycles
ligths when he
plastics and
leaves a room
papers
Photos by Ruby Lang
Green faculty leader: Patty Theodosopoulos By maia nelles-sager Over the past four years, since Patty Theodosopoulos (or Dr. T, as some of her students call her) began teaching at Saint Ann’s, she’s done more than any other teacher to help spread environmental awareness throughout the school. “I’ve actually been mentoring in the Boston area,” she says about her efforts in helping build awareness among students. “So I have some experience in that medium.” She’s teaching an environmentalism and sustainability seminar, has helped William Hartman and Juliet Breza with the garden at 122 Pierrepont, and instituted a composting system into the lower school. However, Patty is not satisfied. “Saint Ann’s could be doing a lot. We’re bringing more awareness with seminars, and this magazine, the garden at 122, and on the roof of the lower school,” she tells me. She is enthusiastic about the environment, but she continuously
says “There are still things that need to be done.” When I ask what things, she tells me what might be her mantra. “Mostly awareness.” Indeed, Patty’s goal seems to be promoting awareness of environmental issues and activism. One of the ways she mentions is her seminar. The class is called “Environmentalism and Sustainability from the Local to the Global: a Call to Action,” and attempts to “explore the history and scope of the environmental movement in America since Thoreau, both as a reflection of the American psyche as well as a force for social change,” as written in the course description. This seminar, which meets on Mondays, currently has seven very passionate students enrolled. Kiki Michaan, a sophomore in the class, feels that “the people who come to the class direct what we do, so we’re really interested in what we talk about.” Kiki backs away from Patty’s goal of awareness, however. “It’s not about spreading the word, but about opening my eyes, learning things I didn’t k n o w, sharing,”
she intones. However, Kiki’s interest is contagious. As we talk in the library, one of her friends who is not enrolled in the sustainability seminar comes over to listen to our conversation, and even asks a question or two. Even as she discusses the need for awareness, Kiki makes others more aware, and is thinking about how to spread her message, just like Patty. “We went to hear Bill McKibben at this event: Do the Math. It was interesting, but he wasn’t the most articulate, and it’s an important message that should, but
doesn’t, reach larger audiences,” she says. As part of the seminar, Patty taught a unit on Fracking. “The capacity to frack safely is extremely limited and the companies involved are most interested in profits,” Patty explains. “The students [in the seminar] have been very interested and were looking to make an impact. They also really like film. They made a video for a contest (“Artists against Fracking,” run by Sean Lennon and Yoko Ono) but I was just pleased that they made a video.” Part of the course description for Patty’s seminar was letting “students have the opportunity to create and participate in local sustainability projects from building awareness in the community to more “hands-on” activities at Saint Ann’s and beyond.” The fracking video seems to fall into that category. “We have discussed this form of communication—it is powerful and gets the message across well,” says Patty. Kiki enjoyed making the video, but says, “it didn’t get everything I wanted a c r o s s .”
Photo by Ruby Lang
(U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Brian Ferguson)
Talking about articulating a message and passing that message on, we come to the topic of civil disobedience. “There’s a time and place for civil disobedience,” equivocates Kiki. I ask her if she thinks the situation is dire enough that this could be that time. “Inciting change is a combination of so many different things. Civil disobedience can be a part of that, but I’m not looking to get arrested right now. “Huge change has been spurred by civil disobedience, though,” she ends her thought. “I do see Hurricane Sandy as a call to action, and evidence of our fragile system.” Patty, too, talks about Sandy. “I can’t offer an expert opinion, but I think that some of the circumstances that led to Sandy being as intense as it was has to do with local climate change.” The answer? “Spread awareness,” answers
Patty. Along with her seminar in the high school, Patty has been spreading awareness slyly in the lower school. About her efforts, she says, “We see interest in composting in the lower school. At lunch, kids are interested in composting, in growing food, and eating what they grow.” I tell her that sounds very positive. “There’s still more that could be done at Saint Ann’s. Spreading more awareness.” Patty is less optimistic about implementing compost and other sustainable procedures in the high school. “It’s less realistic in the big building,” she says. “But once that generation comes into this building, I’m hoping they’ll continue their interest and bring the transition with them into the upper school.” —Maia Nelles-Sager
Lifespan at the dump
How long does it take to biodegrade? Paper Towel 2-4 weeks Apple Core 2 months Paper Plate 5 years Trash Bag 10-20 years Foam Cup 50 years Tin Foil 2,000 years
rooftop farm
Photo by CBS 2
Atop this Sunset Park warehouse is the world’s largest rooftop farm with 100,000 square-feet of farmland. It grows a million pounds of produce every year.
Photo by CBS 2
WATCHING READING browsing LEARNING
magazines
PERMACULTURE MAGAZINE
Garden Design Journal
MOTHER EARTH NEWS
URBAN FARM
BIOCYCLE
ORGANIC GARDENING
E-THE ENVIRONMENTAL MAG.
OUR PLANET
ENERGY AND POWER
Publishes every month http://www.gardendesignjournal.com Publishes every other month http://www.urbanfarmonline.com Publishes every other month http://www.organicgardening.com Publishes every three months http://www.unep.org/Publications
Publishes every three months http://www.permaculture.co.uk
Publishes every other month http://www.motherearthnews.com Publishes every month http://www.biocycle.net Publishes every other month http://www.emagazine.com
Publishes every other month http://ep-bd.com/site/
books
NO IMPACT MAN Colin Beavan $10.95
GLOBAL WARMING FOR BEGINNERS
THE FUTURE
THE ENLIGHTENMENT VISION
BOTTLEMANIA
TOMORROW’S ENERGY
FAIR FOOD
THE GREEN BOOK
OMNIVORE’s DILEMMA
movies
ESCAPE FROM SUBURBIA ad-
Dean Goodwin; Joe Lee $11.60
Stuart Jordan $26
Peter Hoffman $24.95
Elizabeth Rogers; Thomas Kostigen $13.95
Al Gore $30
Elizabeth Royte $10.95
Oran B. Hesterman $10
Michael Pollan $17
dresses the looming energy crisis brought on by the oil industry. (2007)
TAPPED examines the water bottle
FLOW discusses the Earth’s dimin-
AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
Gas HOLE is about the history of
industry’s effects on climate change and pollution. (2009)
ishing supply of fresh water, and its effects on life. (2008)
documents Al Gore’s worldwide campaign to make global warming a recognized issue. (2006)
oil prices, and the future of alternative fuels. (2010)
Urbanized looks at the struggles
The story of stuff opens
FOOD, INC. offers an unflattering
CHASing ice follows James Balog
and strategies of urban planning and design. (2011) look inside America’s corporate-controlled food industry. (2008)
a serious dialogue about mankind’s fixation with consumption. (2007) as he deploys time-lapse cameras to capture melting glaciers. (2012)
by juliet breza
Juliet Rose Breza: Please share a brief history of the Gowanus Canal and the Gowanus Canal Conservancy.
Hans Hesselein: The Canal was at one point a network of tidal creeks and salt marshes. The salt marshes were filled and converted to farmland early in the 1700’s. Right after the Civil War in
Q & A with Hans Hesselein, Director of Special Projects at the Gowanus Canal Conservancy
1869, the Canal was officially dredged and channelized by the government. As soon as this happened, the environmental problems really started to occur. It became an open sewer for the rapidly growing Brooklyn community; industry started to develop and the Gowanus Canal, as we know it today, was born.
In 2010, I was hired as the first full time staff member. Since then we’ve developed a really robust volunteer program: we have a “sponge park” [a series of public urban waterfront spaces that slow, absorb and filter surface water run off with the intended goal of cleaning up the contaminated Canal water]; we’re
Photo by Emilio Guerra
involved in the super fund community advisory group; and we’re building green infrastructure projects throughout the Watershed, including Guerilla Rain Gardens. JRB: And would you explain what a Guerrilla Rain Garden is?
HH: A Guerrilla Garden is when you take a piece of land that you don’t own, and you build a garden without asking permission. Spelled like Guerrilla warfare. So guerrilla gardening has traditionally been about taking an abandoned urban lot in a neighborhood and turning it into a community garden. A Rain Garden collects and absorbs storm water. So it keeps all the pollution out the Canal…some of the pollution. It keeps water out of our sewer system. JRB: So did you do one of these at the Canal? HH: Yes, at the end of Second Avenue and 4th Street by the water—that’s a Guerrilla Rain Garden. We just took property that had been used as a dumping ground, and we turned it into a Rain Garden. There are also a couple other spots around the canal that we’ve transformed.
JRB: What other projects are JRB: What are the Conseryou passionate about at the vancy’s goals in terms of the Canal, the environment and GCC? community surrounding it? HH: Our Compost Project. It started in a very feeble way HH: The biggest environin 2010; we were compost- mental challenge that we face ing weeds and things that we at the Canal is our combined pulled. Then in 2011 it grew. sewer overflow issue. Since Erik Martig came on board, New York City is old, we have and he partnered with a a sewer system that is comwood shop and a coffee shop. bined, meaning our storm He started moving wet coffee water and our sewage travel in the same pipes. Back in grounds and sawdust the day when we built sewers in the city, we used to just let sewage run downhill, and then we’d dump it directly into the Hudson River and the Gowanus Canal. Of course, we now realize that’s a bad idea, but we’re still stuck with this old system. Our sewer system is not designed to hold all of that water. The sewage treatment plant just can’t take it. So rather than the sewers backing up and flooding our homes with sewage, there’s an emergency overflow mechanism that dumps this excess sewage into the Canal. Every year we dump more than 370 million gallons of sewage and storm water in the Gowanus Canal. We are currently working down to the Salt Lot with a with the city to try to sigbicycle trailer. Since then we nificantly reduce the comcaptured maybe four tons of bined sewer overflow probwaste that we composted. lem, which will improve the habitat exponentially.
A Guerrilla Garden is when you take a piece of land that you don’t own, and you build a garden without asking permission.
We really would like to see a dredged and cleaned Canal as apart of the super fund process. Our long-term vision is to have a continuous public esplanade all the way around the Canal—a public park, which would be awesome! Finally, we would really like to see a much greener Watershed with many, many more instances of wildlife habitats. JRB: Where is urban gardening going in the future?
HH: Because real estate in New York is becoming more and more valuable, I think that we’re going see fewer traditional community gardens popping up in vacant lots like they have over the past 50 years. So I think it’s going to be harder and harder to develop traditional community gardens. However, I think people are becoming really certain about using leftover nooks and crannies in the city. So we’re going to start seeing a lot more use of small corner spaces, like at a weird intersection of a street or a subway or something like that, where there’s a fenced off little pocket. Finally, the rooftop farming and agriculture scene is really, really making great strides in New York.
And while I don’t think we’ll ever get a lot of produce in New York City from rooftop farms, I think we’re going to see them much more often. The technology is finally solid enough that we can depend on roofs not leaking with a “green roof” on top. Energy prices are getting high enough and storm water management is becoming such an issue that we need things like green roofs to help reduce our energy use and reduce our storm water burden. Those two arguments themselves lend so much more strength to the idea than just, “Green space is nice.” JRB: With all the new rooftop and neighborhood organic vegetable gardens, is there hope for neighborhood sustainability programs?
HH: Absolutely, definitely, there’s a lot of hope, and I think we’ll be seeing more of them—although people have to come up with more creative ways to fund them. Generous government assistance seems to be history, and so a lot of non-profits are finding it increasingly more difficult to survive. You just have to get a lot smarter and more creative about raising money to support your neighborhood sustainability
initiatives.
JRB: What kind of projects do you need help with, how often and what kind of people are you looking for to help?
HH: We always need help, and it’s very useful to have a diverse background of skills. So we can usually use help from just about anybody, no matter what their skill set is. For students specifically, we would love to get them involved in helping us by attending street fairs and public events where we speak with community members about the problems facing the Canal and address them. So we would love to get student volunteers to work with and help the ambassadors of the Canal. We would also love it if students would participate in our “Clean and Green Program,” helping us to build birdhouses, create gardens, compost and more. The main skill we’re looking for is a good attitude, and we hope they enjoy hard work. If people have skills in gardening, carpentry, public speaking, horticulture, those are all skills that we particularly value. The End
—Juliet Breza
M rning Trek: It’s
cyclel gical
Photo by Ruby Lang
Photos by Ruby Lang
Isabel Marvel
:
T
ucked away in the hills of Hartland, Vermont lie the tightly clustered houses that make up Cobb Hill. 23 green buildings are the homes of the 60 residents who are dedicated to maintaining a sustainable, green lifestyle and a collective business operation. Cobb Hill’s 260 acres contain an organic, man and horse-powered farm, sugarbush, an old red barn, residential houses, and a common house for regular community meetings and events. The new homes and common house were built at a moderate cost in 2002 using green-technology principles: the houses were designed to maximize solar energy for hot water and heating; their thick walls provide great insulation; they are all equipped with composting toilets; and, most importantly, all houses
Cobb Hill Cohousing
Photo by Neil Palmer/CIAT
are connected to a single Garn wood-fired gasifying boiler that provides heat for all 23 houses, as well as back-up water heating power for the solar panels on each roof. The site planning separated parking and pedestrian friendly areas while preserving the majority of the land, over 250 acres, for agricultural fields, pastures, and forest. The majority of the land was put into conservation, and the funds made were committed to the affordable homes. Cobb Hill is oriented around its numerous agricultural enterprises that are the main sources of income for the community as a whole. These enterprises include a CSA (communitysupported agriculture) venture called Cedar Mountain Farm, which produces their award-winning Cobb Hill Cheese, maple sugar and syrup, yogurt, as well as raising pigs and sheep, beekeeping and harvesting eggs. While they use all organic methods, Cobb Hill has decided not to obtain organic certification, only because their business is purely local and regional. In addition to their greenhouses and locally grown organic food, the members of Cobb Hill share a communal lifestyle in practi-
cally everything they do. The residents engage in many social and contributional activities that are fundamental to maintain their level of cooperation and collaboration. These activities include monthly workdays and community meetings, shared meals in the common-house twice a week, and other allinclusive social events. The work done to maintain the farm and houses by Cobb Hill members consists of feeding the boiler every 5 hours, tending to the animals in the barn, collecting maple syrup from the sugarbush, and so on. All maintenance is carried out at varied levels of time and commitment for each resident. The Cobb Hill Community is a great example of a group of people coming together and investing their lives into something they believe in, which has a greater effect beyond themselves. They’ve created a successful model of sustainable living, both environmentally and financially–a model we see as a working and reciprocating community that we can strive to imitate as best we can. —Isabel Marvel
Carbon footprint The 5 countries with the largest carbon emission in 2011 10,692,419 China 5,974,527 United States
2,171,553 India 2,017,229 Russia 1,366,866 Japan
Numbers in thousands of CO2 tons
Photo by Tom Casteel tomcasteel.blogspot.com
Photo by Energysmiths
Photo by FortyCakes.com
Arctic Oil Drilling S
ince 1972, America has heavily relied on petroleum as its main source of energy. Recently, however, drilling for oil has become a very heated topic. As more of our population has begun accepting climate change as a real problem, this controversy over oil has grown and become a major source of tension in America. Traditionally, drilling for petroleum has taken place on land, but in recent history--as the demand for oil has risen and land resources have diminished-the ocean, and specifically the arctic ocean, has been regarded as a promising source
of oil. However, many people are against the transition. One of the main arguments made against Arctic drilling has been focused on the industry “professionals’” lack of experience in the field. Because Arctic drilling is a fairly recent phenomenon, workers aren’t trained well enough to safely use the new technology. As a result, a lot of problems have arisen, most notably oil spills and technological difficulties. The largest oil spill occurred in 1989 on an Exxon Valdez rig in the Prince William Sound. Around 250,000 barrels of crude oil spilled into the formerly pristine waters just off the south coast of Alaska. After this disaster got global exposure, it
BY RUBY LANG was quickly discovered that there wasn’t any successfully proven method of cleaning up oil in broken sea ice.
Many Americans have already been against Arctic oil drilling, but with Shell’s current attempts to drill in Alaska, the country’s reluctance has only intensified—a feeling also present among many Saint Ann’s students. “The United States should not drill for oil in the Arctic. It should start investing in renewable energy. I don’t think the United States has any business exploiting these resources,” said senior Julien Soros. Despite the growing concern from many citizens and organizations, the U.S. House of Representatives
voted for Shell to begin preparatory drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in August of 2012. This project was focused on finding oil-rich locations. The recent backing from the Obama Administration has resulted in a lot of skepticism and objection. Many believe that Shell was prematurely granted permission to drill in the Arctic with the understanding that America would decrease its dependence on foreign oil and regain its significant position in the global oil industry, thus strengthening its economy. Although this is true, is not a sound justification for expediting such a risky project. Since then, there has been a significant amount of hostility and opposition surrounding such an idea. The resistance is mostly from environmental and Native American groups that believe the drilling will disrupt the land and animals living there. Senior Winter Guerra agrees: “I am opposed to oil drilling in the Arctic just because I am opposed to oil drilling in general. Although I do understand that we need crude oil—and it makes sense that they would start to tap the Arctic specifically since it gives us a more self-
“The United States should not drill for oil in the Arctic. It should start investing in renewable energy. I don’t think the United States has any business exploiting these resources.”
sufficient energy supply—it is bad for the environment, and is only going to harm us in the long term.” In September of 2012, Shell began exploratory drilling, but has since encountered numerous problems. The fleet of drillships was unable to meet the Environmental Protection Agency’s current air pollution standards. Additionally, there have been numerous technological problems while drilling: the spill containment system was crushed during testing; many ships ran aground, and even more started catching on fire. The country’s most recent concern has to do with Shell’s drillship, The Noble Discoverer, which is currently undergoing a criminal investigation by the Coast Guard. Although details are unclear, the drillship allegedly violated federal laws with regard to safety and pollution standards. These issues have sparked more criticism than the offshore oil industry has ever encountered, and although Shell is trying to continue its drilling project, it’s facing many problems that will likely intensify in the time to come. —Ruby Lang
Photo by Shell
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