Once a week, I am offering up a tip or action or idea that we can all engage with to help reduce waste, use less materials and energy, help conserve species or habitats, and/or generally work towards living in ways that allow for more health and wellbeing for all aspects of the planet.
So, this week the green thought is about books. I LOVE books! I read a lot. My wife reads a lot. our daughter reads a lot. Our house has a lot of books. But printing new books means cutting down trees, using water, and burning fossil fuels to make paper and bind books. Overall, producing one new book can result in around 6 pounds of CO2 gas being released into the atmosphere which means that books have a rather high environmental cost.
Used books and library books (Photo by Aaron N.K. Haiman).
Two solutions are to buy used books and to utilize libraries. Buying a used book means less production of new paper. This means less tree cutting, lower water use, and less energy consumption. All good things. Buying used books is a much more environmentally sensitive choice when compared to buying a new book, but it still means purchasing a book that will go into your personal collection and does still contribute to climate change. Getting a book from a library reduces all the associated costs even more since one library book can be read by a very large number of people, and library collections can help reduce the need for large private collections. Plus, by visiting a library and checking out books, you are helping to show that libraries are valuable resources and should continue to receive public support and funding.
Thank you for visiting my blog! Please check back in next week for another Green Thought Thursday!
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Cover of The Intersectional Environmentalist by Leah Thomas.
I just finished a book called “The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet” by Leah Thomas. This book just came out in 2022, and it is a very interesting read. The book lays out many compelling connections between the environmental movement and social justice. It explains how BIPOC individuals and communities have, and still are, being burdened with the majority of environmental costs from pollution to climate change to food insecurities. It also does a very good job of explaining some of the history of the environmental movement and the feminist movement, and it shines a light on where and how both of these movements have a history of excluding and further marginalizing already marginalized groups.
The book also explains how inequalities play out in particular industries such as the green energy and the clothing/fashion industries. This subject is especially difficult because the overall ends may be important to pursue (transitioning to more sustainable sources of energy, for example), however we as a global society must be aware of both the ends and the means matter. If noble ends are accomplished using morally questionable means, the side effects of those means will tarnish the ends and their nobleness will be diminished. To learn more about this book and intersectional environmentalism, I highly recommend the book and the website that has tons of resources.
One specific resource that I was particularly interested to learn about was a mapping tool that has been developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) called EJScreen: the Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool. This is a site that has many different layers of data that you can add on or take off a map of any area in the USA. These layers include information about pollution (such as lead paint locations, ozone rates, air particulate concentrations, etc.), socioeconomic indicators (such as race, household income rates, age demographics, etc.), health disparities (such as life expectancies, heart disease, and asthma), climate change (such as wildfire risk, sea level rise impacts, flood risks, etc.), critical services gaps (such as broadband gaps, food deserts, and lack of medical coverage) and more.
This tool allows the EPA to better understand the issues facing the country and to better fulfill their mission to protect the people and natural resources of the USA. It also allows each of us to do some exploring ourselves.
By adding or taking off layers, we can look at what factors are impacting the communities we live in. Are there areas of my city that have unusually high levels of air pollution? I can click on that data layer and see how air pollution concentrations differ across the city. Are there areas of my city for which flooding is an unusually high risk? I can click on that data layer and find out. Are there areas of my city that contain a large number of BIPOC households? I can click on that data layer and find out.
And, of course, even greater power comes from this tool when several layers are overlapped on top of each other. That is when the intersectionality of these different factors comes to light. Are the areas of high air pollution similar to the areas where large numbers of BIPOC people live? Do the areas of high flood risk overlap extensively with the areas of low income households are?
When several of the data layers are combined, distinct differences in living conditions can be made visible. And once they are viable, we can all start to figure out how to address them.
If you read this book, let me know in the comments what you think. If you play around with the EPA mapping tool, let me know if you find any interesting/surprising/disturbing correlations.
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I just discovered a gem (well, actually my wife did).
Cover of the audiobook version of “The Sense of Wonder” by Rachel Carson. Image courtesy of Goodreads.com.
My family and I have an Audible account that we all use extensively. One of the fun things that Audible does is to offer a rotating spattering of books for free to account holders. The books offered this way are always a bit of a random assortment, and since they change frequently checking that list is always a bit of a gamble. My wife checked that list about a month ago and spotted a book she thought I would be interested in. The book was called “The Sense of Wonder” by Rachel Carson, and wow was my wife right about it!
Rachel Carson, in case you have somehow never heard of her, was a marine biologist, conservation ecologist, science communicator, and author (to name just a few). She is most famous for her book “Silent Spring” in which she discusses the negative impacts that insecticides have on the natural world and on human health. This book is widely viewed as having a dramatic impact on the efforts to ban many harmful pesticides and launching the environmental movement in the USA.
In “The Sense of Wonder” Carson talks about sharing a love of nature and the world with kids. How magnificent it can be to spend time with a child asking questions regardless of if you or anyone else knows the answers. How wonderous it can be to stand together on the edge of the ocean and have the waves “through great handfuls of froth” at you. How awe inspiring it can be to walk in the company of child through a deep forest after a storm and see every pine needle and ever spray of lichen trimmed with water droplets.
Carson also discusses how important it is to share these experiences and emotional responses to nature with children, and not teach them about nature. It is the sharing that is important. It is the sharing of one’s own passion that will spread that passion to others. The knowledge will come, almost on its own, if the love and passion are there, but the reverse is so common.
I am so delighted that this book exists. I want to share it with my daughter. I want to take it out into the woods and read it so that I can share Carson’s words and thoughts, myself. This book exemplifies the value of the written word in that the ideas that someone has can be shared with others long after that person is gone (Carson died in 1964 at the age of 57).
This is certainly a book that I heartily recommend and that I will be re-reading often. I will probably even go out and find a hardcopy version that I can physically carry with me to the seashore or forest or riverbank or desert.
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I just finished a book called “Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider: how scientific names celebrate adventurers, heroes, and even a few scoundrels” by Stephen B. Heard.
Book cover of “Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider.” Photo credit: Amazon
The book is a good one with a lot of perspectives on the scientific naming the species and the stories those species names carry with them. The particular focus of the book is on species that have been named for people and what the stories of those people are, and how they came to have species named after them. There are some interesting reasons to name a species after a person. One is because that person is who collected the specimen that was later recognized as a new species. Another is as a way of honoring someone for an accomplishment. This can be a scientific accomplishment, but as the title of the book indicates, this can be any type of accomplishment (such as being a rock icon like Bowie).
The book highlights and discusses some of the positive outcomes that can occur when a species is named after a person. For one, the person giving the name can explain why they are giving a particular species a particular name and this can help to tell a story about someone. These stories help to immortalize both the person doing the naming, and the person who’s name is used in the description of the new species (it is considered very bad form for a scientist to name a species after them self, so there are just about always at least two people involved in naming a species).
But these perspectives are not enough to change my mind on this subject (I have written about issues with the naming if species a few times such as here and here). I think that naming species after people is too problematic. It opens too many avenues for bias and prejudice (conscious or unconscious) to come into play.
And the book actually adds a new way for the naming of species after people to become a problem, and that involves money. In one chapter of the book, Heard discusses how the naming of a species has been used to raise funds for various causes. How this has worked in the past is that a new species is described, that new species needs a name, and the researchers who are describing it auction off the name in order to raise money for a cause or organization.
Now, on the surface of it, I have no problem with this. What a great thing to happen, right? A person or company pays a significant chunk of money in order that a researcher names a species however the person or company wants, and then that money goes to supporting conservation and research. Terrific.
But who is going to have the money to spare to buy these species names? Wealthy people and companies. Since the majority if wealthy people are white (at least in the USA) and the majority of wealthy companies are lead by white people (at least in the USA), this practice will tend to increase the representation disparities that already exist in species names.
Paying for the privilege of naming a species just results in more white people controlling what we call things, and in being recognized in the names themselves.
While the pool of people that species are being named after is slowly growing to be more diverse with women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ community starting to have their contributions to science recognized and having more species named after them, this is a very slow process indeed. And it is in the face of a centuries-long head start that white men have had. With this ongoing lack of representation in the names of species, having yet another way to shift the names of species toward white people does not seem like the right direction to me.
Surely we can find other ways to encourage people and companies to contribute to conservation and research. Surely we can name species without contributing to this example of institutional racism and lack of diversity.
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A new book is just hitting the shelves from UC Press. It is call “Birds of the Sierra Nevada: Their Natural History, Status and Distribution” by Ted Beedy, Ed Pandolfino with Illustrations by Keith Hansen. Here is a link to the official announcement: Beedy, Pandolfino, Hansen
This is a must have book not only for those interested in the Sierra Nevada, but also for anyone who is interested in the birds of California, or North America in general.
abirdingnaturalist 