The site offers a lot. E-mail updates on issues, cheap DVDs of the movie ($10.00 each for the first 10, $9.00 each for the next 10 . . . you may want to get a copy for each social studies classroom), background stories to the movie, story of Annie Leonard, background sheets, lists of organizations working on the issues and reading lists and more. I found no lesson plans, but you can surely cobble one together for an hour class, with 20 minutes taken up by the film. Plus you can download the movie, for free.
Go noodle around the site: There are lots of possibilities for student projects, student discussions, in-class exercises, homework, and fun.
This movie details, quickly and with good humor, the economics of recycling, the economics of waste disposal, and the economics of production. This provides a great gateway to talk about civics and government, and how to make things happen like garbage collection and recycling; a gateway to talk about economics, especially the various flows of money and goods; a gateway to talk about geography and how we have used our land and rivers to bury and carry waste; and how we use natural resources generally.
This would also be a good video for Boy Scout merit badge classes for the Citizenship in the Community and Citizenship in the Nation badges.
Contrasted with most of the industrial grade video I’ve seen for economics classes, this is fantastic. It’s better than any of the sometimes ambitious, but ultimately dull productions from the Federal Reserve Banks (are you listening, Richard Fisher? Hire Will Brehm’s group). (No offense, Osgood — yours is the best of that lot.)
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., probably has political objections to the movie, claiming it leans left, which indicates it’s in the mainstream. If you’re using any other supplemental material in your classes, this just balances it out.
Screen capture from the film, “Story of Stuff”
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Each January 1 I reflect on one of many forgotten environmental disasters, because it’s a focus of television coverage. Oh, the disaster itself isn’t covered — most often it’s not even mentioned — but it’s there if you know anything at all about it.
The Tournament of Roses Parade.
With the Bowl Championship Series game in town, and thousands of tourists out to see the parade, the games, and other festivities, no one really wants to talk about the why of the Rose Bowl, and the Rose Parade.
But once upon a time, under the sunny skies of southern California, Pasadena hosted a flower industry. Cut flowers were the produce. The Los Angeles Basin around Pasadena produced $1 billion in cut flowers annually by the late 1940s. Partly to promote that industry, local civic movers pushed a festival named to celebrate the flowers, to promote them, to feed local industry. The shtick was this: Parade floats had to be decorated exclusively with flowers and flower petals. What better way to showcase the local agricultural miracle?
Nearly 60 years later, I’ll wager less than 0.1% of the flowers used in the parade come from the Los Angeles Basin.
Air pollution forced the flower growers to move. Air pollution mottled the petals of the roses, browned the daisies, and otherwise spoiled blossoms. The greenhouses, the fields, the entire industry left the area. And today, all that is left is the parade and football game. Parade floats are decorated with flowers imported from Venezuela, Israel, Europe, Hawaii, Mexico, South America and Asia.
And so it goes. Significant upheavals in human activities, prompted by environmental goofs by humans, get shuffled out of the history books, out of our collective consciousness — and as Santayana warned, we repeat them, over and over. Los Angeles is not the only city ever to have suffered from air pollution — there were killer fogs in London and Pennsylvania within a decade after World War II. Surely people learned, no?
Consider Mexico City today. Consider Beijing today.
So I just want to list some environmental disasters that we would be better off, if we remembered them and considered how to avoid them in the future, rather than forget them and be doomed to repeat them.
(I reserve the right to post links and edit this list to add to it, as I find additional information, and as readers may add information in comments.)
Extinction of the Great Auk; a particularly poignant story. One auk was put on trial in Scotland accused of causing a ruinous storm; the last nesting pair discovered in 1844 was slaughtered because it was so rare (and the egg smashed to preserve the value of the pelts)
It’s not an exhaustive list by any means — I wager some of these are new to most readers. I wager some of you can provide better information, and other disasters that I, perhaps, have forgotten. Please, inform us.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
The prairie is one of North America’s great ecosystems and a vital habitat for many plants and animals. Over 98% of the prairie has been lost in the past 150 years—but some people are trying to bring it back, hectare by hectare. Restoring a prairie is a great challenge, requiring knowledge of biology, ecology, climatology, and even economics.
Are you up for the challenge? If you choose the right plants and animals, you can watch the prairie come to life before your eyes! Let’s begin!
North America’s prairie is divided into the tallgrass ecosystem and shortgrass ecosystem (plus an area in between—the “mixed grass” prairie). Which one do you want to restore?
This game fits neatly into geography curricula for a number of states, and also covers parts of the 7th grade social studies standards for Texas — if your state is covered by the tallgrass or shortgrass prairies as shown on the accompanying map, it’s likely your state standards include students’ learning about prairie ecosystems.
The game is fail-safe; it does not allow incorrect selections. It’s not a sim, really, but a basic introduction to what makes a successful prairie. Students should be able to master the game in 15 minutes.
Though developed way up north in Minnesota, the game and species are close to Texas prairies, too. The emphasis on soil points to some of the key errors made by farmers (encouraged by developers and the U.S. Department of Agriculture) which led to the Dust Bowl; this is a good enrichment exercise for Dust Bowl lesson plans. These games cover many of the requirements for Boy Scout merit badges, too: Environmental Science, Wildlife Management, and Soil and Water Conservation, and others.
Update, October 2011: No, I can’t find the game now, either. It appears the Bell Museum took the site down, and trusting (and hoping) they wouldn’t do that, I didn’t pirate any of the images, nor especially the game.
Here’s hoping someone will put the thing back on line, somewhere. If you find it, will you let me know? I’d like to renew the links. Several school systems went through this site to get to the game for classroom activities. It was a good thing.
It’s headed up by a bunch from downunder. U.S., Canadian and Mexican bloggers haven’t got on the bandwagon a lot, yet. As the organizers describe it:
On October 15th – Blog Action Day, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind.
In its inaugural year, Blog Action Day will be co-ordinating bloggers to tackle the issue of the environment.
What Each Blogger Will Do
Bloggers can participate on Blog Action Day in one of two ways:
Publish a post on their blog which relates to an issue of their own choice pertaining to the environment.For example: A blog about money might write about how to save around the home by using environmentally friendly ideas. Similarly a blog about politics might examine what weight environmental policy holds in the political arena.Posts do not need to have any specific agenda, they simply need to relate to the larger issue in whatever way suits the blogger and readership. Our aim is not to promote one particular viewpoint, only to push the issue to the table for discussion.
Commit to donating their day’s advertising earnings to an environmental charity of their choice. There is a list of “official” Blog Action Day charities on the site, however bloggers are also free to choose an alternate environmental charity to donate to if they wish.
And that’s it.
A gentle nudge to a better planet. Seems like a good idea to me.
Pay particular attention to what Jim writes in conclusion:
That’s right. The 1972 DDT ban did nothing to restrict the chemical’s use against malaria, but had the effect of eliminating the single most intense source of selection pressure for insecticide resistance in mosquitoes. As the rest of the world followed suit in restricting agricultural use of DDT, the spread of resistance was slowed dramatically or stopped. By this single action, William Ruckelshaus — and, credit where it’s due, Rachel Carson — may well have saved millions of lives.
Steven Milloy is invited to add that to the DDT FAQ any time it’s convenient.
Particularly notable is Jim’s work to make available the much miscited administrative law ruling by Judge Edmund M. Sweeney. It is now available on-line, so the critics can now provide accurate citations to the decision, if their intent were to inform the public, instead of maligning the truth and misleading the public.
Mr. Easter’s applied history work in this effort is notable. The internet misses much of near-recent history, especially from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Much of today’s political discussion could benefit from information that would be available in libraries, had libraries not suffered from great budget and priorities cuts in the last 20 years. Jim Easter’s contribution to making a more complete record of the history of DDT and the history of the EPA deserves applause.
Save
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
6. “To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT… In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable.”
[National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Research in the Life Sciences of the Committee on Science and Public Policy. 1970. The Life Sciences; Recent Progress and Application to Human Affairs; The World of Biological Research; Requirements for the Future.]
In contrast to their citation for the Sweeney hearing record, which leads one away from the actual hearing record, for this citation, the publication actually exists, though it is no longer available in print. It’s available on-line, in an easily searchable format. [I urge you to check these sources out for yourself; I won’t jive you, but you should see for yourself how the critics of Rachel Carson and WHO distort the data — I think you’ll be concerned, if not outraged.] The quote, though troubled by the tell-tale ellipses of the science liar, is accurately stated so far as it goes.
The problems? It’s only part of the story as told in that publication. The National Academy of Science calls for DDT to be replaced in that book; NAS is NOT calling for a rollback of any ban, nor is NAS defending DDT against the claims of harm. The book documents and agrees with the harms Rachel Carson wrote about eight years earlier.
Cover of the electronic version of Life Sciences, the 1970 book looking to future needs in biology and agriculture.
Milloy (and Edwards, he claims), are trying to make a case that the National Academy of Sciences, one of the more reputable and authoritative groups of distinguished scientists in the world, thinks that DDT is just dandy, in contrast to the views of Rachel Carson and environmentalists (who are always cast as stupid and venal in Milloy’s accounts) who asked that DDT use be reduced to save eagles, robins and other songbirds, fish, and other wildlife, and to keep DDT useful against malaria.
First, there is no way that a ban on DDT could have been responsible for 500 million deaths due to malaria. Calculate it yourself, the mathematics are simply impossible: At about 1 million deaths per year, if we assume DDT could have prevented all of the deaths (which is not so), and had we assumed usage started in 1939 instead of 1946 (a spot of 7 years and 7 million deaths), we would have 69 million deaths prevented by 2008. As best I can determine, the 500 million death figure is a misreading from an early WHO report that noted about 500 million people are annually exposed to malaria, I’m guessing a bit at that conclusion — that’s the nicest way to attribute it to simple error and not malicious lie. It was 500 million exposures to malaria, not 500 million deaths. It’s unfortunate that this erroneous figure found its way into a publication of the NAS — I suppose it’s the proof that anyone can err.
Ambrose is victim of the “DDT and Rachel Carson bad” hoax.
His column addresses bias in reporting, bias against Christians, which he claims he sees in reporting on issues of stem cell research, and bias “in favor” of environmentalists, which has resulted in a foolish reduction in the use of DDT. I don’t comment here on the stem cell controversy, though Ambrose’s cartoonish presentation of how federally-funded research works invites someone to correct its errors.
Relevant excerpts of Ambrose’s column appear below the fold, with my reply (which I have posted to the Scripps News editorial section, and in an earlier version, to the on-line version of the Evansville paper).
Aptly named, Salvinia molesta threatens to choke Caddo Lake to death. As Caddo Lake is the only natural lake in Texas, and a site of outstanding beauty and great natural treasure, the friends of Caddo Lake are fighting back.
The New York Times features a lengthy story on the lake and the fight to save it in this week’s Science section (July 31, 2007 – Science is part of the Times every Tuesday).
Every Texas social studies teacher should know Caddo Lake and its stories as well as anything else. It’s the stuff memorable classes are made of.
1. It’s the only “natural” lake in Texas, though it is formed by a dam. The “only honest lake in Texas,” in the local lingo. The original lake was formed by a monumental log jam on the Red River, probably trees blown down by a massive hurricane several hundred years ago.
2. Caddo Lake is named after the Caddo Tribe, the tribe whose word for friend, “tejas,” gave the state its name. (See my earlier post on Caddoland.)
3. Caddo Lake straddles what was once “no man’s land,” or the Neutral Territory, a buffer zone between English/French, then American, and Spanish, then Mexican settlements. It was a haven for criminals, scalawags, filibusterers and revolutionaries. The area plays a large role in the decades of fighting to steal Texas from the Spain, and later from Mexico. Texas history is much better understood when one knows the lake.
4. Caddo Lake once was the means to make Jefferson, Texas, a port city. Until Col. Shreveport dynamited the logjam that made the lake in 1873, Jefferson was a bustling center of commerce. Today Jefferson boasts some wonderfully preserved historic remnants of that era, many converted to bed and breakfast inns, a great weekend getaway. Fishing is good, photography is great.
6. The Hughes Tool Company had its beginnings on Caddo Lake, where Howard Hughes, Sr., tested his drill bit, “the rock eater,” designed to cut through mud and rock to where the oil was; this is the home of the fortune that Howard Hughes, Jr., inherited, to build to one of the greatest fortunes in the world. That the younger Hughes was a rake, a mechanical genius, an air pioneer, daring movie producer, and weird as hell only makes the story better. Hughes named his movie production company after the lake, Caddo Productions.
7. When it comes to Texas botany, zoology, and biology in general, Caddo Lake provides the local angle for water quality, water shortages (one proposal is to steal water from the lake for Texas cities far away), wildlife management, and of course, the invasion of exotic species.
8. Everything about this area screams Texas quirkiness. Uncertain, Texas? An often-told story (accurate?) is that when the town applied for a post office, there was a dispute about what to call the town. The fellow who filled out the application wrote “uncertain” in the blank for the town’s name — and that’s how the U.S. Postal Service approved it. Another story holds that the name “Uncertain Landing” caught on because the landing was treacherous mooring for boats. You got a better story about your town’s name? I doubt it.
Gro Harlem Bruntland: Recently, in Mozambique, I saw children with their eyes glazed with fever from a malaria that could have been prevented if their parents could afford bed nets. Deforestation had changed malaria from a nuisance to a curse in a matter of twenty years.
Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO). Wikiquote image.
More people are suffering from this killing and debilitating disease now than ever before, and deforestation, climate change and breakdowns in health services have caused the disease to spread to new areas and areas that have been malaria-free for decades, like in Europe.
In the Philippines, I have watched how beggars sit exhausted on the pavements convulsed with coughing. Tuberculosis, which we long believed had been brought under control by effective treatment, is on the rise again. Increasingly, we see forms of tuberculosis which are resistant to all but a very expensive cocktail of drugs.
I think that HIV/AIDS may be the most serious threat to face sub-Saharan Africa and other developing regions. space. Already, the AIDS epidemic is the leading cause of death in several African countries. AIDS has reversed the increases in life expectancy we have seen over the past thirty years. The social and economic devastation in countries that could lose a fifth of their productive populations is heart-rending.
I believe we are facing this alarming situation largely because of an outdated approach to development. Our theories have to catch up with what our ears and eyes are telling us – and fast.
There was a period in development thinking – not so long ago – when spending on public services, such as health and education, would have to wait. Good health was a luxury, only to be achieved when countries had developed a particular level of physical infrastructure and established a certain economic strength. The implicit assumption was that health was to do with consumption. Experience and research over the past few years have shown that such thinking was at best simplistic, and at worst plainly wrong.
I maintain that if people’s health improves, they make a real contribution to their nation’s prosperity. In my judgement, good health is not only an important concern for individuals, it plays a central role in achieving sustainable economic growth and an effective use of resources.
As in Europe at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, we have seen that developing countries which invest relatively more, and well, on health are likely to achieve higher economic growth.
In other words, malaria prevention grows on trees, or malaria grows with the cutting of trees.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Sheesh! I thought Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., pretty much took the cake in fanatical ideas close to insanity in the calumny campaign against Rachel Carson. I may have erred.
Please understand, it is important that good people speak up for science, for political sanity, for reason and reality. There are forces of ignorance and evil who willingly fill the information vacuum with excrement, and who thereby pollute political discourse — if you don’t speak up.
Here: Send Sen. Tom Coburn a note, tell him you think he should come to his senses and stop blocking a bill giving a minor honor to Rachel Carson. He needs to do the Christian thing and stand up for truth, for health care, for honesty, you should tell him. Here’s his official message-leaving site.
No, he’s not answered me, either. Swamp him with mail. Or telephone his office: 202-224-5754 (Washington, D.C. office).
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Bug Girl sleuthed around a bit, and found information from official sources that really demonstrates the critics of Rachel Carson are using Gillette Foamy to make us think “mad dog!”
Chart from US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) illustrates biomagnification, by which a minuscule dose of DDT to small plankton gets magnified a few million times by the time the top predators in the food chain get it.
So the evidence continues to pile up that Rachel Carson was simply a fine writer, a good scientist, and correct about DDT’s dangers.
In Audubon magazine she wrote, “We do not ask that all chemicals be abandoned. We ask moderation. We ask the use of other methods less harmful to our environment” (4). Countering claims that she was advocating a back-to-nature philosophy, she said, “We must have insect control. I do not favor turning nature over to insects. I favor the sparing, selective and intelligent use of chemicals. It is the indiscriminate, blanket spraying that I oppose” (5).
Evidence mounts that claims against Rachel Carson are sheer calumny. While the political motivations of this smear campaign are not clear, we don’t need to know for certain who is telling lies about a great American hero, or why. As Americans, as concerned citizens, as teachers and parents — as patriots — we only need to know that the claims against Rachel Carson are false.
And now it is our duty to call on Oklahoma’s Sen. Tom Coburn to stop the campaign against Carson. Coburn is the point man in the smear campaign right now: He has put a committee hold on the well-intentioned, justified bill to name a post office in her hometown after Rachel Carson. It is time for Tom Coburn to stand up and do the right thing for a great American. Sen. Coburn needs to lift his committee hold and allow committee action on this minor honor.
Much of recent history does not show up in internet searches. Some of the holes are being filled, as copyrights expire and older sources get digitized — but that means that a lot of what happened in the late 1970s, in the 1980s and 1990s escapes notice of history searches.
My view is biased — I got stuck on the front lines, knowing a bit about the environment and working for Sen. Orrin Hatch from 1978 through 1985. While working with people who think it’s good policy to aim a D-9 Caterpillar through a wilderness area has its drawbacks, there were a lot of great people and great places working that issue.
Orrin Hatch’s website doesn’t even mention the stuff any more, though it features a nice photo of Delicate Arch, which some of his supporters threatened to bulldoze or dynamite to make a point. Paul Laxalt is dead long gone from office, and (in 2011) nearing 90. Jake Garn is out of the Senate, and never really was all that interested in it. I had extensive files on the ins and outs, but I unwisely loaned them to the guy who took over the issue for Hatch after Jim Black left the staff, and they disappeared.
How did she do it? How did she save so much water?
Vicki advises Texans on planting their gardens, and for the 20 years or so we’ve known her, she’s been spreading the word, and sometimes spreading the mulch and fertilizer, about xeriscaping with native plants. “Xeriscaping” means landscaping that relies on natural water, rain and dew, instead of irrigation from a hose.
Vicki has been at the same place for all that time, but the establishment’s name has changed — the nursery in Cedar Hill where you find her and get advice is Petal Pushers, on Old Straus Road. (No promotional consideration, by the way.)
Soil erosion in Virginia, photo by W. C. Lowdermilk “Figure 15. — A formerly productive field in Virginia that has been cut to pieces by gully erosion. About 50 million acres of good farm land in the United States have been ruined for further practical cultivation by similar types of erosion.”
When in Palestine in 1939, I pondered the problems of the use of the land through the ages. I wondered if Moses, when he was inspired to deliver the Ten Commandments to the Israelites in the Desert to establish man’s relationship to his Creator and his fellow men — if Moses had foreseen what was to become of the Promised Land after 3,000 years and what was to become of hundreds of millions of acres of once good lands such as I have seen in China, Korea, North Africa, the Near East, and in our own fair land of America — if Moses had foreseen what suicidal agriculture would do to the land of the holy earth — might not have been inspired to deliver another Commandment to establish man’s relation to the earth and to complete man’s trinity of responsibilities to his Creator, to his fellow men, and to the holy earth.
When invited to broadcast a talk on soil conservation in Jerusalem in June 1939, I gave for the first time what has been called an “Eleventh Commandment,” as follows: Thou shalt inherit the Holy Earth as a faithful steward, conserving its resources and productivity from generation to generation. Thou shalt safeguard thy fields from soil erosion, thy living waters from drying up, thy forests from desolation, and protect thy hills from overgrazing by thy herds, that thy descendants may have abundance forever. If any shall fail in this stewardship of the land, thy fruitful fields shall become sterile stony ground and wasting gullies, and thy descendants shall decrease and live in poverty or perish from off the face of the earth.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
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