Got high off sewage fumes and wrote this reflection essay.
Still high off looking at the bigger picture.
Michael Garrido 10/13/09
BISC 102 TA: Feng Qi
Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant Field Trip
I learned that humans still have so much recycling technology to develop. Only 80 years, just two generations, ago we were dumping raw sewage into the ocean by Santa Monica. Learning this fact really made the thought hit home that human civilization has been wrecking ecosystems for hundreds of years. Of course we hear about deforestation and global warming, but when I saw all the “sludge” that Hyperion was catching from sewage water, I imagined how all of it was going straight into the ocean my grandpa probably swam in.
Only a small portion of that waste can be recycled. Methane gas is derived from fermenting biomass. But the energy from that gas is only enough to keep the plant running. Then some of that biomass becomes fertilizer for a small government farm. But that farm is losing money. The majority of the sludge goes into landfills. Advanced manufacturing creates materials from bowling balls to condoms that can’t be reclaimed by the earth nearly as fast as they are drawn from it. So on the global scale, we as a species are transforming the elemental cycle of the planet; by creating so many plastics, rubber, poly-whatevers, the planet (via microorganisms) doesn’t have a recycling technology on par with our consumption technology.
I saw so many condom and newspapers fall off the 8-foot wide metal rakes, and had an epiphany: nothing we throw away is actually thrown away. We “throw it away” mentally put it in the trash, flush it down the toilet, and it’s out of our mind, out of our lives. It becomes the trash collector’s problem, then the landfill’s problem, and ultimately the planet’s problem. And if it is the planet’s problem, then isn’t it our problem again since we live on it?
It’s too much to fathom, that every time I flush toilet paper down, I throw away a can of Budweiser and its accompanying red plastic cup, crumple my Big Mac wrapper, empty ketchup packet, paper, Cola-cola branded cup, its plastic lid and straw, into its oily paper bag, that most of that will end up in a landfill. Thinking that I’m effectively sweeping all the trash under the rug (the rug being the earth), that I’m helping to create these pimples of waste on the planet, is impractical. I’ve got papers to write, parties to go to, a job to win, money to make, happiness to enjoy.
The civilization-environment system that I’ve been raised in, enmeshed in, guiltily participate in, is deeply flawed. Our ecological footprints on the planet probably look like those of toddlers just learning how to walk. But in my lifetime, we as a species will probably only take one step in the journey of a thousand miles. Investing in environmental education, expanding social awareness is just realizing that we have feet at all. I only found my feet in college; I bet most of my classmates and peers did too. So what would the world look like if the average majority of American students found their feet in Highschool? Middle school? At home from their parents?
Of course we can’t all be environmental scientists or Whole Foods devotees. But to become better caretakers of the planet, we don’t have to be. The aggregate consciousness of environmental impact was enough to have the Hyperion plant installed in the first place. Leave it to those called to be engineers and chemists, to do literally do the dirty work. But it’s on us to just be aware.
Awareness passes to the media, which passes to academia, which passes to journals, to textbooks, to schools, to teachers, to classrooms, and hopefully to students.
Of course we have the internet, which can bypass one or more of these links, but such a small portion of the world population have access to the internet (and of all of us who do have it, how many of us consciously use it to proliferate knowledge?). Hopefully enough of those students who’ve received awareness will use their lives to make the technological, communication breakthroughs that shift the paradigm of civilization-environment relations. Hopefully, the aggregate proponents of, not just professionals in, environmental science will grow in time.
No comments:
Post a Comment