Jae

__WEEK 1__

Perspective. The way you look at things, and the way I look at things may be similar, or radically different, but they are never identical. The way we view things on Earth may be different due to acquired differences, or just opinions in general. However, there is science behind why we may have these universal differences…

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Today however, we will focus on one aspect of this general topic of “perspective”, - subjective character of experience. There are certain things in life that are universal to mankind, such as color and taste. The mind boggling thing is, there is no way for one person to describe their experience in color or taste to another person, and somehow verify that they experienced the exact same phenomena. For example, you can describe how bitter something is, but what if someone else’s perspective on “bitter” is totally different from yours? These experiences all occur INSIDE a person’s mind, so there is no way for another person to realize the degree of difference in what they experience in relation to what another person experiences, regarding what they believe to be the same topic. For all we know, what someone views as red, could look like blue to another person. However, since both people picked that object as being “red”, there is no way to realize that they disagreed.

Our inability to connect what we feel with what we experience physically to another person, is because of qualia, or a subjective experience. Qualia can be used to describe things such as, how a wine tastes, or how much in pain you are, or essentially anything to do with “sort of” or “what kind” of experiences.

For example, two people can be hit really hard with the exact amount of force at an exact area, but the way they perceive pain is different due to differences in neurological receptors, the amount of pain hormones that are released in the body, or the amount of pain receptors on the skin!

This inability to objectify what we feel on the inside as a physical phenomenon is called the explanatory gap. The most popular example of an explanatory gap would be when discussing color with a person who was color blind their entire life. Can you think of any way to describe red in an objective way without using the word red? You can’t? That’s because of the explanatory gap! Most people would describe “red” as being hot, or warm, but that’s not really describing red is it?

A very strange phenomenon that also occurs is called synthesia. This is when people can literally “taste” colors. This is due to the sense of taste and sense of vision somehow being blurred or intertwined to an extreme level in a person.

To tie things in with relevance to the natural world, the idea of perspective is a thing of beauty, but also that of a curse. Some people do not yet understand what kind of damage human industrialization has been doing to the environment for the past few centuries. They may brush off global warming, or the increasing amount of unrecyclable, permanent human waste such as plastic as trivial pursuits led by a group of “ecofriendly tree huggers”. However, if our generation doesn’t make changes soon, we are dooming our progeny to a terrible life, like the fat people from Wall-E.

[|http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Synesthesia#A_color_blind_synesthete.3B_.22Martian_colors.22]

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WEEK 2
Recycling. Reduce Reuse Recycle. We've all heard the 3 R's, and for many of us in this generation, the word "recycle" has been indoctrinated into us by our parents and school teachers since we were little children. But what is recycling really, and what happens behind the scenes? To keep it quick, after you dump your recyclable objects into the blue bin, the recyclable products are taken to a material recovery facility, where they are made into fiber bales, then distributed to companies that use these bales to make things such as newspaper, magazines, and more. This has significant consequences on our environment, because with recycling, products that are normally destined to go to huge landfills are remade into new products that man can use. Out of the 250 MILLION trash that is generated by the United States alone, only 32.5% are reused or recycled as of 2006. Why is this important to the environment and sustainability? Recycling c onserves natural resources like timber and water, and prevents pollution by further reducing the collection of raw materials. This effectively cuts the amount of power that goes into the big yellow machines that emit erroneous amounts of fossil fuel emission. This in turn reduces greenhouse gas emissions that are a huge factor in global climate change. Last but not least, doing all of this will help sustain the environment for our progeny, so that our children and their children can maybe perhaps see the different exotic animals on Earth such as polar bears in person, instead of having only pictures to look at in books.

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For the more toughened audience who are less inclined to be persuaded by these statistics, recycling has a direct impact on our economy and jobs. Recycling is and always was an industry where people could make a profit. By recycling 75% of our trash, we can create more than 1.5 million jobs. To put it into perspective, 75% is not a hard number to attain. In fact, if most of us got a 75% on a test, we would be pretty upset! Integrating environmental sustainability and jobs have never been more important, and environmental sciences is a growing, and key component for the future of mankind. More obvious and shocking facts on why we should recycle: It takes 95% less energy to recycle aluminum than it does to make it from raw materials. Recycled steel saves 60%, recycled newspaper 40%, recycled plastics 70%, and recycled glass 40%. It takes more money to do the wrong thing than to do the right thing!


 * In 2000, recycling resulted in an annual energy savings equal to the amount of energy used in 6 million homes.**
 * In 2005, recycling is conservatively projected to save the amount of energy used in 9 million homes. **


 * A national recycling rate of 30% reduces greenhouse gas emissions as much as removing nearly 25 million cars from the road. Imagine what we could do if that recycling rate was 100%**
 * Actually, if you do the math then at that rate, that is equivalent to removing around 90 million cars from the road. There are only 62 million registered vehicles in America!!!**


 * __//RECYCLABLE MATERIALS://__**


 * __//Flattened Cardboard, Magazines, Office Paper, Brown Paper Bags, Newspapers, Paperboards, Dairy/Juice Containers, Junk Mail, Phone Books, Plastic Bottles #1-7, Glass Bottles and Jars, Aluminium Cans, Tin/Steel Cans.//__**

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Week 3: Invasive species. What exactly is an invasive species? According to the United States government, an invasive species is defined by the following: 1) non-native (or alien) to the ecosystem under consideration and 2) whose introduction causes or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health

An invasive species is usually an apex predator, or they tend to have no natural predators in the ecosystem it has invaded. Therefore, they are able to multiply rapidly, uninhibited by predation, and they tend to be voracious eaters, ravaging everything in their path. (At least, the most dangerous ones tend to) This causes the collapse of one trophic level due to extreme predation by these invasive species, leading to an irreparable damage to the food web for that specific ecosystem over time.

Or, they can be plants or flora, which can propagate without fear of being eaten, because no animal in the ecosystem naturally eats them. This causes these plants to overrun other vegetation in the ecosystem, leading to the death of the primary consumers, and therefore the secondary and tertiary consumers, eventually leading to a collapse in the food web.

Today, I want to talk about a problem that has been notorious among those who care, the invasion of Northern Snakeheads on the bodies of water in North America. They first appeared in the summer of 2002, in lakes near the east coast, such as the ones in Maryland, Washington, and Virginia. The government encouraged the immediate killing of these fish, because they are voracious, top predators, eating ten pounds of fish a day (in an aquarium). They are able to withstand extremities such as living with a cut from which its entails protrude out, extreme cold (0 degrees – 30 degrees), and it is also able to breathe on land. They originated from the Yangtze River basin, and these “frankenfish” have decimated native populations ever since they were introduced to American waters in 2002. These Snakeheads are now considered the most invasive species in American waters, and the government still encourages the death of these creatures.

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(Documentary on the Snakehead Invasion, and the general history of the impact the species has made on human lives and ecosystems.)

How does this relate to sustainability? Quite frankly, if these reproducing populations of Snakeheads are not kept under control, they will overrun the native species of most major bodies of water in America, such as the Great Lakes, and critically damage not only the fishing industry, but every animal that depends on the lakes and rivers for food, shelter, and more. These snakeheads used to be popular because of their aggressive behavior. When owners bought them as exotic pets, many grew unable to take care of them for long, and they would dump these fish out into random waters. This is how the invasion of the snakeheads most likely began. This not only applies to snakeheads, as most invasive species are introduced because humans no longer want them as pets, and carelessly throws them away. Everyone reading this has probably witnessed this before. Releasing your pet goldfish or turtle when you were younger? Yeah, that pet could’ve been an invasive species. The tale of the snakeheads is also a warning about the dangers of human recklessness, which is also a reason why sustainability efforts are so crucial. As humans made a mess out of the environment, it is our duty to try to maintain and sustain the environment from here on out.



It seems horrible at first right? But here is some food for thought. If an invasive species is essentially able to create a comfortable niche in a new environment, and eventually take over the ecosystem, isn’t that succession? The strongest survive, while those that cannot adapt to the invasive species die out. Even though invasive species are introduced primarily through human means, and would otherwise be unable to enter the ecosystem it is invading without our intervention, humans are part of the biological world as well. So technically, humans are nothing more than simple animals, so whether by human means or not, the invasion by the invading species is a “natural” order of things on Earth. Who are we to determine whether an invading species is “bad” or not? Maybe it was meant to happen.

[] (General Info on Snakeheads)

[] (General Guide of Snakeheads)

[] (Why Snakeheads may not be as bad as people originally thought)

[] (Identifying invasive species)

[] (Defining succession)

WEEK 4: Wasting Precious Resources

It is a well-known fact that the more advanced a society, the more that society tends to underappreciate the smaller things in life. It is natural for people to take things for granted when everything had been available to them since birth. After all, why care about things that don’t affect you? This mentality in developed civilizations is most evident in regards to food. People tend to throw away food at the blink of an eye. Think about a time you were in a restaurant. You see a fancy lady who took a bite out of her steak, and didn’t like it, so she asked for a new one. What does the restaurant do with the already bit steak? That’s right, they throw it out. It seems like being ungrateful for the resources we obtain from Earth is an intrinsic trait in humans.



This anecdote applies to everything else that involves humans. As one of the most developed countries in the world, the United States has been squandering very valuable natural resources- helium. Like most things in the world, helium is a finite resource, and countries have been stockpiling them for years. This is because of the wide range of applications available in regards to helium.

Helium is (Chemistry throwback), one of the noble gases. It is unreactive, odorless, and colorless, in addition to being lighter than oxygen. It is the second most abundant element in the universe after hydrogen. (AND WE ARE RUNNING OUT!)

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Helium is used in many fields of sciences, even today. For example, helium is the only gas used to clean out space shuttles, because all other forms of (abundant) gases would freeze. In addition, it is used to measure magnetic waves in brain cell research. Not only that, it is used to cool down MRI machines. Everyone knows the vast uses for MRI machines, as they saved millions of lives since its inception by detecting abnormalities in the human body. Many countries store their helium in large helium storage banks! The U.S has the most abundance of helium supplies. We have a reserve called the National Helium Reserve at the Cliffside Storage Facility, near Amarillo, Texas. However, the government has not been regulating the exchange of helium. In fact, they had been giving it out for free for years, or they allow helium to be used in frivolous activities like party balloons! That’s right; the thing that makes your voice squeaky when you inhale it is actually a very precious and non-renewable resource.



Protecting our helium reserve is crucial to sustainability, the very same sustainability that we have been talking about in class for the past few weeks. It is imperative that we look at not only biotic aspects of sustainability, but also abiotic factors such as helium as well. Learning to treat all parts of the environment with respect is crucial. If humans cannot learn to appreciate such important things, what chance do we have that we will care about even more salient problems, such as deforestation? If we are not mindful of the future, and we do not think one step ahead, we will lose everything before we even realize we had anything. As a personal anecdote, it was a good thing that we rode bikes to Robbins Park for our trips. Instead of driving and using non-renewable fossil fuels which emit pollution, we learned to be mindful of the environment, and used bikes. Biking causes little impact on the environment, mostly in part because it is powered mechanically and reusable for a long duration of time. One does not have to fill up bikes with gas, so biking instead of driving that short distance shows a certain level of awareness of the potential harm we are doing to the environment, and not contributing to it.

If we are just a little bit more careful about how we spend our helium, we can make it last for a long time. If we are even a little bit self-aware about how we are spending such a precious resource, we can extend the current stockpile for hundreds of more years. Sure, party balloons won’t be floating anymore, but we can live without balloons, if it means that we can find applications for Helium that can potentially save millions of lives. Even though it is a finite resource, it is possible to recycle parts of it, like most things in life. (It will eventually become non-recyclable). The future for helium application looks beautiful, but we may run out of it before we truly get to unlock its uses.



Helium is running out right in front of our eyes. Its supplies are slowly dwindling, even as I type this report. Will we be able to realize the value of helium, before it is too late? Or will helium soon become “extinct” due to human lavishness? If this trend of human ignorance continues, and we keep destroying the finite resources we have, like trees, animals, and more, we will soon become a very lonely, if not the only species on Earth. And after all… who can survive such a lonely existence?

[] (Dwindling Helium Supplies)

[] (Applications of Helium in Science)

[] (Why you should hate party balloons)

[] (Frivolous use of Helium)

[] (Pleading scientists, stop wasting Helium!!!)

[] (What is Helium?)