What's on Tap for Week 2

Material World

Although it was pretty dull and square, the advice Dustin Hoffmann got in the Graduate was probably not too far off the mark.  Plastics are a ubiquitous part of our lives, both in good ways, and in bad.  Even places as down to earth and natural as organic farms can use a surprising amount of plastic.  This informative film talks about the use of plastics in farming and about what becomes of that plastic.  It was  produced by a student team here at OSU that participated in the EPA People, Prosperity, and the Planet (P3) student design competition for sustainability.  They were selected last April at the national competition for Phase II funding for a project designing a biodegradable natural fiber based mulch that will serve as an alternative to plastic (polyethylene) mulch film.

Raucous Spring

Rachel Carson is one of the people that you can choose to profile for this week's homework assignment.  Timely enough, there was a very nice profile of her in last Weekend's New York Times Magazine.  In an age when problems like global warming or the challenge of feeding an ever growing and seemingly insatiable human population can seem hopelessly insurmountable, I think Rachel Carson's legacy is a powerful beacon of hope.  A number of environmental....or really human....success stories such as the return of Bald Eagles and other birds of prey from the brink of extinction are a direct result of the awareness that Carson raised.  It is a reminder that we can wisely manage our interaction with the planet if we put our mind to it.

What's on tap for Week One

The Other Inconvenient Truth

Check out this interesting talk by Jonathan Foley on what he calls "The other inconvenient truth"

Oysters on the Thin Shell

Climate change is not the only worrisome potential consequence of releasing large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.  As the atmospheric concentration of CO2 increases, the amount that dissolves into the world's oceans also increases making ocean water more acidic.  It is an introductory chemistry lesson on a giant scale.  You can read a nice synopsis of the process here.  This acidification can have a range of disquieting, but not very well understood impacts.  This story in today's Oregonian describes one of them: declines in shellfish populations.

The Corner Greenhouse

As we will talk about in the later weeks of the course, there has been a recent resurgent interest in urban agriculture in the U.S.....everything from household scale gardens and poultry raising to commercial scale production of a sometimes surprising scale.  Check out this interesting story from the NYT