sustainability – art, design and social practice

Project1 is a link to the accompanying PDF presentation:

Project Carbon Removal From My Life

Carbon is not just affecting the environment, it is affecting our health.

C02 affects breathing rate and can overexcite and depress the central nervous system.

The Canadian Center for Occupational Health & Safety conducted tests on humans (1997), exposing them to various levels of C02. 1% Exposure = 10,000 C02 ppm parts per million.

Workers who were exposed to low concentrations (3.3% or 5.4%) felt their breathing rate increased.

7.5% experienced dyspnea (feeling unable to breathe) as well as headache, high pulse rate, dizziness, sweating, restlessness, decreased mental performance and visual distortion.

As you can see this is a big concern for me. (show picture)

So what can I do to limit the amount of C02 in my life?

1) go to parks more often.

2) get a bike & use it

3) use less energy ie heat elctricity

4) use public transportation/carpool

5) punch CO2 in the face

6) make a list of things I do, that perpetuate the use of carbon.

The list:

fly home by plane

drive a car

take the train

ride the bus / lightrail

play electric guitar

use an electric dryer

use indoor lighting & lamps

play hockey

use a computer at work

use a laptop

leave my appliances & chargers plugged in

eat a diet that is not local or conscious of distance

consume a lot of animal products daily

print frequently and use a lot of paper

Differences:

The two main ways I changed the way I used CO2 were:

1 The Students for a Sustainable Campus are starting a bike share. Mimi Cheng an active member of the club gave me a bike in the meantime.

(show bike pictures). I was the first beneficiary. Now I can bike to lexington/farmers market on a daily basis and regulate what I eat (like in Europe)

2 Eat less meat. It quickly occurred to me that I eat meat daily and having been exposed to a barrage of ethical concerns about the meat industry, I was swayed by the environmental impacts of meat transportation. If I take responsibility for the distance my meat has travelled to my plate, then I can conclude those CO2 emissions are my fault. After all if there was no demand, there would be no supply. Vegans will attest that there is no need to eat meat at all because all of the nutrients we get from our food is attainable from other non animal sources (however they frequently take supplements or hurt in the calcium, iodine, vitamin B12 and vitamin D department). Food activist Michael Pollan explains that the remedy to America’s eating disorder is to “eat food. not too much. mostly plants.” To make this statement more C02 friendly I will add “mostly local plants.”

As we’ve learned from documentaries like “Fresh” & “King Corn:”

Michael Pollan, New York Times Magazine (Food and Farming Spokesperson—Sustainability Advocacy)

“Subsidized monocultures of grain also led directly to monocultures of animals: since factory farms could buy grain for less than it cost farmers to grow it, they could now fatten animals more cheaply than farmers. So America’s meat and dairy animals migrated from farm to feedlot, driving down the price of animal protein to the point where an American can enjoy eating, on average, 190 pounds of meat a year—a half pound every day.”

(same slide)

Transporting the food as frequently as we do (show whole foods pamphlet) impacts the environment:

(next)

Even properly inflating tires can save 1% or 1.25 billion gallons of US gasoline per year, which is about the same amount of crude oil that is needed from offshore oil drilling. (Vital Systems)

A kilogram of beef is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution than driving for 3 hours while leaving all the lights on back home. Akifumi Ogino of the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Tsukuba, Japan, found this while evaluating the effects of beef production on global warming, water acidification & eutrophication, and energy consumption.

Daniele Fanelli, New Scientist Magazine (Media—Research)

To be more specific a 2009 New Science Magazine study determined that for every pound of beef produced in Japan, generated approximately 36 pounds of C02.

Comparatively driving a 2006 passenger car 40 miles would emit the same amount of C02 as that one pound of beef.

This was determined with a car that gets 22.4 miles to the gallon. Burning a gallon of gas emits 20.4 pounds of C02. Dividing these two numbers together yields the average C02 emission in pounds per mile (0.91) for that car.

By dividing that C02 equivalent into the amount of C02 that was generated from the one pound of beef, you learn it would take 40 miles of driving to emit the same amount of C02.

(show the math in the slides)

I asked myself: “WTF” or what’s the footprint of the food I’m eating?

Timeline

For the last six weeks I have made efforts to eliminate meat from my diet. I could have bought local but the goal was to radically change my behavior.

In the beginning of the year I ate at the meyerhoff mainly because I don’t own and car and am often unable to coordinate shopping outing with friends when I need them.

I carefully documented my meat consumption for the last 6 weeks and attempted to understand WTF I’m making. If we assume that I ate anywhere from half a pound (the size of a large burger or medium steak) to a whole pound of meat per day, then quite simply I am taking responsibility for approximately 36 lbs. of C02 now in the atmosphere in production alone. If I add the C02 emissions from a meat distribution truck, I come up with even higher results.

The Union of Concerned Scientist claim that on average a truck will release 24 lbs. of C02 into the atmosphere. This amount multiplied by the amount of miles the meat has travelled from the farm to my plate plus the amount of C02 created in the production of meat gives me a rough estimation of my total meat C02 footprint. The reason I chose to do this, even though I knew the results would undercut the true number of total emissions is I wanted to know the extent of my impact and as I quickly learned how shocking a best case scenario could be.

I gave the product the benefit of the doubt and google mapped the distance I am from the farms the meat is coming from.

If you eat meat at MICA here is the breakdown:

Meyerhoff:

Chicken: Tyson

Beef & Roast-beef: Iowa Beef Processors

Pork: Hatfield

Sliced Turkey: Carolina Turkey

Gateway:

Chicken: Holley Farms

I also bought meat products from Whole foods:

Chicken: Miller Amish Country

Beef: Star Ranch

Pork: Montana

Will Harrison Georgia

Meyer Family Farms

Meat Timeline

September 16–22

W Chicken Creole

Th Turkey & Dill Havarti w/ apple wrap

F Chicken Chop Suey

S Organic free range chicken broth (Whole foods)

S Chicken breast (Whole foods)

M Fried Boneless Pork Chops (Lunch), Beef Fajita (Dinner)

T Chicken Scampi with Spinach & Cherry Tomatoes

September 23–29

W Organic free range chicken broth (Whole foods)

Th Roast Beef & Cheddar

F Thanksgiving Crepe from Sofi’s

S Bacon & Country Sausage

S

M Roasted Top Round Beef, Chicken Wings

T

September 30–October 6

W

Th Pepperoni Pizza

F Beef Stew, Classic Meatloaf

S

S

M

T

October 7–13

W

Th

F

S

S

M

T

October 14–20

W

Th

F

S

S Thanksgiving Crepe with Turkey

M

T

October 21–27

W

Th

F

S

S

M

T

Accomplishments

What I was able to do was eat like a pescetarian for almost 3 weeks. Simply cutting a half a pound of red meat from your diet per week for a year is the equivalent of not driving 1040 miles. So to not eat chicken, beef, pork, veil or lamb is not taking responsibility for that amount of C02. My footprint is shrinking considerably. Now I just need to bike instead of fly home Indiana and power my electronics with natural energy and I’ll be living like no impact man.