Tag: environment

My Environmentalism

I’ve been figuring out and reflecting on how to cut my carbon footprint lately, especially because I’m reading a lot of reports about how we don’t have much time left to reverse the effects of human activity on climate change. Environmentalism was a huge cause for me as a kid, and in middle school I remember starting my own small campaigns to raise awareness about environmentalism and climate change. I think that is why Greta Thunberg was so encouraging to me when I first heard of what she was doing, because her life journey reminded me a lot of myself. I remember being really depressed during seventh grade and I also struggled with low self-esteem, and I wanted to feel a sense of purpose in life. I don’t know exactly what prompted me to care so much about the environment and global warming, but I remember around the time I was in fifth grade or sixth grade, my family and I watched a lot of documentaries. One of them was Super Size Me, and after watching the movie I decided I wasn’t going to eat McDonald’s ever again (of course, many of my peers took the film with a grain of salt, one of them telling me, “I saw Super Size Me nine times and I still love McDonald’s.) In fact, when I went over to a friend’s birthday party, her dad drove us up to McDonald’s in the morning after our sleepover and when they asked me what I wanted, I said, “Oh, no thank you. I watched Super Size Me so I’m not eating McDonald’s anymore.” I’m pretty sure I got an orange juice and one of the wrapped hash browns because I didn’t want to seem rude, but that documentary impacted me a lot (“The Smoking Fry” feature turned me off from ever having McDonald’s fries again)

Another documentary that scared the shit out of me and got me to care about the environment was An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary by former U.S. vice president Al Gore. The documentary explored how human activities over several years has contributed to rising temperatures, rising sea levels, and a rising urgency to save the planet. A year later I found myself watching this incredible livestreamed benefit concert called Live Earth, which took place in several cities around the world and was geared towards raising awareness about climate change and environmentalism. The festival featured a bunch of short films that were pretty brilliant. One took place in a convenience store and an old woman and a cashier argue about whether or not to ask for a plastic bag or bring a reusable one to the store. Every time each of them picks the plastic bag option, they slap each other and then break the fourth wall, telling the audience that it wouldn’t be necessary to ask for a plastic bag since plastic bags have a negative environmental impact and end up in the ocean. The old lady ends up bringing her own reusable bag to bag her groceries. Another short film was called “Inconvenient Ruth” and it was an animated short about a girl named Ruth and her penguin friend, Eff, who is a refugee of Antarctica and plays the banjo. Ruth talks about creative ways we can save the planet, like making buildings out of recycled orange rinds and drying used toilet paper out on clotheslines so we can reuse it (realistically, both of these would need to go through serious sanitary processes for us to actually do something like this. Even though I feel guilty about using a lot of toilet paper, I probably wouldn’t reuse it after all the stuff I put it through while using the restroom.) Ruth also has a huge crush on Al Gore, and she fantasizes about him being this hunky muscular guy and knight in shining armor, until a gas-guzzling car nearly runs her over and snaps her out of her romantic fantasies. She reprimands the person for producing carbon emissions by driving, and gets flustered, but then in a cruel twist of irony she ends up passing gas and her flatulence burns a hole in the ozone layer. As a child who loved tooting humor, I guffawed after watching this short film. It brought humor to a serious topic.

Another short film I loved was a three-part series called Bob and Harry: The Last Two Polar Bears. Bob and Harry were played by the late actor Rip Torn and Harry Shearer, and the show was about the last two polar bears who are still living even after the polar ice caps have melted and other species are going extinct due to the effects of global warming. Bob and Harry are trying to survive in a world where resources are becoming scarce, but they often fall short. In the first episode, they approach a real estate agent because they are looking for a home. The real estate agent shows them different climates where she thinks they will thrive, but the climates aren’t suited for polar bears. Because the polar ice caps have melted, all the climates are warm, and some are actually zoos where Bob and Harry wouldn’t be able to roam freely like they usually do. When Bob and Harry are about to give up, the real estate agent shows them the last glacier that she keeps in an ice box. However, it is really just a big ice cube, and it only has enough room for Bob and Harry to sit on it. It’s not a sustainable living environment for them because they actually need to be in an icy environment to thrive, but since the polar ice caps are gone, they don’t have a home to live in anymore. Another episode is where Harry tries to find a soulmate, and the lady who is finding a match for him can’t find the right match for Harry. The most she can find is a panda bear named Lucy who is attractive but has really bad digestive problems and lives far away from Antarctica. The matchmaking lady tells him that if he had come sooner, they would have found him a mate, and by sooner she means several years before global warming made several species extinct. The final episode in the series takes place at a restaurant, and Bob and Harry order seafood. However, instead of bringing out seafood or food that polar bears eat, the waiter brings them rice (without the sushi fish), a disgusting tar-like mixture of oil from an oil spill (when the waiter said it was a “Valdeez” broth, at first, I didn’t know what he was referring to, but then I realized it was a play on “Valdez” and was referring to the Exxon-Valdez oil spill in 1989.) and the final dish, a broth made of tangled fish nets and debris from the ocean. All of these episodes were meant to illustrate how depressing life is going to be for polar bears (and all life for that matter) if we don’t reverse the effects of global warming. I remember this series had a pretty serious impact on me, even though it, like Inconvenient Ruth, used humor to illustrate a serious point.

I remember also watching a few Ad Council commercials that were pretty scary when I watched them as a kid (as they were intended to be, because realizing how much the planet is burning up is pretty scary) One of them featured a series of kids saying the word “Tick” over and over again, and in between saying the word “tick” they listed off all the irreversible consequences of global warming, such as melting polar ice caps, severe drought, and devastating hurricanes. Another commercial by the Ad Council featured a middle-aged man standing in front of a camera while a train moved closer and closer, and he said that some people think the irreversible consequences of climate change are 30 years away (the ad came out around 2007) but in 30 years, it won’t affect him. He then moves to the side, and we see a girl on the railroad tracks with the train heading toward her as she looks hopelessly into the camera, indicating that the people who are going to suffer from global warming’s impact the most are future generations. The Ad Council was very effective in getting me to want to care about protecting the planet, and so I remember getting really pumped about finding creative ways to lessen my carbon footprint and raise awareness about environmentalism. I remember being in Texas History class and passing around an article from either Newsweek or TIME about an organic farming initiative that students at Yale University were kicking off (the article came out around 2006 or 2007) I’m sure my teacher wasn’t thrilled about me distracting the class while he was giving the daily lecture about how Texas wanted to secede from the Union, but some students actually enjoyed reading the article. I went on to buy organic cotton shirts with messages about saving the planet (one of the labels was called Mission Playground), to recycle like my life depended on it, and to turn off the lights whenever I left a room. Oh, and I also loved composting. Then in ninth grade, I read a book called 50 Ways to Save the Ocean, and it gave a lot of useful tips for what fish to eat and which fish to avoid, how to raise awareness about overfishing, and how to protect our world’s oceans. It had a lot of cute illustrations, which I found appealing because I loved a lot of books with cartoons, especially of animals. I ended up cutting out fish from my diet altogether, and decided to become vegan when I began ninth grade. I also started to look up fuel-efficient cars, and dreamed of one day owning a Mini Cooper, a Volkswagen Beetle or, better yet, a Toyota Prius. I think in college, I started to become more aware through doing research that the environmentalism movement wasn’t perfect and that it has a history of overlooking the contributions of people of color to the movement. I also didn’t know anything about environmental racism, which is where marginalized communities are disproportionately affected by pollution and other environmental problems. There is a predominantly Black community in Chicago called Altgeld Gardens, and they were located near a polluted water system. It was often called “the Toxic Donut” because so many chemical facilities surrounded the community, and a lot of residents in Altgeld Gardens started dying of health problems linked to exposure to these toxins. In 1979, Hazel Johnson, one of the residents, wanted to do something about this and so she started an initiative called People for Community Recovery, where she and the other Altgeld Gardens residents organized grassroots campaigns to address these environmental issues in their community and getting the state and the city of Chicago to recognize that this was a huge problem. Doing research on Altgeld Gardens really expanded my perspective on the environmental movement as a whole. While I was focused on the present-day environmental movement, I didn’t know much about the history of the environmental movement or how people of color played a huge role in the environmentalism movement and were often overlooked in history. I am grateful I got to take a course on environmental ethics in college, because that’s how I ended up learning about environmental racism and injustice and wanting to write a paper on it.

Book Review: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

June 7, 2019

Categories: books

This morning I just finished this incredible memoir called The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. I saw the trailer for the Netflix adaptation and wanted to see the movie, but I’m one of those people who has to read the book first then see the movie (Precious and For Colored Girls are the few exceptions where I saw the film adaptation, then read the book afterwards.) So I went to the library and lo and behold there’s a display for World Water Day smack dab in the middle of the library’s back section. Not only did I find the documentary Tapped, about the bottled water crisis, but I found The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. I was interested in learning what I as a consumer could do to help the environment, and even just educating myself on these environmental issues such as clean energy and water consumption was a starting point.

It took me a while to complete this book not because of its length (it’s around 200 pages) but because I normally read fiction, so I was reading all these novels and kept renewing The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind because I was determined to finish every book that I checked out from the library, whether it was fiction or nonfiction. I devoured The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. It is an incredible read. William Kamkwamba takes us to his life in Malawi, a country that struggled with making education, clean water and clean energy accessible to its residents and was struck with famine in 2002, causing millions of deaths. William’s family struggled to pay for his school fees and because of this, he could not attend school, so he went to the library every day and read books. William came across some books on wind energy, and sought about making his own wind turbine to bring electricity and water to his village. People in his village laughed at him, and he often faced bullying from his classmates for going out every day and finding discarded materials to use for his wind turbine, but he persisted because it was the only thing that gave him hope. William takes us through the process of how he built his turbine out of recycled materials, and it is fascinating how he did it. What inspired me is that even though the parts of the turbine kept falling off (and even ripped off parts of his skin when he tried to reattach them to their proper places) he never gave up on himself. His first turbine powered people’s cell phones and radios, and brought clean energy to his village, and he was able to speak at a TED conference on clean energy and his journey to bring wind power to Malawi. Not only that, but he was able to go back to school later on in his life after many years of not being able to go to school.

This book inspired me, too, because it taught me that even things we throw away or think have no value can be used for many different things. Gay Hawkins, in her book The Ethics of Waste, says that value doesn’t exist in and of itself, but only when human beings give a thing a sense of worth and put it to use. William could have treated the old bicycle parts and PVC pipes like trash to never be touched or used, but he couldn’t afford new shiny parts, so he worked with what he had. Even though the parts had slime and weren’t the newest coolest parts, he took lemons and made serious lemonade by using what he knew from reading books on renewable energy to create something useful from scratch. I read a New York Times Magazine issue on climate change and how we will need to adapt to rising temperatures, worsening natural disasters, and other consequences of burning up the planet. It talked about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green Deal plan, and how people were divided about it. However, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind reminded me that renewable energy is our last hope if we seriously want to, if not completely wipe out, at least mitigate the effects of climate change on our planet and our own individual lives.

Through sharing his experience, William also reminded me of the importance of education in one’s life. Even when he wasn’t in school, he read a lot of books, and this helped him unlock his potential more than anything else. Speaking for myself, I love reading to this day, and at a point in my life where I cannot afford graduate school, I am catching up on all the pleasure reading I didn’t make time for during my years in college (except for winter and summer breaks, where I inhaled books as if they were air.) Growing up, I always carried a book around with me, even at the times when it wasn’t always called for, such as parties. When I read, I uncover new worlds that I didn’t think existed. It’s important to read and watch the news to stay aware of things, but it can be draining sometimes, so I sometimes have to switch off and read a nice book instead (I know if someone has to read the news for their job, that would be hard, but it might be doable, I dunno.) Reading is not only one of my few forms of self-care I can’t get enough of, it’s also my education (besides, well, life, of course.) I feel a lot less lonely, too. Friends in real life are a must, but friends come and go, so when that happens I try to stave off feelings of loneliness by reading. Reading reminds me that I’m not the only one with problems and that everyone in life struggles with something.

Overall, I highly recommend you read this book! It is incredible and I cannot wait to see the film adaptation! 🙂

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope. William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer. 273 pp. 2009.

Book Review: Freedom

June 25, 2019

Categories: books

Last night I finished the book Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. Even though the novel is almost ten years old (it was published in 2010), it is relevant now more than ever and I highly recommend you read it. I’m glad I found it at the library because I found it at Half Price Books and was about to buy it, but some inkling of intuition told me that I could easily score a free copy of it at the library, so I waited patiently and went to the library to find it. At first I couldn’t find it and was a little sad, but then a librarian helped me out and I found it on a display shelf for books of the month (or some kind of other theme, I forgot.) Bingo! I though, and I immediately started reading it.

What I love about this book is how very similar it is to the writing styles of Michael Chabon and Jonathan Safran Foer, two of my favorite authors. Normally I prefer first-person narratives to third-person narratives. I don’t know why, that’s just what I’ve always preferred. But so far, I’ve read Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon, Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer, and this novel, and I’m starting to realize that maybe I’m not as biased toward first-person narratives as I thought I was. Franzen, like Chabon and Foer, uses the third person to allow the reader insight into the characters that we might not have gotten if were read it in the first-person. I’m not saying first-person isn’t insightful, but we only get to read about the situation from the main character’s point of view (or whoever’s point of view it is, if it’s a novel with more than one character, such as The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon.) In Freedom, Patty and Walter Berglund are an American couple living in Minnesota. They seem to have the perfect life on the outside: they have two children, they live in a neighborhood that is becoming more and more gentrified, Walter has a great job and Patty seems to be the talk of the town, albeit not always in a good way. But as the book goes on, we find out that Walter and Patty aren’t the perfect couple, and are in fact quite imperfect in so many ways.

The book is genius not just because of its eloquent writing, but also because there’s an autobiographer who writes Patty’s biography so we gain extensive backstory into how she became who she is. Patty’s mom, Joyce, grew up poor, but her father, Ray, grew up rich, and so Patty and her sisters Veronica and Abigail grew up living this privileged life. However, Patty gets raped and her parents don’t handle it very well, and so this sours the relationship between her and her parents. Patty befriends this girl named Eliza, who seems shy but turns out to be quite controlling of Patty, criticizing her and even refusing to let Patty see her singing and playing her guitar. Eliza is friends with a guy named Richard Katz, who goes to Macalester College with Walter. Patty and Walter meet at one of Richard’s gigs, and when Eliza ditches her, Walter keeps her company and soon they become a couple.

Flash forward more than a few years, and Patty and Walter are doing better than they ever did. Patty gets to stay at home with the kids Jessica and Joey, and Walter goes to his cushy job at 3M. But Richard Katz comes back home having still not succeeded much in his career, still sleeping with women and mooching off of Patty and Walter’s good will. Then Walter gets a job at a coal company, and the guy who runs it wants to clear off land for a private sanctuary for cerulean mountain warblers because they are the guy’s favorite bird. Even though Walter grew up as an environmentalist, the fact that he would allow for mountain top removal in West Virginia just so the cerulean mountain warbler can have its own space, especially since they guy said they were dwindling in number, is beyond ironic. It gets even more twisted when Walter has an affair with his assistant for the Cerulean Mountain Trust, Lalitha, a young woman in her late 20s who is working with Walter to raise awareness of overpopulation and how it is killing the planet. What’s more twisted for the family is that their son, Joey, becomes a Republican and starts living with his girlfriend Connie because he can’t stand living with Patty anymore (it’s shocking for them because they are liberal.)

If this novel taught me anything, it’s this: we can talk all we want to about freedom of speech, freedom from financial stress, and our free country (and, most recently, freedom gas.) But no one is free of suffering. In Nichiren Buddhism, the only thing that truly sets us free is realizing that suffering is a part of life and that even if we’re suffering, we can turn that suffering into something positive. There are two kinds of happiness: relative and absolute. Relative is short-lived happiness: you get the dream job, the perfect spouse, the GPA that lands you into a top-tier grad school. But those things only make you happy for a short time because they require a lot of hard work and you may not even like every part of the dream job, or you might end up burning out during grad school, or after a few years of your relationship, you might end up sick of your partner. You’ll find things to escape from your pain and misery, but those end up being temporary solutions to a larger problem. Then there’s absolute happiness, where even if you’re stuck in a job you don’t like, you got a divorce or any other kind of thing that makes you suffer, you can turn those sufferings into impetus to to keep going no matter what. It seems that even though Walter and Patty have the perfect life, they don’t, because all this other stuff comes up in their lives and they aren’t prepared to deal with it. Walter is unhappy in his marriage, and even though he seeks escape from his problems through his involvement with environmental work, he still can’t shake the fact that he’s sick of being married to Patty and is lovesick for Lalitha. Lalitha also suffers because Walter is still married to Patty but still, in the end, loves Patty deep down, and Walter’s personal life is starting to affect his work rapport with Lalitha. Lalitha is pretty much the only person of color in the book, and even though the book doesn’t directly say it, it’s almost like she’s a prop for Walter. Walter doesn’t treat women very well, and neither does his friend Richard, but Lalitha is both a woman and a person of color. In one scene, a white man confronts Walter at a store and makes a derogatory comment about Lalitha’s race towards him, showing how even though Walter and Lalitha love each other, they still have to deal with bigots, people who live in the prison of racial bias and prejudice. The racist who confronts Walter about his relationship with Lalitha can’t free himself of his own ignorance, and deep down, even though the book doesn’t talk about it, this ignorance causes him, too, to suffer. Every character in the book goes through some sort of pain, which serves as a reminder of why literature is so important. Literature lets us know that we aren’t alone in our suffering, and that other people have problems, sometimes greater than our own.

There’s an archetype I studied in my English class: man vs. nature, and this book works a lot with this archetype. Walter seems to live a very Walden-esque life. For those who haven’t yet read Walden, it’s by the philosopher Henry David Thoreau and in the book he talks about how he dropped everything, went into the woods, built himself a shack and journaled about nature and politics. Even though Walter seeks an escape through nature, he can’t escape his own ego. He sees nature as a way to get away from the people he held most dear in life, and this causes him to just suffer more. Walter leaves his cushy job at 3M so he can do conservation work, but it’s not a totally selfless pursuit because he’s really doing it to escape his relatives and his family, who never seemed to understand him or take him seriously. However, he is still not free because he must deal with the environmental consequences of his project. The Cerulean Mountain Trust isn’t in the end sustainable at all even though it proposes a conservation sanctuary for a species of birds and thus helping it from going extinct, it still degrades the environment because it proposes clearing land for this sanctuary, thus putting people’s livelihood at risk and endangering other species. Freedom isn’t really freedom if it causes another being suffering, and the novel says that clearly through the actions and thoughts of its characters. Even though Walter and Patty are liberals, and seem to be free of biases and open minded, they are not free because they still have biases and are tethered to their pasts, and this affects their view of the world and their political views.

Overall, I really liked this book.

Freedom. Jonathan Franzen. 562 pp. 2010.