Thinking About Sustainability: Issues and Themes for College Students

Abstract

This contribution discusses many of the themes that the author has used in various Environmental Studies courses at the University of Oregon. While this collection of themes could be viewed as eclectic, they are well rooted in what is happening in the real world. In cases of data, as this article was written December 2016, we have tried to find and use the most current data to describe some situation. This is quite important because in the arenas of energy generation, resource consumption and climate change, the real world strongly evolves and can change dramatically from what the situation looked like just a few years ago.

Appendices

Appendix 1: The University of Oregon Zero Waste Program

The concept behind zero waste is a good example of taking a whole system approach to consumption and in that process minimizing the amount or waste that is produced. Zero waste includes far more than just recycling. At its core, the zero waste movement emphasis reduced consumption through consumer choice of products that can be re-used. In turn, this movement can put pressure on the commercial sector to supply more re-usable goods to the consumer. Indeed, the power of the consumer could be large in this regard if conscientious consumers begin to refuse to buy products that cannot be reused.

A very good example of the kind of quantitative sustainability which can be achieved on a local scale through the zero waste concepts is the very successful Zero Waste program at the University of Oregon, which has now received national prominence. The mechanism of a solid waste audit becomes the principle manner which programs like this can actually, quantitatively, prove sustainability on the scale of their campus waste. Further mechanisms of waste to composting instead of landfills go a long way in helping to ensure zero waste.

The University of Oregon program is extensively detailed in this resource http://zerowaste.uoregon.edu/Book/ and also offers a toolkit for other campuses to use if they want to design and implement their own program (http://zerowaste.uoregon.edu/PDFdocuments/ZeroWasteToolkit.pdf). The specific case of a solid waste audit is discussed here: http://zerowaste.uoregon.edu/Book/#Chapter7—and this is an excellent source for student reading and experimental pilot projects. In order to effectively manage consumer waste, you must know what comprises it, in quantitative detail.

Since the implementation of this program depends almost exclusively on student labor (sometimes volunteer) the program becomes a visible manifestation of what sustainability can look like. Programs like this are real, they are quantitative, and they make an impact in the real world. All campuses are strongly encouraged to consider following the lead that University of Oregon has established.

Appendix 2: Some Student Exercises

Below we give some example student assignments based on some of the material presented in this chapter.

It is possible that the require links to databases in some of these assignments will not appear in the paper text—therefore, please go to http://homework.uoregon.edu/pub/class/springer.html  to fully access these assignment suggestions.

Q1: Of the 7 stated reasons for resistance to change, write an editorial style 600-word piece on which 2 of these 7 reasons are the biggest obstacles to overcome and identify what strategy you would employ to overcome them.

Q2: Research the University of Oregon Zero Waste program and write a 600-word letter to the editor of your student newspaper advocating the benefits to your campus if it were to adopt this kind of program.

Q3: This data exercise makes use of This Database. (Links to an external site.)

An editorial in your student newspaper claims that US foreign policy has been oriented towards protecting US interests in the Middle East for the last 30 years because “almost all of our imported oil comes from the Middle East—everyone knows this”.

Using the database above:

• (a) Average the decade of the 80s, 90s, 00s and 2011–2015 of Annual import (units of thousand barrels a day) for two groups of countries:

Group A: Canada, Mexico and Venezuela

Group B: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait

• (b) Using this This tool—plot the data you just got and make a screen shot of that and insert it into your answer document.

• (c) How does the Group B to Group A ratio change as a function of decade? What is that ratio currently? (Links to an external site.)

• (d) Write a 150 word rebuttal letter to the Editor of your student newspaper

Q4: William Cronon’s, The Trouble With Wilderness (Links to an external site.), (1996) is one of the most insightful works of environmental philosophy ever produced.

One of the fundamental tenets of environmentalism is the holiness of wilderness. It is considered a pure, pristine environment, “an island in the polluted sea of urban-industrial modernity,” a landscape untouched by humanity. This concept is very much a human construct, however, and it is merely the latest version of an evolving human relationship to the wild.

The above is an excerpt from a review of Cronon’s essay (linked above).

For this assignment, you are to read this essay and write a 600–800-word synopsis that included the following:

• (a) Explain why this essay is insightful and how it serves to illuminate a kind of environmental hypocrisy

• (b) In what ways does Cronon assert that the environmental movement is broken?

• (c) How does Cronon’s view of wilderness help society realize sustainability?

Q5: Tesla’s Powerwall Solution (Links to an external site.)—let’s do the energy math.

Here are the raw data/technical specifications for this new product needed to solve all parts of this question. The process is far more important than any numerical answers.

• Powerwall modular Storage = 10 KWHs.

• Continuous discharge power = 2KW.

• Battery Technology = Li-Ion @ 100 W hours per kg.

• Purchase + installation cost = $4000.

• Residential electricity rate = 0.1$ (10 cents) per KWH.

• Typical residential rooftop PV array rated at 4 KW maximum output (=noon on a sunny day).

• Average output in a day = 1/3 of peak.

• Rooftop cost + installation = $1.80 per peak watt.

• Average number of suitably sunny days per year = 160.

Show all work involved in making the following estimates:

• (a) What is the weight of the 10 KWH modular storage unit and how many hours does it take to discharge?

• (b) What are the upfront costs to the homeowner for the purchase and installation of the storage unit and the PV rooftop?

• (c) Averaged over the year, what is the average daily available solar energy that can be used to charge up the Powerwall system?

• (d) How many hours, given this average daily available solar power, would it take to fully charge the 10 KWH system?

• (e) Given your answer for d—explain what the homeowner would need to do to overcome this basic problem and estimate how much more this might cost.

• (f) Given (d) and (e) and the residential electricity rate described above, what is the approximate payback time for just one of these storage modules?

• (g) The Global Lithium Market (Links to an external site.) (Links to an external site.)—Refer to the table in that document that shows 36,000 metric tons of Lithium were available for products in the year 2014. Assume that 1/3 of world lithium production can be used to build Powerwall storage units for American houses. In the year 2017, world availability is projected to increase by 20% from the year 2014. Using this information, how many houses in America could have a Powerwall installed in the year 2017? What fraction of houses in America does this represent?

• (h) Given what you know about scalability, write a 200-word statement on whether or not the Powerwall is a scalable alternative energy solution for American houses.

Q6: Research and read about the Tesla GigaFactory and its planned production of 500,000 vehicles annually. Your team is hired as the consulting team for the GigaFactory. There are numerous studies on the lithium supply chain/problem, etc. that you can easily find via a Google Search. You are to access a variety of reports and synthesize a 500-word consulting report to Tesla on the probability that they can actually meet this production goal with existing resources. If they cannot meet this goal, what needs to be then done to find new resources.

Q7: In this simulation, we explore the relationship between percentage of an ecosystem that is made toxic by some industrial process and the ability for a migrating species in that ecosystem to survive. The image is a snapshot of the simulation which shows an ecosystem in which 10% of it is made toxic—this is represented by the oil derrick symbols and the other 10%, the spider symbols, represent a migratory species that uses the resources available on any of the green squares. The simulation was actually built to described the situation in Eastern Ecuador due to the highly exploitative oil exploration that occurred there in the 1980s and 1990s.

The goal here is to understand critical phenomena as there is a threshold of toxic ecosystem filling factor as a function of species migratory habits and timescales. In the control panel the user sets the initial population size, the total habit area and the breeding delay. The breeding delay is the number of pixels (green squares) of movement required for offspring. If one of the spiders moves randomly into one of the oil derrick squares, then it dies.

The links to the relevant simulations are here:

• http://homework.uoregon.edu/run/spiders/tests/test3.html (3% filling factor)

• http://homework.uoregon.edu/run/spiders/tests/test5.html (5% filling factor)

• http://homework.uoregon.edu/run/spiders/tests/test10.html (10% filling factor)

• http://homework.uoregon.edu/run/spiders/tests/test16.html (16% filling factor)

The goal of the student exercise is to determine the parameters for a population to be stable after 20 generations or so (there is a generation counter) and to explore the stability requirements in terms of initial population and breeding delay for each of the filling factor scenarios. After running a few of these the student should understand that once the filling factor gets too high, there is no way to produce a stable population.

Q8: Below are 5 quotes related to Consumerism on the part of some 20th century thinkers. I include them initially as anonymous so that you want be pre-biased. These quotes somewhat reinforce my closing remarks regarding our facile sacrificing of the sacred for the sake of the expedient and convenient (e.g. the 1950s throwaway society—see Dunning 1992).

In an essay of 1200 words (reserve 500 words for part C):

• (a) Of the five quotes, select the one that best describes out situation and defend that selection.

• (b) Integrating all of the quotes together, what is the combined message to us consumers?

• (c) Your generation is really the last one that can make a difference. You are giving the graduation speech at your ceremony. In 500 words, what do you say to your peers that will change their value system with respect to consumerism?

The quotes:

• 1. Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse. And while you people are over-consuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.

• 2. But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity, the security sought is still the security of numbers, and the chief motive is still the consumer’s anxiety that he is missing out on what is “in”. In this state of total consumerism—which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves—all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.

• 3. This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products.

• 4. We seldom consider how much of our lives we must render in return for some object we barely want, seldom need, buy only because it was put before us…And this is understandable given the workings of our system where without a job we perish, where if we don’t want a job and are happy to get by we are labeled irresponsible, non-contributing leeches on society. But if we hire a fleet of bulldozers, tear up half the countryside and build some monstrous factory, casino or mall, we are called entrepreneurs, job-creators, stalwarts of the community. Maybe we should all be shut away on some planet for the insane. Then again, maybe that is where we are.

• 5. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis.