When he visited California State University Monterey Bay to appear in the fourth and final installment of the Panetta Institute Lecture Series, a handful of other UC Santa Cruz students and I were fortunate enough to represent UCSC in the audience amidst a sea of high school and college students from the surrounding counties.

The Panetta Institute, located on CSUMB’s campus, has historically partnered with the university to bring in guest speakers and implement programs that encourage involvement in public policy.

Although by now we’re all familiar with Gore’s 2006 documentary and accompanying book, “An Inconvenient Truth,” anyone who predicted that Gore’s approach to the issues of global warming and climate change would be stale four years later was proven incorrect. The issues he addressed were made more relevant than ever by the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Of the 90 million tons of CO2 we put out daily, 30 million are absorbed by the ocean, causing marine acidity to rise and the wildlife to dwindle. The recent oil spill has had an uncannily similar effect on the ecosystem.

“Here’s one difference between the oil spill and the CO2 spill,” Gore said. “Oil you can see … CO2 is invisible.”

Although an unfortunate and lasting incident, the oil spill serves as a useful analogy for the other environmental crises facing the world. Gore referred to it several times to explain the grave consequences that will arise from denying the severity of these issues.

“That much pollution is being pumped into the atmosphere every three seconds,” Gore said. “They told us it was safe to drill into the ocean. They were wrong about the Gulf; they’re wrong about this. [Global warming] masquerades as an abstraction … gives us the illusion that we have the luxury of time.”

He referred to the oil drilling platform responsible for the spill as a “rat’s nest,” and emphasized that the nest ought to be cleaned out, alluding to “corruption in that part of the government.”

Gore also spoke about multibillion-dollar corporations that try to prevent people from demanding change, comparing companies that deny the validity of global warming and climate change with the pro-smoking ad campaigns of the 1950s.

“The response [to the dangers of smoking] was delayed almost 40 years by creating doubt,” Gore said.

I was pleased to see a famous politician and public figure speak so candidly about an issue — any issue — and indeed, Gore pulled no punches. Judging by the raucous applause the former Vice President received every 30 seconds or so, the rest of the audience was equally enthused.

In response to the question of where students should go to seek out the hard facts, Gore recommended the National Academy of Science of any country, professional scientific societies, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“Or,” he joked, “you can listen to Rush Limbaugh. It’s your choice.”

Since he was addressing students — who are in the position of being educated as well as educating themselves and others — Gore emphasized the importance of what he called “sorting through the noise” when it comes to the state of the environment and those who deny the reality of global warming. This was the component of his lecture that I found most profound and most memorable. I would guess that my peers felt the same way.

“Learn about it,” he said. “Empower yourselves with knowledge … If you decide you want to make a difference, you can. You really can.”

For what may have been the hundredth time, the audience broke out into applause again. Whether it was because we were relieved we hadn’t been told the best thing we could do to save our planet was to buy energy-efficient light bulbs, or because it just seemed like the appropriate thing to do, we all clapped over and over again.

There was an energy that pervaded the auditorium, emanating from the applauding hands of the students and the ardor in the former Vice President’s eyes. It hinted at the passion we all have toward our world, a force that might prove to be the ultimate source of alternative energy.

Coral reefs are one part of the marine ecosystem threatened by warming oceans. Photo by Devika Agarwal.

Flamingos and other wading birds perch in swamps, which could be flooded as a result of sea level rise. Photo by Devika Agarwal.

Warmer beaches could alter the male to female ratio of sea turtles in the oceans, threatening their population. Photo by Devika Agarwal.

A group of children on a field trip view splashing penguins, which may soon have to migrate further north to feed their population. Photo by Devika Agarwal.

A talk-back station invites aquarium visitors to share their feelings and ideas about global warming. Photo by Devika Agarwal.

As swarms of tropical fish dart in and out of porous corals, vibrant colors pop against the paler branches of the reef. Children gaze in awe, their hands and noses pressed to the glass, eyes following each animal’s every move.

Visitors to the Monterey Bay Aquarium may not realize that the ocean home of marine life — from spotted jellies gliding effortlessly through the water to delicate flamingos tip-toeing through salty marshes — could soon be a very different place.

With the exhibit “Hot Pink Flamingos: Stories of Hope in a Changing Sea,” which tells the stories of species all around the world affected by global warming, the aquarium hopes to inspire awareness of climate change.

Global warming, or the warming of the Earth’s atmosphere due to increasing levels of greenhouse gases, has been a topic of intense worldwide debate for the past several years. Despite detractors, there is a scientific consensus that the planet’s climate has begun to warm and will continue to do so in the future due to increasing levels of carbon emissions.

“Climate change is a very sobering topic,” Raul Nava, an Assistant Exhibit Developer for “Hot Pink Flamingos,” said. “What we want visitors to understand is that we are all trying to wrap our heads around climate change. But we have found that there is hope. There is power in numbers.”

The Phenomenon

Climate variation is nothing new. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide have always been a part of the atmosphere. However, since the 18th century industrial revolution, human consumption of fossil fuels has led to rising carbon dioxide emissions. Scientists fear this will lead to a rapid increase in the Earth’s atmospheric temperature.

Just ask Director of the Institute of Marine Sciences Gary Griggs, a distinguished professor of earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz.

“Right now, globally, we are about 85 percent dependent on fossil fuels,” Griggs said. “In the next hour [around the world], we’re going to burn about 150 million gallons of oil, 15 billion cubic feet of natural gas, and about a million tons of coal. Cumulatively, those are going to put, per hour, about a million tons of carbon dioxide into the ocean.”

Mark Snyder, assistant project earth scientist at the Climate Change and Impacts Laboratory at UCSC, uses climate modeling to predict the future temperature and greenhouse gas levels in the Earth’s atmosphere. Snyder and other researchers use scenarios established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of 3,000 scientists that last released a report in 2007, to calibrate future temperature and carbon dioxide levels.

“Right now, we’re essentially on one of the more extreme scenario curves, in terms of the rate of CO2,” Snyder said. “The sort of rapid climate change that people have looked at could definitely be happening as a result of this rate.”

According to the IPCC, global temperatures could rise between 2 and 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, leading to a sea level rise of anywhere between .6 and 2 feet, as ice caps melt. UCSC professors and Monterey Bay Aquarium researcher’s estimates are less conservative. Such scenarios could put many parts of Santa Cruz under water.

There are still many unknowns about how climate change will affect oceans, but the Monterey Bay Aquarium is raising awareness of the changing seas.

Changing Seas

“Hot Pink Flamingos” is tucked away on the bottom level of the aquarium. Upon entering, viewers are drawn to hundreds of fish, in all colors of the rainbow, whizzing from side to side in the “Acid Oceans” exhibit. The fish aren’t literally swimming in acid, but in the future, marine ecosystems dependant on coral reefs could be threatened by changes in ocean pH.

“The ocean is becoming more acidic, which affects the coral reefs and all the animals that depend on the reefs,” said Angela Hains, public relations senior associate manager at the aquarium.

Acidic water affects the ocean’s levels of calcium carbonate, which many organisms use to build shells.

“Certain types of plankton that make calcium carbonate shells are going to dissolve,” Professor Griggs said.

Corals and plankton may not be the most fierce, colorful, or interesting animals in the aquarium, but both are vital to the food web that feeds larger marine animals and even humans. The larger aquarium is also home to sea otters and black-tipped reef sharks.

“Even if [some] animals are not affected by ocean acidification or warming, the loss or the change in abundance of some other species they depend upon can affect them indirectly,” Jim Barry, a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) said.

Beyond “Acid Oceans” lies a tank of spotted jellies in shades of translucent brown, dotted with white spots — some have tentacles tangled in webs, while others drift, solitary, through the center of the tank.

Jellyfish are especially sensitive to the temperature of their environment.

“Warmer temperatures threaten some tropical spotted jellies and sea turtles, species who live at the edge of their temperature limits,” Assistant Exhibit Developer Nava said.

Sea turtles have temperature-dependent sex determination, which means that the temperature at which their eggs are incubated determines the turtle’s sex — warmer eggs become females, while cooler ones become male. Warmer oceans could lead to warmer beaches, which could alter turtle sex ratios and lead to a decline in population.

“Scientists are concerned that we may tip the balance for them,” Nava said. “Some beaches are already on the edge and produce more females than males.”

Past the jellies are two turtles gliding by the glass, their dark eyes looking out at the children staring back at them. Though an Earth 100 years into the future may seem distant for humans, it’s all in a turtle’s lifetime.

Flamingos — perhaps the most flamboyant of all birds in the marine ecosystem — face equal challenges.

All over the world, rising sea levels could force wading birds to move inland to marshes that are disappearing quickly.

Nava emphasized that although many birds can fly and migrate to different areas, the question is whether there will be enough wetlands left.

“We know that they can move and survive in different environments, but will there be other birds there doing the same thing?” Nava said.

Hitting Home

“Hot Pink Flamingos” features species from all of the world’s oceans that are facing the effects of global warming, and the local Monterey Bay may be facing many of the same changes.

According to the Bay Conservation Development Commission, if sea levels rise by three feet, the entire San Francisco International Airport, which currently sits within 16 inches of sea level, could be covered within the next 100 years. In Santa Cruz, the Boardwalk, Main Beach, parts of the harbor, and even downtown, which is built on a flood plain, could be inundated by the rising tide.

“If we keep going at the rate we’ve seen for the last 50 years, sea level would rise about one foot in the next 100 years, but most people are predicting that in the next 100 years, it’s going to go up a lot faster,” Professor Griggs said.

Ocean acidification, warming, and species migration northwards could also change the bay’s unique ecosystem.

Stories of Action

Despite the feelings of hopelessness that climate change can bring, “Hot Pink Flamingos” focuses on stories of hope and inspiration.

“A lot of times, people are overwhelmed on this subject. Our message is that it’s OK to feel worried, it’s OK to feel hopeful, and, most importantly, you’re not the only one,” Nava said.

The exhibit features “talk back points” throughout, stations at which visitors can share their feelings on climate change or their ideas. Dispersed between species are stations where visitors can post note cards sharing their personal stories or use a touch screen to share their emotions, whether hopeful or helpless.

Visitors can see examples of cities around the world that are cutting their carbon footprints through innovative public transportation systems and religious groups that are working toward creating a better planet for children by using solar energy or growing gardens.

Erin Loury, a CSU graduate student from the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, was visiting the exhibit while planning a trip for teachers who would then incorporate climate change education into their curricula.

“It’s really great that people are getting to see animals they may have heard about but maybe not seen,” Loury said. “They have to care about something before they can care if it disappears.”

Why Hope?

If ocean species are on the path to disappearance, why try?

According to Nava, marine ecosystems have a vast potential for adaptability.

“Life is resilient,” Nava said. “Nature is very capable of adaptation — we know that. We can bounce back. The question is whether we are going to have enough time.”

This isn’t the first time that oceans, and Earth in general, have experienced climate change. But because of human activity and emissions, the rate of change is faster than in previous periods.

“In the past, we’ve seen changes in ocean temperature and chemistry. Those changes happened over millions of years. The difference is that [now] these changes are happening over hundreds of years,” Nava said.

Nava explained that although many scientists think there could be a point at which change is irreversible, that doesn’t mean giving up now.

Jim Barry, a senior scientist at MBARI, stated that despite evidence of changes already happening in the Monterey Bay, people should take action in any way to reduce their energy use and emissions.

“You sort of think about global warming as an on-off switch,” Barry said. “[But] it’s not global warming or no global warming — it’s how much global warming, and the more we do to conserve energy, to use alternative energy … the less warming we will see, and the slower warming will occur, so we will give ecosystems a better chance.”

At the end of the exhibit, visitors are asked to commit to do one thing in order to combat climate change — examples included bringing a reusable bag to the grocery store or skipping a hamburger to reduce methane emissions.

Visitors are rewarded with a video of their photo transposed onto a person carrying out their pledge.

One option is simply to talk about what they learned from the aquarium, an idea that Nava says encapsulates the goal of the exhibit.

“It’s a success to me if someone walks out of here and understands that their actions ripple out,” he said. “That’s the biggest thing anyone can take from this exhibit.”

The Santa Cruz community came out in the hundreds to take part in the Earth Day celebration. Photo by Andrew Allio.

A skyscraper made out of a beer bottle towers over cardboard streets. Drinking straw telephone poles run in front of an apartment building made of an upside down Burger King cup.

Students from Monarch Community School built this diorama from the litter they found around their school. Their project was part of a contest at Earth Day Santa Cruz, but it would have been hard to find signs of this dark future at the yearly Santa Cruz event.

In an effort to create zero-waste, the Earth Day coordinators implemented a variety of solutions, like a bike valet, a solar-powered sound system, and waste disposal stations with an option to compost.

Earth Day Santa Cruz is part of a larger nationwide event that was started in 1970 by Senator Gaylord Nelson in order to raise awareness about mounting environmental concerns.

Playing in front of solar panels the size of a small house, Peter Weiss, the Singing Scientist, sang the title song off his album “Do as you Otter.”

This main stage, where performers and speakers like Mayor Mike Rotkin made their appearances, ran entirely off of clean energy.

“[Solar power] actually runs the whole band … [it] is capable of doing all the energy needs,” said Casey McDonald, a representative from the local energy company and Earth Day sponsor, Solar Technologies.

People Power, an organization that encourages the use of human-powered transportation, offered free valet service. Thirty bikes, many of them with custom child carriers built onto the back, could be found neatly parked by volunteers.

“[The valet service] encourages people to take alternative ways to the Earth Day,” said Tawn Kennedy, who works with People Power to educate schools about modes of transportation like bicycles, skateboards, and scooters.

People Power also offered special bicycle blended smoothies, with proceeds going towards the initiative to promote bicycle culture in schools from elementary to college.

In addition to the extensive efforts to make Earth Day Santa Cruz a zero-waste event, many groups also worked to create a space of awareness about current environmental issues.

Molly Kirkpatrick, a steward with Save Our Shores, walked around Earth Day with a blue poncho covered in the different refuse she found while cleaning a variety of local beaches. She pointed out a pair of dentures that she discovered and a beer cozy that had travelled all the way from Minnesota.

“Our message is to try and avoid plastics as much as possible, because they don’t totally break down,” Kirkpatrick said.

Santa Cruz County agrees. Mark Stone, the Fifth District Supervisor, opened Earth Day with a speech that addressed past and future achievements in waste reduction.

“As you know, the county and all four cities — Santa Cruz, Capitola, Watsonville, and ScottsValley — have banned polystyrene in take-out containers from local restaurants and food services … and the county has recently put into motion, I’m very proud to announce, a plastic bag ban.”

Later that day, Monarch Community School won the third prize for its project that creatively displayed the litter around the school. The students triumphantly held a giant $200 check above their heads. The trash-filled dystopia they imagined in their diorama is likely to be sorted into the recycling.

Photo by Morgan Grana.

A volunteer deposits a needle into the biohazard box. The needle shown was among several needles found that day. Photo by Morgan Grana.

A child drops a hypodermic needle into a biohazard box with a poster draped over it that reads “Save Our Shores.” The box is already host to several needles found at the beach that day. The child is volunteering at a cleanup on Main Beach, in front of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. Save Our Shores organizes cleanups throughout the year to preserve the local environment of the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary.

A Brief History

Save Our Shores is a local nonprofit organization based in Santa Cruz that organizes cleanups and raises awareness of threats to the marine ecosystem. Whether for monthly cleanups, where any community member can participate, or group cleanups, where specific organizations participate, Save Our Shores motivates the community to volunteer to preserve the marine environment in which they live. The organization’s pamphlet reads, “We show them how their actions affect the marine environment, and offer the choice to make a positive impact.”

Save Our Shores has served to facilitate a “thriving and healthy marine ecosystem as a result of an informed and compassionate public” in the Santa Cruz area since they fought offshore drilling on the central coast 20 years ago. In order to prevent offshore drilling, Save Our Shores has traveled across the state since 1985 to gather support for offshore drilling prohibition. The momentum the organization generated during their campaign across California provided support for the establishment of a National Marine Sanctuary. In 1992, the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary was established, and since the sanctuary’s conception, the organization has influenced cleanup in the protected area they helped establish.

At their watershed cleanups, Save Our Shores provides volunteers with supplies for cleanup; such as receptacles for collecting trash along the waterways, gloves, the biohazard box, and cards to keep tally the types and quantity of trash found. Before letting the volunteers loose on the litter, a Save Our Shores representative gives a short presentation about the amount and types of trash found in marine ecosystems.

“It’s important to help the environment we live in, and especially because Santa Cruz is such a beach town, it is important to keep the ocean ecosystem thriving and healthy,” said Tori Lord, an intern with Save Our Shores and fourth-year environmental studies major.

Save Our Shores’ office sits on the harbor, its front windows looking out onto the sea of docked sailboats. Here, the nonprofit organizes monthly waterway cleanups throughout the Santa Cruz area, with both specific groups and the general community.

Last year, Save Our Shores collected over 26,000 pounds of trash and 9,000 pounds of recycling, a total that was reached by adding up the quantity of trash collected from all of the cleanups they run throughout the year.

Trash collected at local waterways contributes to this amount. Save Our Shore’s mantra, “Awareness, Advocacy, Action,” is now being directed at the rivers as well.

“We are starting to run more river cleanups, because they are in much worse condition,” said Emily Glanville, Program Manager at Save Our Shores. “We’re really focusing our education on pathways of pollution. I think we have gotten people to not litter on the beach, but we want to foster that kind of awareness for all watersheds.”

Photo by Morgan Grana.

A Shifting Focus

Save Our Shores has begun to focus on rivers and all waterways in the area because they eventually lead to the ocean and are contributing to the amount and type of debris found on the beaches and in the marine habitat.

“Our beaches are getting cleaner because we run a ton of beach cleanups. We hope that it is because of the awareness [we’ve raised],” Glanville said. “Our rivers are a different story. It is much easier to leave a mess at a river. I think that people have a hard time connecting the trash on the rivers and the harm that it causes.”

Despite Save Our Shores’ increased involvement in river cleanup, it has not decreased its involvement with ocean conservation. They still conduct the same number of ocean cleanups.

Glanville said that the high levels of traffic and people that frequent the rivers furthers the importance of their involvement with that endeavor. The debris found at the rivers includes heavier objects, such as tires, washers, dryers and other various household items. The trash typically found on the beaches usually consists of significantly lighter items, like cigarette butts and bits of paper.

Much of the garbage picked up at their beach cleanups — like the one at Main Beach — is in fact attributed to runoff from rivers. For example, the San Lorenzo River pours into the ocean at Main Beach and deposits trash from the river onto the shore.

Needles, like the one found at the Main Beach cleanup, are among the various types of copious amounts of trash found at watersheds and oceans throughout the Santa Cruz area. They indicate how the beaches and the rivers are connected.

“It’s weird, cigarette butts used to be the main thing, now we are finding more condoms and syringes,” said Jessica Glanz, an intern with Save Our Shores, as she stands behind the table, instructing volunteers on the proper methods of trash disposal at Main Beach. Glanz is a Clean Boating and Sustainable Seafood Intern with Save Our Shores and a third-year marine biology major at UC Santa Cruz.

Inhabitants along the rivers may be contributing to the increased presence of needles and other drug paraphernalia being found on the beaches.

“There might be a few people who use on the beach but it is from the homeless encampments on the river and then the river washes them into the ocean,” said Dennis Gagne, Save Our Shores volunteer.

Save Our Shores does not intervene with homeless encampments, but they do acknowledge the damaging effects of such infrastructure on the environment.

“We don’t ever break up homeless encampments. It’s a hard situation that I feel has not been addressed correctly,” Glanville said. “From an environmental perspective, it is bad to have people living along the river without bathrooms, but without the proper infrastructure coming from the city and county, there isn’t anywhere for these people to go.”

Many volunteers at the beach cleanup brought their children with them, and one volunteer braved bringing their stroller onto the sand. Photo by Morgan Grana.

Volunteers for Save Our Shores looked throughout the beach for tiny pieces of trash mixed in all with the wood. Photo by Morgan Grana.

Getting Their Hands Dirty

To facilitate community involvement, Save Our Shores works with community organizations ranging from grade school children to adult sport leagues, coordinating things like beach adoption. In the adoption process, an organization will adopt a local beach and then participate in a minimum number of beach cleanups at their locale.

One blustery February afternoon, at the cleanup aforementioned, nearly 30 Santa Cruz Roller Derby Girls and members of their families showed up to their newly adopted beach, Main Beach, to do one of the three mandatory beach clean-ups required as part of the adoption process. Main Beach is a place that many of the Derby Girls have frequented.

“A lot of our girls grew up here and have an affinity for the beach and keeping the beach cleaned up,” said Derby Girl Salt Ann Battery. “Having grown up here, a lot of us want to help out and because Santa Cruz supports us, we want to show that we are thankful and set an example of community support.”

The cleanup illustrated the intertwined relationships of the community, the beaches and the rivers.

Talking Trash

Save Our Shores works with groups of children frequently, and in light of the debris being found, volunteers are fearful for the youth present at the cleanups.

At the office, Kate Purcell, volunteer coordinator with Save Our Shores, described how the dangerous debris is especially a cause for concern at cleanups with school groups.

“Needles and syringes have increased and it is really worrisome for us, because we have so many school groups who go out,” Purcell said. “It is just scary.”

The possibility of needles and syringes lurking beneath the surface has prompted the staff at cleanups to make a request to children at play.

“Sometimes we recommend that kids don’t dig, because there might be hidden danger. To me, that’s just so sad,” Purcell said. “One of those quintessential childhood experiences is threatened because of the mess.”

Save Our Shores has each volunteer carefully mark what items they collect at cleanups to ensure a thorough bookkeeping of the type and amount of trash collected at each cleanup. The removal of syringes and needles factor in to keeping the beaches safe.

“The state beaches would be pretty dismal without the beach cleanups,” Purcell said. “Save Our Shores is really providing a service to the community. We’re keeping them safe. People don’t realize that cleaning the beaches keeps it safe for children.”

As of mid-March this year, Save Our Shores had collected a total of 2,764 pounds of trash, and 797.5 pounds of recycling at their 18 beach cleanups and 11 river cleanups.

Their close tally of the types of litter picked up at the cleanups allows them to generate accurate and helpful breakdowns of the data.

The top five items picked up at the cleanups, are as follows: 8,230 Styrofoam pieces, 6,545 plastic pieces, 4,025 cigarette butts, 2,503 plastic food wrappers, and 2,430 glass pieces.

The amount of trash that Save Our Shores removes from all watersheds reflects the organization’s role in continuing to preserve the sanctuary they fought so hard to establish 20 years ago. The nonprofit continues to preserve the community and ocean ecosystem that hundreds of marine animals and nearly 700,000 people that live along the Monterey Bay coast call home.

Photo by Morgan Grana.

Gallons of precious water are wasted each day as they swirl down countless sinks and drains. Due to the heavy winter rainfall in Santa Cruz, it may be easy to take water for granted. In actuality, showers and faucets at UC Santa Cruz dorms and apartments make up 40.5 percent of the campus’ total water usage.

Sarah Finder, a second-year global economics major from College Nine, is transforming her passion and concern for the environment into action as she dives into a campus project documenting water usage.

“The goal of the project is to try to raise the awareness that we [as a campus] care about how we act in the community,” she said.

As a University Relations Good Neighbor intern, Finder aims to foster good relationships between the campus and the city of Santa Cruz.

Finder’s project, debuting this week, involves the distribution of mock water bills to students living in Crown and Merrill apartments.

The bills will be distributed three times during the quarter, displaying water usage for February, March and April. This billing will allow students to learn how much water they utilize per month and how much money they would realistically pay if they lived off-campus.

UCSC uses about 200 million gallons of water per year. According to the 2007 UCSC Water Efficiency Survey, the campus consumes 5 percent of the total Santa Cruz Water Department demand.

“I take water for granted. If I were told how much I use, I could cut down,” said Tyler Hunt, second-year economics major and resident of the Merrill apartments.

There is a great need to conserve water to keep housing fees from rising and to reduce the strain on the city water supply. Finder hopes increasing awareness about campus water use will help to create a more sustainable campus.

She created the mock water bills herself, taking the mean water readings of the 14 buildings and 92 apartments located in Crown and Merrill to calculate hypothetical costs.

Ian McDonald, the UCSC Energy Analyst, supplies Finder with information regarding water usage on campus. She has concluded that every cubic foot of water used costs approximately 10 cents.

Finder received initial help getting the word out about her project from Silas Snyder, the Safety, Training and Resource Conservation Coordinator. Snyder helped Finder to connect with Gabriela Alaniz, the Coordinator for Residential Education (CRE) for Merrill.

Alaniz asked Residential Advisors in Crown and Merrill to do the footwork of distributing the bills, creating an opportunity for the apartment residents to learn about their water consumption.

“I want to help out and share this information. In Santa Cruz, you see stickers in the bathroom telling you to conserve. Having enough water is a serious problem here,” Finder said.

Growing up in Nashville, Tennessee, Finder noticed that many residents did not focus on environmental awareness and saw little encouragement of conservation.

“I learned to be very conscious about water usage and recycling from my parents,” Finder said. “After talking to many of my peers, it was clear that not everyone knew about the importance [of these things]. I remember people would ask if we had to recycle, and I would say ‘Yeah! We have to!’ I was very surprised.”

Finder anticipates that many students will be persuaded to conserve when they receive the bills.

“I would like this to eventually reach all corners of campus, maybe even in the dorms,” Finder said. “I am envisioning this to be a regular thing.”

Finder is hoping to find other committees or interest groups focusing on sustainability and water conservation, such as the Green Campus Program (GCP), to help the distribution of mock water bills become a standard practice on campus.

So far, Alaniz said, Finder has been successful in achieving her goals. “Sarah has been doing an impressive job. Getting something done takes perseverance. I feel like this is a different way of educating students instead of just giving out tips,” Alaniz said. “It teaches that water is an important source in the country and it allows students who live on campus to see what it is like to be responsible for a bill and collecting money.”

Finder has high hopes for the project.

“Nothing is impossible,” she said. “People want to help students out. If you have a good idea, start talking.”

1. the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline.
2. refers to the maximum rate of the production of oil in any area under consideration, recognizing that it is a finite natural resource, subject to depletion.
3. the end of the 21st century lifestyle.
4. a chance to be reborn.

Illustration by Joe Lai.

Homegrown harvests and bread baked by the family down the street. Medical care subsidized by local taxes and available to all residents of a municipality. Mixed-use housing, water catchment systems galore, walkable neighborhoods and thriving community connections.

Transition Santa Cruz, a citizen coalition that educates and acts on the principles of personal and community resilience in a future devoid of cheap oil, believes all of these and much more are possible in a post -petroleum world.

Assiduous, relentless, and, above all, positive, they want the city to be ready for the biggest crisis facing the mechanized world: the redefining moment when oil will no longer be the ubiquitous source of energy it has become.

“The crisis is inevitable,” said Michael Levy, a core coordinator for Transition Santa Cruz and a local music teacher, referring to peak oil. “But there are things we can prevent from happening.”

These ‘things’ include, but aren’t limited to: the collapse of the world’s economies (the current crisis will pale in comparison when the fossil fueled, globalized financial system loses easy access energy), famine, civil war (over what oil is left) and, quite possibly, human extinction.

In the face of these hard-to-swallow potentialities, almost all of Transition Santa Cruz’s 450 members are looking on the bright side. They see a break with oil as an opportunity to redefine society on more prudent terms.

Levy, initially frightened by the visions of the world foreshadowed by global warming hypothesizers, stumbled upon Transition and was immediately hooked.

“I saw people having fun. It’s a realistic movement,” Levy said. “I made the decision to see the world in terms of possibility. I don’t think it pays to see the world as probability.”

Transition Santa Cruz, which is a satellite of the international Transition movement that first sprouted up in England four years ago, is staying true to the literal meaning of their name: in order to effectively phase out fossil fuels and make the changes stick, the process must be gradual and organic.

“You don’t have to go around and say, ‘Peak oil is coming! We have to do something!’” Levy explained. Instead, he recommends we begin by building resilient communities where neighbors can rely on one another and individuals are prepared for life without cheap oil.

Levy went on to say that Transition has always been a grassroots effort and that there is a gap between citizen solutions and government rhetoric, a realm where it is unpopular to speak publicly about diminishing energy supplies and halted economic growth.

“There’s no way to have a growing economy with shrinking energy,” he said.

Until there is enough popular support for weaning municipalities off oil, government is going to drag its feet and cover its ears.

Some, however, are listening.

City council member Don Lane, sipping a steaming cup of green tea and gingerly placing his bike helmet on the wooden bench next to him, has attended a handful of Transition meetings.

“Transition is really very practical about what you can do,” he said, praising the group’s positive pragmatism. “People are held back by that ‘What can I really do?’ attitude.”

Lane decided that what he could do was start a home garden, which he says produces copious amounts of lettuce, among other veggies. It took some grunt work, but for him the payoff is worth it, especially when he shares his crops with his neighbors.

He agrees with Levy that peak oil isn’t the most politically savvy subject for politicians to breach, especially when the economy is such a touchy topic. Santa Cruz, though, as the Mecca of conscious living it purports to be, has been quite progressive in terms of city planning and policies.

“We are starting a program to finance people putting solar panels on their roof,” Lane said. “We need to let things be built near neighborhoods – the classic example is small community grocery stores that people can walk and bike to.”

Lane’s favorite proposal is the creation of a high-capacity transportation system between UC Santa Cruz and the downtown area that would cut down on traffic and carbon emissions.

Lane also believes that lasting change won’t come about by mandating what people should and shouldn’t do.

“If it happens fast, then it isn’t truly transitional and won’t last,” he said. “The city government can play a supportive role and facilitate things that are already happening on the grassroots level.”

Neighborhood Ne Plus Ultra

Oil discovery peaked in 1964, meaning that over the last 65 years the number of new oil reserves has declined precipitously. Most experts agree that oil production — the amount of barrel-bound petroleum — peaked in mid-2008. From now on, they say, oil will become increasingly harder to find, both in the ground and, consequently, in the greater marketplace. At the moment, we are using five barrels for every one we discover, a rate that is impossible to sustain for much longer.

Responses to this predicament include everything from survivalist retreat to reluctant surrender to militant denial.

Transition takes a different approach.

“I just see, on the horizon, that culturally and economically, we’re going to have to learn to live within the means of our environment,” Aviva Longenatti, a member, said. “I see Transition as a hopeful, positive way we can live within on our means.”

She posed a question that seems to sum up Transition’s seminal philosophy: “Instead of worrying about what we’re going to give up and live without, what can we do within Santa Cruz county to sustain ourselves?”

Longenatti is spearheading the Neighborhood Working group, one of three smaller, singularly-focused action teams within the larger movement. Her husband, Rick, is the coordinator for the Land Use Working group, and Michael Weaver heads the biggest one, which focuses on food.

“It’s about getting to know the people on our block,” Longenatti said of her working group’s goals, “getting to know each other and support each other, to reconnect with people we live two feet from.”

Reinventing the wheel is not what Transition is about. Though they want to see society dance to a different beat, the group feels all the answers are right next door.

Using what tools are at hand, “reskilling” is a major component of the movement, emphasizing a back to basics, empirical education that provides for the needs of day-to-day living. Transition holds classes on building rainwater catchment systems, forging, compost toilets and carpentry — all skills geared toward preparing members for an era deplete of fossil fuels.

Because meals won’t be able to travel the great distances they currently average before they land on dinner plates, and commuting to and from jobs many miles away will become nearly impossible, “re-localization” is a second major prong of the Transition plan. This is probably the most widely recognized precept of the movement and extends beyond the “Buy Local” mantra to cover other fundamental necessities like health care and currency.

Personal preparedness is tantamount to Transition’s vision of the future, but without resilient communities, that future will be bleak.

Levy and Longenatti both believe that the re-establishment of personal relationships represents the only way humanity will make it through the peak oil crisis. Both of them say that an added benefit of getting to know one another, aside from simple survival, is the enriched personal life that comes with a sense of communal belonging.

“The neighborhood is a great size, in a way,” Longenatti said. “People talk about change on a grand scale, but a neighborhood is like an extended family…It’s a more human scale.”

And until the government catches up, neighborhoods represent the only place where transformation can take root and grow.

“There [do] need to be policies, yes — nationally and locally — to make change,” council member Lane said. “But we need to start at home.”

Summer 2009 is almost here, and everyone knows what that means: people from all over the world will be stampeding to the beaches in Santa Cruz to enjoy some of the most beautiful coastal scenery in California. There is no feeling quite like the one you get when you are standing on the cliffs at Seabright Beach, looking down at the pristine white sands, beautiful people and deep greenish-blue of the ocean. 

What you probably don’t notice is the amount of trash piling up beneath the blankets and umbrellas. One of the largest threats to the health of our beaches is marine debris, which is trash that ends up in the sea either from land-based or ocean-based sources. In the past 50 years this problem has worsened due to the increased use of convenient plastic containers rather than reusable ones. Cigarette butts, plastic and glass bottles, aluminum cans and every other forgotten piece of trash left on the beaches of Santa Cruz every day by the throngs of visitors diminishes the landscape’s postcard perfection.   

We are not the only ones who have to deal with the consequences of marine debris. Every year, an estimated 100,000 birds, sea turtles, dolphins, whales, seals and other animals will ingest plastic debris or become entangled in it. Everything from lighters to small toys has been found in animals washed up on the beach, who were just trying to eat and survive. 

Plastic material is mainly responsible for the ongoing massacre of marine animals, forever floating around brightly-colored and appealing to hungry creatures. Americans each use about 200 pounds of plastic every year, and that number is predicted to become 300 by the end of the decade. With our reckless use of this long-lived petroleum product, it’s no wonder that the environment is suffering. 

By now, many people have heard of the horrifying North Pacific Gyre trash heap in all its plastic splendor: a mass of trash the size of Texas in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, containing an estimated 3.5 million tons of trash. There is not a better visual example of the consequences of our careless use of plastics than the garbage patch. 

The amount of trash on Santa Cruz beaches is staggering, but there are many dedicated locals who don’t mind cleaning up the mess. The annual International Coastal Cleanup Day happens every summer at beaches all over the world. Last year, over 3,000 volunteers cleaned up 10,200 pounds of trash off of the beaches in Santa Cruz County alone. Worldwide, people from 104 different countries picked up 6.8 million pounds of trash from their beaches, rivers and streams. 

The good news is that it’s not too late to diminish our impact on our coastal environment. The main action that we should all take is simply to use fewer plastic containers. Be aware of your surroundings on the beach, keep track of the trash that you end up with and make sure that you pack it up when you leave. If you smoke, don’t throw your cigarette butt away in the sand. These simple actions could save thousands of marine animals’ lives and keep the beaches in Santa Cruz looking beautiful. 

There are several organizations in Santa Cruz dedicated to keeping the beaches clean and looking for volunteers to help. Save our Shores has been organizing coastal clean-ups in communities of California for the past 30 years. Pack Your Trash is another agency promoting the health of the coastline with their anti-littering campaigns, and is located on Pleasure Point.

So when you trip down to the beach this summer, just remember to leave it how you found it — you’re not the only one enjoying the sun, sand and surf.

By Kathleen Mullen-Ley 
Fourth-year environmental studies major

~~~~~

We are eager to hear your opinions, so please e-mail editors@cityonahillpress.com. Letters should be around 250 words, and ideally will have to do with recent CHP content. We reserve the right to print, or not print, anything we receive.

Illustration by Joe Lai.

The end of spring marks a time that many seniors either dread or embrace: graduation. 

For some, graduate school is around the bend, while others are looking to start their careers. At College Eight, no matter what students’ next step may be, they are asked to take into consideration more than just their future goals.

“Given the theme of College Eight, being ‘Environment and Society,’ I thought it was appropriate to bring [the pledge] to the attention of the college,” said Mike Kittredge, College Eight programs coordinator. “Then I brought it to the attention of our senior graduation committee last year and they decided to run with it and make it part of the College Eight commencement.”

Kittredge helped incorporate the Graduation Pledge Alliance (GPA) into College Eight’s commencement ceremony last year. 

The pledge that all College Eight graduates have the option of taking states: “I pledge to explore and take into account the social and environmental consequences of any job I consider and will try to improve these aspects of any organizations for which I work.” 

For graduating legal studies major Ryan Estes, this pledge is much more than just an empty promise.

“I’m going to grow up to be a corporate lawyer,” Estes said. “So when I take this pledge I take it to not go join a company like ENRON or Washington Mutual, or go work for a company that’s going to go destroy all the rainforests of the world. I’m just talking about a sense of high moral standards.”

Currently, UCSC is the only UC campus to partake in this pledge and College Eight is the only college that has proactively worked to have its graduating class take the pledge.

Fourth-year environmental studies major Jessica Wackenhut believes that all colleges should be making their graduating students more aware of the pledge.

“I think it’s important for all colleges to do something like this because it is one of those things,” Wackenhut said. “Most of the colleges are engaged in social issues like globalization or social justice, so it’s important for everyone to be knowledgeable or take this into consideration when going into their future careers. They need to think about social justice and environmental issues and sustainability in general.”

College Eight’s incorporation of the pledge into its ceremony is unique, even for institutions that participate in the pledge.

“There’s not many [institutions] that actually incorporate the pledge into their ceremony,” Kittredge said. “The way we do it is that we ask students who have either taken it or plan to take it stand and be recognized by the audience.”

Kittredge recalls how he first learned about the pledge when he worked as clubs, activities and new student programs officer at Humboldt State University, one of the first institutions to participate in the pledge.

At Humboldt State, students would table in their quads to raise awareness about the pledge and inform other students about how they could take it. For College Eight seniors, taking the pledge is as easy as going online to the college’s commencement website. Estes and Wackenhut, both part of College Eight’s graduation committee, will also table at rehearsal and on graduation day to ensure that every senior who wants to take the pledge can and will.

“I feel like [students] are not really informed about it at all yet,” Estes said. “It’s only its second year, so only the graduating class hears of it actually. They might want to think about telling the freshmen when they first come in, that when they graduate they’ll have a chance to be part of the GPA.”

However, Kittredge stresses that the pledge is a personal decision and students will by no means be held accountable.

“It’s just a voluntary pledge. No one follows up with them to say, ‘You’re doing this and you’re not doing that,’” Kittredge said. “I think it’s more a statement of value, of someone’s individual values and choices.”

What if a shovel, a seed and a conversation could change the world?

Students of University Repair find themselves asking such questions every day.

University Repair is a project founded by students of the Kresge Garden Co-op, and acts as a class that tends to and upkeeps the Kresge Garden. The group holds weekly World Café meetings where students discuss themes relating to educational and environmental issues important to the university.

Self-proclaimed as a “thriving powerhouse of creativity and abundance,” University Repair incorporates gardening and conversation with the students’ vision of a “regenerative culture.” This vision means focusing in on the cultivation of an abundant, thriving, and self-perpetuating social and ecological community. Inspired by the collaborative and community-based initiatives of both the garden and the café, these regenerative visions are becoming a reality.

“[University Repair] is truly experiencing a renaissance, a rapidly growing number of individuals and groups involved with what we are doing,” said second-year Ryan Abelson, an environmental studies major, teaching assistant for the Kresge co-op class and participant in the World Café. “The increased amount of human interest has allowed for the creative imagination of the collective intelligence to flourish in many unique directions.”

The Campus Sustainability Council (CSC) collaborates with the university to finance environmentally friendly and sustainability-promoting organizations on campus, according to a UC Santa Cruz Student Union Assembly (SUA) description. A ballot measure passed in 2005, meant to ensure and improve the quality of campus sustainability, charges students $6 in student fees each quarter to fund these types of environmentally friendly efforts. The CSC then allocates this sum of money to various organizations bi-annually. 

After seeing a recent increase in interest and activity in their program, University Repair students sent in a grant proposal to the CSC on April 30.  They asked for $35,000 of the total measure money.

If they secure the grant money, University Repair will be able to purchase new tools for the Kresge gardening class, remove dead oak trees, expand the co-op class, provide TA and faculty stipends, and improve garden infrastructure overall. The money would also help expand the World Café program to other colleges across campus, increase the size of their gatherings, and sponsor similar universitywide forums.

“I see it as a generous thank-you gift or investment from our tuition fees back into the hands of students, so we can create the change we see and desire,” Abelson said.

The Kresge Garden

The Kresge Garden was created during the late 1970s and early 1980s by students and volunteers. Since then, the garden has seen periods of fallow and flourish. With the creation of the Kresge Garden co-op and class in 2007, students and faculty have witnessed the garden’s immense growth. Every year, the class has grown in size, with 29 students currently enrolled. 

First-year Ayden Graham, a music major enrolled in the co-op class for the first time this quarter, has seen and tasted the fruits of hard labor through the work he has done.          

“It’s been delightful,” Graham said. “It’s cool to look around and see, ‘Oh yeah, I planted that entire bed right there. I dug and planted it, and it’s going really well.’” 

However, the growth in student interest has caused a lack of available resources. Many of the tools used in the garden have either been donated or scavenged by the students themselves. As of now, there is only one completely functional watering can. 

Though a seemingly simple request, second-year University Repair student Phineas Ellis suggested that achieving sustainable goals will be very difficult without more gardening tools. 

“If we’re working towards sustainability, I think everyone should know how to garden, or at least have an opportunity to do that, to work with a shovel,” Ellis said, “but we don’t have enough shovels.” 

Dave Shaw, instructor of the class, said that new tools are vital if the co-op’s visions of expansion are to be fulfilled.

“For the garden to grow with ease and grace it’s necessary to have the right tools,” he said. “Will our project be stopped if we don’t have funds for the best quality tools? No, it will continue, because it’s not dependent upon any outside force. It will grow. But in what way? How easy and graceful will it be?” 

With the money, students at the garden intend to maximize their efficiency. Though certain tools such as watering cans and forged bulldog spades must be bought brand-new, other tools will be purchased at flea markets or through Craigslist.com.

First-year Anna Capurso has been involved with the garden since winter quarter and is now a teaching assistant for the co-op class. She said that the grant money would help students focus more on gardening and less on finding ways around faulty materials.

“[The grant] would … allow us to focus on expanding the vision even more, rather than attempting to find outside resources and continue to work with broken tools,” she said. “It would just ease the process.”

Included in Capurso’s and other students’ vision for the co-op is the plan to help other colleges have thriving community gardens of their own.

“I would like to see every college have a thriving garden, as well as a class to accompany it and teach incoming students the ways of gardening,” she said. “I see the Kresge Garden co-op as a foundation for the other gardens … we can lend our time and resources.”

The World Café

The World Café began in 2007 as an avenue to gather students on a weekly basis and serve as a collaborative space for all students to dialogue about campus issues, which University Repair sees as a vital step toward enacting change in UCSC.

“The World Café is the time to put the shovels down and use our most fundamental of tools: the power of conversation,” Abelson said. “When the body is well-fed it becomes a lot easier to entertain a dialogue around current meaningful issues.”

Every week a new topic is discussed, ranging from sustainability to budget cuts proposed by the administration.

On May 12, students and faculty members gathered to discuss the cuts that the community studies program may face next year. Posters pinned along the walls provided thought-provoking quotes and phrases. One of them, from Mark Twain, read “Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.”

First-year Amelia Baker, a community studies major herself, has been integral to the writing and submitting of the grant proposal. She led the May 12 meeting and continues to take an active role in both the café and the garden.

“All you’re really doing when you host a World Café is providing a space and a time for people to connect,” Baker said. “It always turns out interesting. Most of the work is in just showing up.”

Though those involved say these café meetings will continue regardless of whether the grant goes through or not, the grant funds would help to strengthen and enlarge their gatherings.

“It is truly a rare place in which we all become teachers and students to listen and also share personal involvement, concerns or knowledge,” Abelson said. “The creative collective intelligence really has no boundaries to imagine when a positive place of nonviolent equality and good food and tea is created, which is exactly what we aim to create in the garden as well.”

A Regenerative Culture

The University Repair project describes itself as “an incubator for projects which regenerate themselves.” A large theme of the grant proposal revolves around the idea of “integrated eco-social design,” a concept that plans to “integrate ecological and social elements of sustainability to build a regenerative culture at UCSC.”

Dimitri “Dima” Zadorozhny does not take the Kresge co-op class for credit, but has contributed an immense amount of time toward the writing of the grant proposal and frequently works on improving the quality of the garden. He regularly attends World Café meetings, where he takes an active role in the discussions.

“Regenerative culture is a concept that builds on the concept of ‘sustainability,’” Zadorozhny said. “While sustainability simply means being able to use something over and over without depleting it, regenerative culture means being able to use something over and over in a way that allows it to grow more abundant, and there is actually more of it because of your interaction with it.”

This is University Repair’s ultimate goal: to create a culture that is regenerative, thriving, and constantly growing through self-perpetuation — rather than a culture that merely sustains. 

In order to spread this message to the greater UCSC community, University Repair hopes to use some of the grant money to develop a quarterly workshop designed to teach gardening skills and provide seeds to interested students. A similar workshop, planned for the winter quarter of 2010 — pending grant approval — would teach students tree-growing techniques and provide them with a tree of their own.

“I don’t want to just sustain the garden, I want the garden to be regenerating so each year it is fertile and every year there is more and more,” University Repair student Ellis said. “The grant will help this place be that much more effective in what it does.”

Ayden Graham commented on the regenerative lessons he’s learned since starting his work in the garden and attending the World Café meetings.

“It’s really exciting to understand [gardening] because I feel like even with this small amount of knowledge that I’ve gained here, I can take plants and plant them in a small plot in a backyard whenever,” Graham said. “I get a house, and start a garden.” 

Visions of the Future 

Though at print time it was still undecided whether or not the grant would pass, students optimistically looked to the future. 

While teaching assistant Capurso, like many of the students involved with University Repair, hopes to see money sent toward the gardening program and the World Café, she said that the vision of the gardeners will remain strong regardless of whether the group secures the grant funds.

“I believe that we would still be completely functional and continue to grow without funding,” Capurso said. “We are a determined group of people and we can accomplish a lot.”

Instructor Dave Shaw believes that while the money is important, the opportunity to establish a relationship with the CSC is a bigger step toward fulfilling their long-term goals.

“The fact that we’re building a core group of interested participants and the fact that we’re in a conversation now with more stakeholders … is super important,” Shaw said.

Zadorozhny agreed that though the grant is important, other things are more important than the money, and the group members will do whatever it takes to keep the garden growing.

“If we don’t get the grant, things will definitely keep going,” Zadorozhny said. “It’ll just be trickier. We’ll have to get more creative.” 

University Repair holds potluck meetings each Monday from 5 to 6 p.m. The World Café meets every Tuesday at 7 p.m. Both meetings are located in the Kresge Student Lounge. The Kresge Garden is open weekdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. For more information, visit theworldcafe.com.

Photo by Isaac Miller.

Craig Pearson hates plastic. 

It’s 9 a.m. on a brisk and windy morning at the Santa Cruz landfill, where a fence bordering an exposed mound of garbage is lined with Pearson’s archnemesis: single-use plastic bags.

“We just cleaned this fence off earlier this morning and look at it now,” Pearson said. “There’s gotta be hundreds more now.”

As Superintendent of Waste Disposal for the city of Santa Cruz, Pearson has been fighting an uphill battle against plastic, and everything else Santa Cruz residents throw away, for 20 years.

“Plastic, plastic, plastic,” Pearson said with a grimace. “There’s no reason people should be using that.”

But use it we do, and in massive quantities. 

According to a recent special report on waste by The Economist, the average American produces over 700 kg, or 1,500 lbs, of trash per year. Landfills house the remnants of our wasteful habits and consumption patterns, with every plastic cup, candy wrapper, popcorn bag, sushi container, toothpaste tube and plastic fork that we buy, use and throw away every day with little thought. 

With a growing population, increasingly threatened planet, and ever-shrinking supply of habitable land, it seems that wasteful habits cannot be sustainable forever. There simply will not always be enough space to cast off our refuse. 

Modern waste habits are driven by one-time-use convenience, said environmental studies professor Margaret Fitzsimmons, whose research focuses on resource management.

“In terms of domestic waste, packaging is the major component,” Fitzsimmons said. “People are too accustomed to the convenience of just picking a package up and then throwing it away.”

Photo by Isaac Miller.

The Inner Workings of Waste

At the Santa Cruz landfill, Pearson is running an independent enterprise unfunded by tax revenues, and his precious commodity is space. He operates what is called a “sanitary landfill,” meaning the waste must be covered.

“If I can smash it, push it down, or put a ton of garbage in a cubic yard, that’s more profit for me,” Pearson said.

The fact that waste even has to be managed in such a space-conscious manner is somewhat of a modern phenomenon, and serves as a testament to how much waste we actually produce. The Santa Cruz landfill began as an “open canyon dump” in 1926, into which residents freely disposed of their waste. Because of the volume of trash today, the site must be carefully regulated, managed and spatially calculated to ensure room for future generations’ trash.

“I don’t think people really realize the ‘end’ of their stuff,” Pearson said.

That “end” is located just two miles north of Santa Cruz off Highway 1. If it weren’t for the persistent squawking of seagulls, a visitor to the area might not even realize he or she is standing on a literal mountain of garbage, over 80 years in the making. 

This constant barrage of garbage means that the more trash Pearson can divert, or keep out of the landfill, the longer the site will have open space to keep running.

“We’re so regulated and it’s so expensive to run a landfill, we find it’s cheaper to recycle,” Pearson said.

Santa Cruz has a somewhat efficient rate of diversion. Sixty percent of everything that is produced in the city of Santa Cruz is diverted from the landfill for beneficial reuses including recycling, composting, e-waste and scrap metals, Pearson said. 

The landfill is constructed in a series of “cells” that are engineered and subsequently filled with garbage one at a time and then covered. Carefully planned and measured, these cells are constructed by a team of soil experts, geologists and engineers who seek to maximize space and minimize environmental impact. One cell can be 40 feet wide, 100 feet long, and 100 feet deep and can last anywhere from five to 10 years before being covered. 

There are two major environmental issues that every modern landfill is forced to deal with: methane production and water contamination, Pearson said.

To tackle methane production, which occurs when garbage decomposes in an anaerobic environment, methane wells sequester the substance, which is then either harnessed in an energy facility or destroyed by flaring it off.

To prevent “leachate,” or contaminated water, from entering the groundwater systems, the bottom of the cells are lined with impermeable clay soil or plastic sheeting. Once the cells are full of trash, they are covered with clay soil, mulch and seedlings from organic compost matter to prevent soil erosion. 

The end result is a landscape that resembles rolling grassy hills, except the hills are massive piles of our trash.

Photo by Isaac Miller.

Waste Watchers

People’s refuse has always served as an indicator of what day-to-day life was like at any given time in history. Anthropology professor Judith Habicht-Mauche, whose research focus is in archeology, explains that “garbology,” or the study of modern trash from an archeological perspective, is widely used to study the material culture of today’s society.

“I think that garbage tells a lot about who we are,” Habicht-Mauche said. “It tells us about the material remains of our day-to-day life.”

Just last year, Santa Cruzans threw away 52 thousand tons of trash — excluding recyclables and organics, which are diverted from the landfill. From a garbologist’s perspective, the contents of our landfill might reveal the underlying values and trends of our community. To Pearson, the contents of his landfill often reveal how careless people can be when kicking something to the can.

“I have to pay someone $20 an hour to clean up other people’s garbage,” Pearson said as he watched employees filter through what is supposed to be a pile of organic waste. “I mean, why do you throw [plastic] in a green waste can? Is it because you’re cheap, uneducated, lazy — it’s ridiculous.”

Habicht-Mauch explained that the carelessness people tend to have when it comes to their disposal habits, in addition to its universal presence in human society, is part of the reason why trash can be so informative.

“Archeologists will often say how democratic garbage is,” Habicht-Mauch said. “It tells us about everyone’s life because everyone gets represented in garbage. We can see rich people, poor people, men and women, young and old.”

Furthermore, when it comes to people’s consumption habits — what they eat, as well as what they buy and then don’t eat — trash is honest when people often are not.

“[Trash] tells us about what we do, not what we say we do,” Habicht-Mauche said.

Photo by Isaac Miller.

Cutting Down the Crap

It is becoming increasingly clear to environmentalists that our unsustainable habits cannot continue unabated. 

As the Waste Prevention campaign coordinator for the Student Environmental Center (SEC), second-year student Nicky Chronis seeks to change the way that students think about what they buy and consume.

“Everyone is so busy that I think they feel justified in not caring about it,” Chronis said. “I’m taking into account future generations and I don’t want them to face the consequences of what I’m throwing away now.”

The SEC campaign encourages the university to make more responsible purchasing decisions, such as 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper. It also promotes waste-free campus events, starting with the summer 2008 new student orientation going zero-waste for the first time.

Silas Snyder serves as the resource conservation coordinator for university housing services at UCSC and works closely with waste reduction committees at the various colleges to reduce the amount of trash that we truck to the landfill. Snyder said that the solution is part individual, part systematic.

“Part of it is a global effort — don’t put anything in the trash, reduce, buy in bulk, etc.,” Snyder said. “The other part of it is providing individuals with the opportunity to properly process their waste through recycling.”

At the university level, the University of California Office of the President has outlined a systemwide waste policy that plans a zero-waste UC system by the year 2020. Snyder said UCSC is currently at a 50 percent diversion rate, expected to increase to 75 percent by 2012.

Zero waste is an ambitious goal for such a large system, and both Snyder and Chronis consider a comprehensive and in-house composting system on campus vital to achieving that goal. 

The recent introduction of trayless dining in the campus dining halls cut down food waste from 3 to 4 ounces per plate to 1.75 ounces per plate, Chronis said. However, only the College Eight dining hall is equipped with a food pulper to convert this wasted food into compostable material, which is then outsourced to a local farmer. Chronis explained that in order to achieve zero waste, the school cannot continue sending its compost off-site.

“We produce so much compost as it is that the city can’t even handle taking it all,” Chronis said.

There is a long way to go, but a rapidly changing planet requires our commitment, Snyder said.

“The students who are going to be here when we have to be zero-waste are second-graders right now,” he said. “Can you imagine all the climactic change, landfills filling up, and ocean pollution that’s going to occur until then? It’s going to be a very different place.”

It is this kind of mindful awareness of waste that Pearson hopes will become more prevalent. Indeed, for someone who spends his days surrounded by the trash of 60,000 people, Pearson has managed to not resign himself to the fact that humans are driven to degrade the earth. In addition to abolishing the reviled single-use plastic bag, Pearson hopes people will begin to think less about one-time convenience, and more about reuse.

“It’s a circle, you can’t have something that goes in a straight line and stops,” Pearson said. “People have to start thinking that way in everything they buy and use.”

  

Photo courtesy of Dennis Schwartz.

On April Fools’ Day, Daniel Press, the head of the environmental studies department, wrote an opinion piece in the San Jose Mercury News deriding UCSC’s recent purchases of renewable energy certificates, calling them a “feel-good scam” and saying that the school, which purchased certificates for 57,000 megawatt-hours of clean energy in 2007, “was getting fleeced by green-energy scammers.” Despite the cover date, however, his piece was no joke, and it was completely wrong.

In 2006, UCSC students voted to raise their tuition by $3 in order to purchase renewable energy certificates to reduce the carbon footprint of the school’s electricity use. Because its utility, PG&E, doesn’t have a green power program that would allow the school to pay extra for a greener mix, the school chose to buy certificates. In 2006, they were for California-based geothermal power. In 2007, over half came from California wind, the rest from a mixture of biomass in Florida and wind in Oklahoma, Texas, and the Dakotas.

In his piece, Press said “certificate brokers have persuaded hundreds of colleges to buy the ‘environmental attributes’ of wind, landfill gas and solar energy – but not the electricity itself.” And he is exactly right. Renewable energy certificates are a market-based answer to a simple physics problem that Press understands well: once electricity is on the grid, you can’t route “clean” electrons to those who pay extra for it and away from those who don’t.

Part of that has to do with the sheer complexity of the electric grid. With the need to respond instantly to shifts in demand and the lack of ability to store energy, the grid is a deeply intertwined, delicate system, cobbled together from midcentury infrastructure designed to service always-on coal plants and the comparatively recent additions of intermittent renewable resources like wind and solar. It’s a mixed-up, tumbled-around creature, and the power you get out of the outlet under your desk is a mashup of electrons from any number of sources, much like a cup of water dipped from a river formed by a thousand small tributaries. Trying to divine where each drop came from is impossible.

Normally we don’t care about the details – the lights turn on just the same whether the electricity was generated from coal plants, wind power, or gerbil wheels. But now that we’re demanding cleaner electricity from renewable resources, we want to be able to pay extra to get our electrons from the wind and sun, not belching smokestacks. By paying extra for green power, so the argument goes, it should incite investors to build renewable energy, which is more expensive to build than fossil fuel plants and has a longer payback time. But if we can’t route green power straight to our homes, how can we give people and universities the ability to send an unequivocal economic signal to build more wind farms and solar arrays?

The idea, first instituted in the late 1990s, was a pretty revolutionary one, and went like this: assign every megawatt hour of clean energy a unique serial number (a certificate), and then sell the certificate as the sole claim to that generation, but independent of the actual electrons. That way the wind farm has two things it can sell: first, the undifferentiated electricity (it’s not “wind power” anymore) to the local utility, and second, all the good environmental benefits of that electricity embodied in the certificate, which can then be sold to the highest bidder on national commodities markets. The final buyer (say, UCSC) has sole claim over the renewable attributes, and once the transaction takes place, the serial number is retired so no one else – not the state it was generated in, or even the owner of the wind farm – can claim the environmental benefits of that megawatt hour.

There’s no other system quite like it, but it works. Individuals and companies can buy renewable energy whether their utility offers it or not, and renewable energy generators get paid for more than just the electricity they produce. They are compensated for the environmental benefits we all enjoy. Before this system of certificates, our common natural resources were given away free to industry to use up and pollute, and there was no financial gain in avoiding the environmental pillaging that was fully allowable by law. The system of renewable energy certificates is an artificial system, but it’s effective as both a way to monetize the act of not polluting, and to incentivize new renewable development. All this in a market-based system of commodity trading where the market determines the price.

And here are the results: wind power capacity has grown on average by 24 percent per year in the U.S. since 2000, 46 percent in 2007 and over 50 percent in 2008. Certificate prices rise and fall but have trended sharply upward over the last decade, improving financing options for new facilities. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in the last decade households and businesses collectively have provided a larger market for new renewable energy developers than all state government renewable programs combined, and these voluntary purchases support more than 4,000 MW of new renewable energy capacity nationally, steadily increasing over time. Every state uses certificates to track their renewable energy generation and progress toward their renewable energy goals, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recognizes big purchasers of renewable energy like UCSC and Intel as part of its Green Power Partnership program.

Columbia Energy Partners, a developer of wind energy projects in the northwest, finds certificates are crucial for getting new projects in the ground. “Wind projects are immensely capital intensive, often requiring funds way in advance of project development,” they said. “As wind turbines are becoming more and more expensive, you have to have every revenue stream on the back-end to cover your costs. Renewable energy certificates are critical to our projects. Apart from the financial imperatives, in the presence of global warming, any incentive for renewable energy only makes sense.”

Basin Electric Power Cooperative, a utility purchaser of wind energy in North Dakota, has a similar story. “We started out planning for one turbine, but then when we started seeing the interest from the U.S. government and from [consumers] in purchasing renewable energy certificates, we decided that we could build more wind. Certificates make wind competitive with coal or other traditional forms of energy.”

Because of its purchases, UCSC is No. 6 on the U.S. EPA’s Green Power Partnership Top 20 College & University list, just below the entire California State University system. Chancellor Blumenthal is a signatory of the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment, a pledge by over 600 college and university presidents to at least partly reduce their schools’ environmental impacts by purchasing or producing at least 15 percent of their institutions’ electricity consumption from renewable sources. The only way this purchasing can be done is through certificates, and in purchasing 100 percent renewable energy, the school has done far more than the minimum required by the commitment.

President Obama’s energy plan calls for increasing the nation’s use of renewable energy to 25 percent by 2025, up from the current 2 percent. Twenty-five percent might not sound like much, considering the urgency of the climate crisis, and it is far less than the 100 percent goal Al Gore challenged the nation to last year, but getting there will take all the political will, private investment, and public action we can muster.

This means that we have to start cutting back on our energy use and buying renewable energy now, just as the school is doing. Renewable energy sales last year to individuals and businesses were responsible for more demand than all the state goals put together, and we need both markets if we’re going to build enough renewable energy to wean ourselves off foreign supplies, stop destructive coal mining, and stave off the coming climate crisis. Along with reducing our overall energy use, buying renewable energy is one of the most important environmental steps we can take, and UCSC should be commended for doing both. Keep it up.

 —–

Jeff Swenerton is communications director of the Center for Resource Solutions, a San Francisco-based nonprofit working to advance sustainable energy. He can be contacted at jeff@resource-solutions.org.

A glance at the food labels in any given dining hall would prove our campus chummy with the organic movement. We utilize gardens and food co-ops, and we even have compost stations at all 10 colleges. So, we’re doing all we can, right?

Wrong.

However environmentally conscious we strive to be, there are still copious amounts of food waste and trash at the end of the day, each and every day. Right now, our campus has a diversion rate of about 50 percent, meaning that half of all the waste we produce goes to beneficial reuses like compost or recycling. The other half takes a one-way trip to the dump.

So it’s true, we are flexing our greener muscles. But it’s time to up our game and get more aggressive. A friendly gesture toward a greener tomorrow simply is not enough anymore. A few random compost bins here and there won’t cut it. 

The UC Office of the President has put forth a goal for future waste practices UC-wide, hoping to up our current diversion rate to 75 percent by 2012 and dump only a quarter of our waste. By 2020 we are aiming for a zero-waste policy, reusing everything and bidding the local landfill a permanent adieu.

Although lofty, this goal is not out of reach. But UCSC has to take some progressive measures soon, or this vision of a cleaner campus could very well get dumped, along with that 50 percent of our oh-so-reusable waste.

As a means of achieving this goal, it’s time we revamped our compost system. Currently only semi-effective in its disjointed college-by-college state, UCSC’s practice of this sometimes smelly art form isn’t living up to potential. First of all, the UCSC waste that is composted is not even handled on campus. We ship it off so those better equipped can literally do our dirty work for us. With the amount of students here and the sheer strength of the average college appetite, this route will no longer be effective if we plan to achieve our zero-waste goal. We eat too much and throw away too much to send everything offsite. Self-sufficient sustainability is the name of the game. Put on your big-kid pants, UCSC, and learn to take care of your own mess.

What we need is a cohesive system, a campus united under old banana peels, wilting lettuce, and eventually, rich, reusable soil. It is necessary that the various compost stations around campus have communication, and that we gear up enough as a school to handle the waste we produce. This would give us a jump-start in claiming this zero-waste beacon, and also make for a strong system with some staying power. It’s a solid first step, and while it’s not the only road toward zero waste, it’s definitely one of the most important.

The good news is we just have to keep doing what we’re good at here in Santa Cruz: play up that eco-friendly vibe like it’s going out of style. But we could certainly do with a little more organization and fine-tuning. And where better to hone our skills than the place where we stuff our faces? The College Eight dining hall has the right idea, utilizing a “food pulper” that mashes leftover food together to make it more compostable. This is a squishy step in the right direction. In fact, adding a pulper in every campus dining hall could be just the step needed to help us build the foundation for an improved compost system. 

The intention is good so far, but now it’s time to really organize and do something constructive with the heaping pile of waste before us. Let’s dig in.

Illustration by Joe Lai.

Fourth-year Antonio Bautista is on a climate-changing mission. Bautista, an environmental studies major, is the climate action intern for the Chancellor’s Undergraduate Internship Program (CUIP) and is one of three undergraduate student members of the Chancellor’s Council on Climate Action. 

This council, which is composed of faculty, administrators and students, recently released the first-ever draft of the Climate Action Plan, which outlines UCSC’s commitment to reduce its carbon emissions in the coming decade. 

Bautista is rallying to get students to both read the plan and submit their comments and feedback to the council for revision during the public comment period, which extends until May 8.

The plan takes inventory of the university’s current greenhouse gas emission levels, which are at roughly 79,726 metric tons of CO2 equivalents. The plan aims for that figure to drop 2,000 levels by 2014, eliminating over 14,000 metric tons of CO2 in the process. With other milestones along the way, the ultimate goal is a carbon-neutral campus.

Bautista spoke with City on a Hill Press to explain the campus’s carbon forecast and how the plan hopes to achieve it. 

—–

CHP: How did the process of making a climate plan for the university begin?

AB: The chancellor signed on to what is called the American College and University Presidential Climate Commitment (ACUPCC). When you agree to that, you agree to create a climate action plan. It was a student, though, who first went to the chancellor and bugged him by saying, “When will you agree to do a climate action plan? Because we haven’t done it and we need to do it now.”

From that, the chancellor went ahead and created the Chancellor’s Council on Climate Action and approached Daniel Press, chair of the environmental studies department. As the chair of the climate council, [Press] got everyone together on a task force, including Larry Pageler from Transportation and Parking Services (TAPS), Alan Spearot from the economics department, Ali Shakouri from the engineering department and three student interns, among others. 

The plan sets forth ambitious goals. How are they going to be implemented?

The Climate Action Plan outlines some of the methods, including putting solar panels on facilities here and doing more energy efficiency projects. It also focuses on trying to change the mobile ridership on campus by introducing more bike paths and bike shuttles to use those kinds of methods to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

Why is student input and feedback about the Climate Action Plan so important?

Basically, right now the Climate Action Plan is just a document. It could easily just become another document with no importance. The administration needs to know that students are interested in this and support it and that they’re going to be the watchdogs. We’ll read all the student comments we receive and then incorporate all the useful ones into the official Climate Action Plan. If students aren’t vocal about its implementation, it will be weak. Especially because of the budget cuts right now, sustainability isn’t a priority.

In your opinion, what’s missing from the Climate Action Plan?

We’ve developed some of the clear paths that we’re going to take to achieve our greenhouse gas emission quotas. … Also, it clearly outlines that energy efficiency is going to be one of the routes by which we’re going to achieve a reduction in emissions. 

What’s missing from the energy efficiency part of the plan is the how. What projects are going to be undertaken and when? How much are they going to cost? It clearly lists energy efficiency as one of the routes to get us to cut down our emissions, but it doesn’t say how we’re going to do it.

Another component that is missing is behavioral changes, which would include anything from teaching students how to reduce their energy and water consumption to really changing their lifestyles. We don’t include anything on that and it clearly needs to be a big part and could be a big cut to emissions.

In a time when our university is experiencing extreme budgetary stress, why is this important?

It’s important to have a clear plan on how we’re going to cut our greenhouse gas emissions. It’s especially important right now, because the United States is figuring out a way to do that too. We’ve gone from really debating if global warming is a problem to saying that it definitely is. We need a document that involves every student and that every student knows how to participate in.

How supportive has Chancellor Blumenthal been throughout this process?

He supports it, but he hasn’t supported it in the way it matters, and that’s the implementation side of things. In order to get to that point [of implementation] we need to know that the money is going to be available. The source of funding is for the chancellor to figure out, but we’re hoping it comes from his office. Since we’ve signed on and committed to reducing our greenhouse gas levels, we have to do it. We’re only as good as our word.

Illustration by Rachel Edelstein.

Everywhere you turn, it’s there. 

Climate change, as little front-page attention as it receives, is what many experts agree to be the single greatest threat facing Planet Earth, and all life on it, in all its four-and-a-half billion years of existence. 

Frankly, the thought of a planet — my planet — burnt to a crisp and thus completely unable to sustain any form of life terrifies me. Many times, after reading the latest reports on the exponential rate of polar ice caps melting or the extinction of an unprecedented number of species, I felt hopeless and vulnerable. These problems are too big, and the people aware enough to care are too powerless when compared to the monolith system of consumption that got us here in the first place. The world is going to hell in a handbasket and, I’m sorry future generations, there’s nothing much we can do about it. Good luck.

At first, my despair was paralyzing. Literally. I’d cower inside for hours, hiding from the precarious outside, knowing that the world as I know it could be gone in just a few years. 

However, amid all the apocalyptic predictions I suddenly became distressingly aware of after watching “An Inconvenient Truth,” there was an unwavering shimmer of hope. The silver lining was small, but it was undoubtedly shining.

It came in the form of scientists saying there were other ways, that it wasn’t too late to save the planet and the precious life that calls it home. It came dressed in suits and leather loafers, drafting bills aimed at making the environment our top political priority. It came clad in organic cotton and Birkenstocks, protesting capitalism and neoliberalism at the G20 summit, riding bikes and buying local, ready to dig deep in the trenches, planting seeds of change through the sowing of home gardens.

But hope has come most powerfully, in my life, in the form of my peers. 

I’m inspired by the wheeled warriors who bike up Bay Street instead of driving a car. I’m energized by students petitioning for campus initiatives that would move us toward a greener, more sustainable campus. I’m galvanized by the Coalition to Save Community Studies, which, while not directly related to the environment, stands as a testament to students who could have bowed down to the administration, but who instead are fighting tooth-and-nail to make sure the very heart of their department isn’t cut out. 

We’ve been indoctrinated since the day we were born that we don’t have any power, leaving us to depend on others to make the decisions for us. These de facto policy makers, sitting in their ivory towers far removed from reality and the people on the street, have led us down a path towards economic and ecological destruction. 

Slowly but surely, people are realizing they hold the most powerful weapon of all — the power of choice. Seventy percent of the population elected Barack Obama, a far cry from the usual presidential suspects, to be the leader of the free world. He has chosen, with all that’s on his colossal plate, to make the environment one of his top priorities. By appointing Stephen Chu, the focused and forward-thinking physicist from Berkeley, as his Secretary of Energy, Obama is signaling to the world that we have a problem, and we need to deal with it ASAP.  

Daily, we can make choices that will enrich our lives and simultaneously protect our planet. Choosing to ride a bike, taking the bus, switching out our lightbulbs, buying local, voting for environmentally-oriented policies, electing environmentally-focused public officials, emailing Chancellor Blumenthal and demanding a comprehensive climate action plan… the list of the minor and major things we can choose to do that will, in the short and long term, save us from ourselves is endless. 

Already this quarter, students are realizing what power they have inside themselves. Even more importantly, they are realizing what power they have together. 

Our own power can be frightening. It can be exhilarating. But we can’t afford to sit back and watch as the world falls to pieces.