Ferdinand Hayden

    In the middle 1800s, a durable young man named Ferdinand Hayden went on many scientific expeditions of the American west.  The range of these expeditions extended from the Dakota Plains to the northern Rockies of Wyoming and Montana.  In 1854, his expedition was the first in North America to discover dinosaur fossils, at a location near the Missouri River in Montana.  He didn't know these were dinosaur fossils at the time, because none had yet been discovered in the Americas.  These early expeditions required tremendous endurance, as his duty was to map unknown areas like the Badlands and Rocky Mountains, including any vertical strata from excavations.  Hayden's teams were the first to draw such detailed maps of the Northern Rockies. 

    After the Civil War, he was commissioned by Congress to find resources for our ever-expanding industrial sector, which lead to his prominent role in establishing the U.S. Geological Survey.  He is most famous for convincing Congress to pass a bill establishing the first national park in America (let alone the world): a little place called Yellowstone.  This happened in 1872, and it started a much needed global movement in wilderness conservation.  You can appreciate the irony in this development, since the basis for these expeditions was to exploit the environment for resources, not preserve it.  I like to imagine how the beautiful sites of the American west must have inspired him to rattle the American public into supporting their preservation rather than mining them. 

    During his time, dinosaurs were not known to have lived on the North American continent.  Hayden's expeditions helped establish their ubiquitousness, as well as many other species.  Additionally, without his surveys and maps, much of the area he explored wouldn't be known to geologists.  His revolutionary contribution to geology was the establishment of national parks, for without them, places like Yellowstone could have been mined by corporations or settlers, disrupting their unique geology.  It only surprised me that it took until the 1870s to get the ball rolling on wilderness conservation, mainly because the Industrial Revolution had started a full century previously.  The debate continues today on how much of our wilderness should be protected from resource exploitation and other human influences.  We owe it to Hayden for even starting the discussion. 

Sources: 

Encyclopedia.com.  May 23, 2018.  Ferdinand Vandinveer Hayden.  https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/historians-miscellaneous-biographies/ferdinand-vandeveer-hayden 

Levin, Harold.  2013.  The Earth Through Time, p. 25. 

Inverted Quarantine: A Treadmill of Destruction

 

        One of the most enlightening books on the environment I have read is Shopping Our Way to Safety, by Andrew Szasz.  It is about the ways in which people react to threats from the environment by stockpiling on products that supposedly combat them.  Often these threats are man-made, and many of the products advertised to protect people against them are not even necessary.  Szasz uses the term “inverted quarantine” to describe how, in modern times, our response to environmental harm is to protect ourselves instead of our environment.   Szasz shows how we are locked in a vicious cycle of production that shifts the focus away from environmental conservation and onto personal safety from the toxins it generates. 

        He does this in a variety of ways, using specific examples like drinking water.  It was not until the 1980s that a turning point happened, where bottled water was suddenly viewed as safer to drink than tap water.  This happened because consumers grew worried about all the reports of industrial chemicals infiltrating their water supply.  Instead of solving the problem with government regulation, the response from the public was to drink bottled water instead.  Yet despite popular belief, there is no evidence that drinking tap water is a danger to health.  Szasz (2007:174) states that “bottled water may taste better than tap water, but in terms of chemical or biological content it is not obviously superior to tap water, and sometimes it is demonstrably worse”.  Other examples he uses to illustrate the futility of inverted quarantine are water filters, air filters, and eating organic foods.  Instead of working to end the pollution that led to inverted quarantine, people are generally more content to buy these products because they believe they will be protected by them.  “Environmental inverted quarantine products are often ineffective, but because people believe – falsely – that they are protected, they are less likely to feel an urge to voice support for the kind of regulatory controls that would be needed to really address the hazard” (Szasz, 2007:226). 

        I think Szasz accomplishes the purpose of his research with demonstrations of inverted quarantine that never came to fruition, but were solved by the proactive intervention of world governments.  Two examples he uses are the possibility of nuclear war and the destruction of the ozone layer.  In the 1950s, many people stockpiled products in case of nuclear war, which had the effect of making it more of a reality; that by buying products to protect against fallout, people were unconsciously encouraging it.  Once the governments of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. intervened and the movement stopped, the threat became less real.  Similarly, the Montreal Protocol was a global agreement that put a stop to chlorofluorocarbons destroying the ozone layer.  Since then, there has been growing evidence that the ozone layer is returning to normal, especially after this book’s publication in 2007. 

        Of all the concepts in Twenty Lessons in Environmental Sociology, risk society is the one this book emphasizes the most.  In 1995, Ulrich Beck created this concept to describe the changing U.S. social dynamic that took place after the 1950s.  This is when there was a shift away from industrial society’s focus on the distribution of wealth to risk society’s focus on the protection of personal health.  In industrial society, class inequality was the pivotal motivator for social activism, which had collectivist results; in risk society, environmental threats create consumer patterns that only protect individuals.  “This fear emerges because risk is much more equally distributed across the population in a risk society than goods distribution was in an industrial society” (Gould and Lewis, 2021:46).  This means that threats are distributed evenly across a population in a non-discriminatory manner, yet they result in individualist behavior because no specific groups are threatened. 

In a risk society, the avoidance of toxins creates additional environmental issues to the ones being avoided.  This is because the convenience of buying products allows people to forget about possible alternatives.  Over time, any alternatives to the status quo are considered impractical, because a reliance on inverted quarantine has already been cemented on the public.  Corporations continue to exploit the environment because there is no pressure from social or political groups to stop them.  Not only that, but a risk society allows the treadmill of production (T.O.P.) to continue at ever-increasing rates.  The T.O.P. is a function of capitalism; it means that ever-increasing production and consumption leads to ever-increasing environmental degradation, in cycles of increasing intensity.  If people keep buying products to protect themselves, it contributes to the accumulated extraction and waste of resources, which further pollutes the environment, creating a loop of destruction that gets stronger as time goes on. 

In Twenty Lessons, Gould and Lewis (2021:40) state that “capitalism’s inherent need to expand and increase its rate of profit means that capitalism will expand and intensify its ecological degradation.”  Here they are describing Ecological Marxism, which is another way of looking at the T.O.P.  The difference is that Ecological Marxism describes how alienated we feel from the environment because of consumption; that as we buy more products to fight its threats (let alone products that do not), we distance ourselves from any responsibility of protecting it.  

Another concept from Twenty Lessons the book touched on is ecological modernism.  Gould and Lewis (2021:31) state that “ecological modernization theory proposes that the economic growth needs of capitalism can be reconciled with ecological principles in a win-win situation…”.  Technology is widely espoused by these advocates as the holy grail of reconciliation.  The problem with this is that a reliance on technology would just create more inverted quarantine as potentially toxic products are created to combat old ones.  “Clean consumption is compatible with, even requires, dirty production.  It is an amazing contradiction” (Szasz. 2007:197).  An example that Szasz uses to illustrate this point is how the chlorination of water had the “unforeseen consequence that when we shower, we inhale trihalomethanes” (Szasz, 2007:161).  Trihalomethanes are toxins that can be inhaled when taking a hot shower; they are only a threat because of the technology used to chlorinate water.  This is just one example of inverted quarantine gone wrong. 

I believe the problems above point to a cultural veil the U.S. has involving science denial.  The lack of attention on sustainability can be attributed to social constructionism, where people develop knowledge of the world in a social context, based on shared assumptions that are not always factual.  Some of these assumptions “deny that there is an environment independent of human perception… or at least that we can have reliable knowledge of the natural world” (Gould and Lewis, 2021:115).  Thus, a large amount of people in the U.S. serve the political interests of corporations, who lobby for this veil to stay covered over their eyes.  Climate change, genetically modified organisms, the harm done by tobacco: these issues all have powerful companies campaigning against their regulation, and most of them are successful.  Likewise, the affect our waste has on the environment is largely ignored by corporations and the media, who work together to increase each other’s profits via advertising.  That is why we hardly ever see evidence of the impact pollution is having on the environment in the news.  Conveniently, we only see it in reports that scare people enough to buy products in the inverted quarantine sector. 

It is important to read this book because the deregulation of environmental monitoring may continue at its current rate.  The Trump administration probably did more than any other to shift focus away from the environment.  Conditions now are far worse than they were when this book was published 15 years ago, except for the destruction of the ozone layer, which only improved due to an international coalition that banned the use of CFCs.  The U.S. would be wise to take a page from the international community’s ongoing efforts to combat ozone depletion and climate change. 

Despite some of its dated information, I would still recommend this is as essential reading.  It helped me as a student understand key concepts in our sustainability class, like risk society and the T.O.P.  The concept of inverted quarantine was also useful, as it appears to be a symptom of capitalism that is harder to see than others.  This book opened my eyes to the fact that as our industrial society transitioned to a risk society, we shifted our focus away from protecting the environment onto protecting ourselves.   

A new shift is needed, one that does not rely on technology to save us.  The only way to fight the T.O.P. is through government facilitation of the expanded accumulation of wealth.  Ecotaxes and incentives can be used to strengthen investments in clean energy and research alternatives to ecological modernization.  Social movements and radical journalism need to reach more people, because I believe that if more people knew what was going on, they would stop to think twice about buying the latest iPhone from Apple.  Inverted quarantine would transform into proactive social change, as it did in the past, lest the treadmill of production turn into one of destruction. 

 

References 

Szasz, Andrew.  2007.  Shopping Our Way to Safety.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Gould, Kenneth A., and Tammy L. Lewis.  2021.  Twenty Lessons in Environmental Sociology.  New York: Oxford University Press. 

Health Research in the Media

 

            Sometimes a media organization will take a scholarly article and report something from it they think will get more attention than the rest of its contents.  Other times, their reporting is more consistent with the scholarly findings.  In this assignment, I have picked a random article from Psychology Today and compared it to the original article it references.  The idea is to see if any distortion or sensationalism was used by the media company to popularize its contents.

            The media article I chose, titled “4 Traits of Psychologically ‘Healthy’ People”, seeks to popularize what the most likely traits are in people who are the most psychologically healthy.  In this article, the writer Mark Travers relays information from a team of researchers: “They found that high levels of openness to feelings, positive emotions, and straightforwardness, combined with low levels of neuroticism, were most indicative of a healthy personality” (Travers, 2020).  The article then provides a full list of traits that are ranked according to their likelihood of describing a healthy person.  A few other traits high on the list are competence, altruism, and activity.  At the bottom of the list are traits that are not as likely to describe a healthy person: hostility, depressiveness, vulnerability, anxiousness.

            The article Travers references, “The Healthy Personality from a Basic Trait Perspective”, also sought to discover these traits.  It used the Revised N.E.O. Personality Inventory system of traits, which has 30 facets among five domains (a.k.a. the Five-Factor Model).  Several samples were taken from different groups, including personality trait experts and undergraduate students, who were asked to rank these traits on a scale of 1-5.  The result was the list that ranked these traits from high to low, based on the mean values of each sample.

            The results of this study can be attributed to a combination of factors, including biological, psychological, and environmental.  While the traits may all be described as psychological, the factors that characterize them can come from either source.  A person may be biologically gifted with these traits; others might have been raised in an environment that shaped them; still others might have acquired them psychologically- through the process of learning or adopting belief-despite not being blessed with good genes or being raised in a proper environment.

            The data presented in the scholarly article is correlational rather than experimental.  This is because the researchers did not introduce a change to a group to monitor its effects.  They simply used the data from surveys to calculate the most likely traits of a healthy person.  Correlational data can only justify claims made in relation to two variables, while scientific data can justify more assertive, concrete ones.  There is greater evidence for causation when using scientific data, so these articles are not as groundbreaking as others.

            Both these articles provide data that have social and applied implications.  People who read about this data might be inspired to live better, so that they can exhibit the traits of a healthier person.  The data can be useful to society if enough people are informed about these findings.  However, the fact that this is a correlational study probably means it will not reach as many people as an experimental study would: or that readers will not take it as seriously, especially in the scientific community.

            Both articles are similar in that they document the results of the same study.  But the media article only seems to restate the first half of the abstract, copying it verbatim at times.  They differ in that the media article published only one of the results from the study, while the scholarly one had an additional series of studies that were never even mentioned by the media one.  This second series of studies was a follow-up to the first, which asked the same question to find other traits that are not part of the Five Factor Model.  They created a healthy personality index to examine other traits that participants with high scores on psychological health possess.  It found that these individuals had “high self-esteem, good self-regulatory skills, an optimistic outlook on the world, and a clear and stable self-view.  These individuals were low in aggression and meanness, unlikely to exploit others, and were relatively immune to stress and self-sufficient” (Bleidorn et al, 2020, pg. 1).

            Fortunately, the media story did not distort or sensationalize any information, but it did omit the second series of studies.  This segment seems just as important as the first, for there are many traits it touched on that are not covered in the Five-Factor Model.  These traits have strong correlations that describe the healthiest minds and should not have been left out of the media article.  My impression of the scientific findings was enhanced by this additional information; it showed that the four traits highlighted in the media story are not sufficient to summarize the research. 

Factors that may have influenced the decision to only list four traits from the first study are efficiency and simplicity.  It is faster for a writer, who may be trying to optimize their (or the company’s) profits, to report on an article when only one of the studies in it is being examined.  Also, it is probably easier to grab the attention of the reader if the headline is kept simple.  “The Four Traits of Psychologically ‘Healthy’ People” will probably attract more readers than “Two Studies Show High Correlation Among Traits…”.  This is not just because it is a simpler title, but because it is a concrete statement that does not involve the word ‘correlation’.

            Health research in the popular press is plagued by overhyped remedies that are often scientifically inaccurate.  Many media articles on health are written with emotionally charged headlines that are meant to grab the reader’s attention, simply to gain readership; or, in the instance of online readers, clicks and likes.  Others are probably trying to sell a product or regimen, like the “lose weight fast” diet programs. 

I was lucky to choose an article that did not distort any findings, though I do feel they were under-reported and therefore misleading.  In hindsight, I probably should have chosen a more controversial article, as this would have helped point out the problems with media distortion.  Nonetheless I did learn that even a reputable source like Psychology Today can gloss over the findings of a scholarly article.  In the interest of earning money and getting more clicks, they will summarize a scholarly article with minimal information that swiftly moves the reader along to the next one.  Journalistic integrity should allow for more detailed reporting to make sure all the bases of a study are covered.  Otherwise, we risk reading false information that could have a tremendous impact on the general health of people in a society.

References

 Bleidorn et al.  (2020).  The Healthy Personality from a Basic Trait Perspective.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  118(6), 1207-1225.  https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000231

 Mark Travers.  4 Traits of Psychologically “Healthy” People.  November 15, 2020.  Psychology Today.  https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-instincts/202011/4-traits-psychologically-healthy-people?eml

Ecological Footprint

 

       For this assignment, I kept track of all the trash I threw out in the span of two days.  All the items I would have thrown out, apart from objects flushed down the toilet, were kept by me in a bag until the two days were over.  They were then written down on a list that I will summarize and analyze.  The point of this exercise was to familiarize myself with the different ways my waste is managed: how far it goes, how long it takes to decompose, what it says about me as a consumer.  After the summary, I will look at my ecological footprint to see if there are any ways I can introduce less waste into the environment. 

        The most waste I threw out by volume was plastic from food packaging.  Six of the thirteen items on my list were from packaged food.  These included several containers of ready-made food, a yogurt cup, a sandwich wrap, a nutrition bar, and a bag of chips.  I suspected this would be where most of my waste came from, because I hardly ever cook my meals.  My wife either does it for me, or I eat something ready-made. 

        When judging by weight, all the paper I threw out at work is probably more than the food packaging.  I throw out about a pound of paper per day at work, all of it recycled.  This is because I am an accountant at a printing company, and one of my duties is to discard all the old jobs we did.  Throwing out these jobs contributed the most to my waste pile, while various other duties provided smaller amounts, like throwing away opened envelopes and spam from the mail. 

        The least amount of garbage I threw out on this two-day project was food compost; only two of my items were solid food that went into the compost bin.  One was a moldy blueberry; the other was a banana peel.  Food compost was my lowest type of garbage because I have a habit of finishing my meals.  It is very rare that I waste anything on my plate.  If I am unable to finish a meal, I save the leftovers for eating later. 

        My garbage mostly came from paper and plastic.  A couple miscellaneous items I threw away are a light bulb and a baby diaper.  The light bulb was made of glass, copper wire, and various other metallic elements.  Aluminum was the biggest component, consisting of the base of the bulb and the heat deflector.  Tungsten, being the element with the highest melting point, is notoriously found in the filament that lights the bulb.  Other elements include copper, molybdenum, nickel, and iron (Harris, 2002). The disposable diaper was made wood pulp and a variety of plastics. 

        Paper and plastic can be found in so many of my disposable items because they are cheap to produce.  I think paper is especially cheap because it can be recycled.  It seemed like there was a correlation to the cost of my items and the amount of paper or plastic in them.  The diaper and the light bulb cost more than the others by weight.   

       I believe this garbage reflects my desire to be environmentally conscious as a minimalist.  At the same time, there are things I would not have discarded if I were fully conscious, such as food packaging.  This is a result of my busy lifestyle, which does not provide me a lot of time for cooking.  And sometimes I am in such a rush that I do not stop to think about what I am buying. 

        The time it takes for these products to break down varies by composition.  Paper takes 2-5 months to decompose; food compost less than a year; plastic over 500 years (possibly forever); the glass from a light bulb about a million years (Science Learning Hub, 2008).  The garbage that I throw away is picked up by Waste Management, who hauls it to a transfer station where it is either recycled or relayed to an RDC container on a county truck.  The truck transports it to a rail facility in Everett, about 10 miles from here.  Garbage is then boxed into freight containers, where it is sent by rail all the way to the Roosevelt Landfill in Klickitat County in southern Washington.  This is 10-hour trip that spans about 250 miles! 

        For the second part of the assignment, I took a test at Footprint Calculator3 to see if my kind of lifestyle would be sustainable for the Earth if everyone did the same things as me.  Sadly, I found out that we would need 2.4 Earths to sustain the global population if everyone lived the same way I did.  On the bright side, my footprint was almost half the U.S. average (Global Footprint Network, 2021).   

There are several ways I can get my ecological footprint lower.  My high scores on meat consumption, commuting by car, and living space can all be adjusted.  But even if I adjusted those, my score would still be high.  I took a retest that told me we would still need 1.5 Earths to sustain someone like me if I changed my answers to: eating meat occasionally, living in an apartment, taking public transportation.  It was only after changing the answers to eating no meat, living in an apartment, and no transportation that I was able to get the score under 1.   

This alternative lifestyle is not very practical for me, considering I am the breadwinner in a family of three.  I suppose I could try harder to find a job where I could work from home, but that would only take away someone else’s opportunity to do it.  Plus, someone else would have to take over my job anyway.  They would probably have to commute from farther away, seeing as I only need to drive for ten minutes to get to my office.   

Eating vegan is something I have never tried, that I am willing to do if I can convince my wife to join me.  We could also try moving to a smaller house or apartment, or “live off the land” somewhere.  This would pose quite a few inconveniences, and I am not sure we would be able to save enough money for our child and his education.  There is a lot of uncertainty under such a scenario. 

It made me sad to find out I was still contributing to environmental degradation despite taking multiple steps to counter-act it.  I used to think I was a minimalist, but it is now clear that living in the U.S. automatically disqualifies me as one.  Just by living in our social structure, it is nearly impossible to get a score low enough to keep the planet healthy.  This appears to be because of all the space we use, the energy we rely on, and the products we buy.  Things like voting Democrat, recycling, buying local, and consuming and driving less do not appear to be enough to get anyone’s score in this country under 1.  More radical measures are needed that as a society we need to address.  Capitalism and “freedom” seem like they are so firmly rooted in our collective conscience that it would be unrealistic to consider radical alternatives like limiting commute time.  Although, the covid-19 pandemic has helped reveal how a radical shift like this is possible.  Eliminating commutes seems like a good first step we can take as a society to getting our number closer to 1. 

My wife and I thought it was gross carrying around a bag of garbage all day.  It was for a good cause though.  We both learned a lot from this project and are making active adjustments to combat the environmental issues plaguing our planet.  If it were not for this class and this project, we would be totally unaware of what is going on.  Rather than relying on an obscure college class (no offense) to inform people, the education and media systems in our country could do more to bring these issues to light.  I believe if there was more awareness about what humans are doing to the planet, more people would be willing to take proactive steps the same way my family is doing.  

 

References 

 Tom Harris. How Light Bulbs Work. February 19, 2002. 

https://home.howstuffworks.com/light-bulb.htm 

 Measuring Biodegradability.  Science Learning Hub.  June 19, 2008. 

https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/1543-measuring-biodegradability 

 What Is Your Ecological Footprint?  Global Footprint Network.  2021. 

https://www.footprintcalculator.org/ 

 Getting Down to Basics: Where Does Our Garbage Go?  Snohomish County 

https://www.snohomishcountywa.gov/DocumentCenter/View/44630/Where-Does-Our-Garbage-Go--English