Mark Fiore suggests that the celebration of Valentine’s Day is, um, complicated:
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Dmitriy T.M. sent in a link to a 13-minute video in which Van Jones discusses the problems with patting ourselves on the back too much every time we put a plastic bottle in the recycle bin instead of the trash, and the need to recognize the link between environmental concerns and other social issues:
Also see our posts on the race between energy efficiency and consumption, exposure to environmental toxins and social class, race and exposure to toxic-release facilities, reframing the environmental movement, tracking garbage in the ocean, mountains of waste waiting to be recycled, framing anti-immigration as pro-environment, and conspicuous environmentalism.
Full transcript after the jump, thanks to thewhatifgirl.
In two of my favorite earlier posts, I featured photographs by artist Edward Burtynsky. These photos depicted the outcomes of our consumerist societies: giant repositories of recycle-able materials and the consequences of resource extraction. In the same vein, J. Henry Fair has been taking photographs of industrial sites and environmental disasters from an even more distant place: small planes.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
I recently saw a great example of greenwashing — that is, marketing a product as eco-friendly based on questionable or rather superficial characteristics of the production process. This decal was on the front of a calendar, touting it as “eco-positive”:
What was eco-positive (a term that has no real meaning or standards) about it? Was it made from recycled paper? No. Maybe some statement about non-toxic ink? Nope. It’s eco-positive because they used the scraps from producing the calendar to make you a very special gift…two bookmarks tucked inside the calendar.
I’m all for using scrap material, but that alone seems to be a pretty minor detail upon which to then market the entire product as an “eco-positive” one, especially given that paper scraps from manufacturing processes are often reused already (notice how often paper products say they’re recycled from “pre-consumer” waste).
Annie Leonard tackles e-waste (what happens after we’re done with our computers, cell phones, etc) in the latest 7-minute edition in her Story of Stuff series (see also her first story of stuff and her analysis of bottled water and cap and trade).
Via Reports from the Economic Front.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Dmitriy T.M. and Jeff H. sent in a link to Mapping the Measure of America, a website by the Social Science Research Council that provides an amazing amount of information about various measures of economic/human development in the U.S. Here’s a map showing median personal (not household) earnings in 2009:
The District of Columbia has the highest, at $40,342; the lowest is Arkansas, at $23,470 (if you go to their website, you can scroll over the bars on the left and it will list each state and its median income, or you can hover over a state).
You can break the data down by race and sex as well. Here’s median personal income for Native American women, specifically (apparently there is only sufficient data to report for a few states):
Native American women’s highest median income, in Washington ($22,181), is lower than the overall median income in Arkansas, which is the lowest in the U.S. as we saw above.
Here is the percent of children under age 6 who live below the poverty line (for all races):
Life expectancy at birth differs by nearly 7 years between the lowest — 74.81 years in Mississippi — to the highest — 81.48 years in Hawaii:
It’s significantly lower for African American men, however, with a life expectancy of only 66.22 years in D.C. (again, several states had insufficient data):
The site has more information than I could ever fully discuss here (including crime rates, various health indicators, all types of educational attainment measures, commuting time, political participation, sex of elected officials, environmental pollutants, and on and on), and it’s fairly addictive searching different topics, looking data up by zip code to get an overview of a particular area, and so on. Have fun!
An NPR photo essay by Hugh Holland offers a fun glimpse into the evolution of skateboarding. Holland explains that a drought in mid-1970s Southern California led to the mass draining of swimming pools. Kids with skateboards took one look at the empty pools and invented vertically-driven trick skateboarding as we know it today. According to Wikipedia:
This started the vert trend in skateboarding. With increased control, vert skaters could skate faster and perform more dangerous tricks, such as slash grinds and frontside/backside airs.
Ah the serendipity of cultural innovation.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Lake Mead (1958):
Lake Mead (2010):
Via the Earth Observatory.
These two starkly different and somewhat frightening images don’t represent a linear diminishment of Lake Mead. Instead, they are two extremes on a naturally fluctuating water level:
This fluctuating water level isn’t, further, a natural problem. It has, however, become an increasingly social problem. It provides water for the Southwest, a portion of the country that has become thirstier and thirstier. From Maggie Koerth-Baker at BoingBoing:
Take, for instance, Las Vegas, which gets 90 percent of its water from Lake Mead. Back in the 1940s, fewer than 9,000 people lived there. In 2006, the population was estimated at more than 550,000, and growing. Rapidly.
This makes large numbers of people vulnerable to these natural fluctuations in ways that they never were before and potentially creates human disasters out of our own poor planning and resource management. If climate change exacerbates this problem, and it very well might, then the reliability of our water supply is even more fragile.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
