environment/nature

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.

In the TED video below, Lisa Margonelli of the New America Foundation Energy Policy Initiative gives a fascinating 17-minute talk on the political psychology and the political economy of oil… and how the former distracts us from the latter.

Among other revelations, she tells us that:

1.  Oil pumps are purposefully designed to look like ATMs to make us feel better about using them.

2.  Having a car that runs predicts employment more than a GED.

3.  Oil production reform has amounted, largely, to exporting the risk to other countries, and…

4. We pay for our oil dependence not only at the pump, but with our taxes.

Watch:

Via BoingBoing.

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.

This 8-minute video from Powering A Nation documents the fight of Kindra Arnesen to save her family and her Gulf Shores community. It’s a stirring portrait of how one family has been affected by the oil spill and is trying to fight back:

Via NPR.

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.

These Bed Stü shoes, sent in by Dmitriy T.M., are meant to appear as if they are covered in oil accumulated while cleaning up the BP oil spill in the gulf.

According to Selectism, 100% of the proceeds are going to help wildlife affected by the spill.

So Bed Stü makes no money on this collection, but gains a great deal of publicity and, potentially, good will from consumers.  And then some dude is going to be wearing shoes that look like they’re covered in oil at a garden party.

This looks to me like an example of “conspicuous conservation.”  The term was originally derived from the phrase “conspicuous consumption,” defined by Wikipedia as “lavish spending on goods and services acquired mainly for the purpose of displaying income or wealth.”  Conspicuous conservation, then, is the (often lavish) spending on “green” products designed mainly to advertise one’s environmentally-moral righteousness.

If you wear regular shoes and donate to the gulf spill clean up, your altruism is entirely invisible.  But if you buy these hideous things, everyone gets to know what a nice guy you are.

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.

In today’s edition of context is everything, this 1962 ad for the ironically-named Humble Oil and Refining Company brags that it produces enough energy to “melt 7 million tons of glacier!”

Text:

EACH DAY HUMBLE SUPPLIES ENOUGH ENERGY TO MELT 7 MILLION TONS OF GLACIER!

This giant glacier has remained unmelted for centuries. Yet, the petroleum energy Humble supplies- if converted into heat- could melt it at the rate of 80 tons each second! To meet the nation’s growing needs for energy, Humble has applied science to nature’s resources to become America’s Leading Energy Company. Working wonders with oil through research, Humble provides energy in many forms- to help heat our homes, power our transportation, and to furnish industry with a great variety of versatile chemicals. Stop at a Humble station for new Enco Extra gasoline, and see why the “Happy Motoring” sign is the World’s First Choice!

Ad and transcript borrowed from Ms. Marx.

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.

Abby Kinchy sent in a link to a story at Colorlines about where waste from BP’s Gulf oil leak is being disposed of. Nine landfills have been approved as disposal sites. Robert Bullard, who studies environmental racism (particular how toxic waste dumps are often located in neighborhoods where racial/ethnic minorities are over-represented), posted his calculations of the racial makeup of the areas surrounding these nine landfills over at Dissident Voices. This map from Colorlines shows the location of the landfills, the amount of waste (which includes “oily solids,” waste from the cleanup, and so on) sent there, and the percentage of people living within a 1-mile radius that are People of Color:

I looked up the % who aren’t non-Hispanic Whites for each state (as of 2008), just to provide some context:

• LA: 38.1
• MS: 41.3
• AL: 31.6
• FL: 39.7

So if we compare the neighborhoods simply to the % of POC in each state, there are 3 in LA, 1 in AL, and 1 in FL that have an over-representation of non-Whites and/or Hispanics. On the other hand, 3 landfills are in neighborhoods with racial/ethnic minority populations significantly below the state overall. This, of course, is a very rough measure, since different racial groups are not evenly spread across a state. I just wanted to provide at least some background info.

According to a story at the Miami Herald, operators of the landfills say there is no danger:

…operators of the landfills insist the BP garbage is not unprecedented and is suitable for the type of landfills they’ve selected: disposal sites that take household waste, as well as “special waste” like contaminated soil. They note much of the waste is generated by the cleanup operation itself: soiled cleanup coveralls, gloves, sandwich wrappers and drink containers.

They point out that the BP waste makes up a tiny amount of the material taken to these landfills each day.

However, residents are concerned because the landfills are regular municipal landfills, not designated for toxic waste (since the EPA has not categorized the waste as hazardous). The Associated Press discovered problems, including a truck that was leaking and left a trail of tar balls behind it, waste in containers that were not lined with the protective liners BP is supposed to use, and uncovered containers, including one in a state park that was leaking liquid from the previous night’s rain. The AP concluded, “…the handling and disposal of oily materials was haphazard at best.”

I’m not an environmental toxicologist, so whether or not the waste is hazardous or whether the landfills can keep it from seeping into groundwater is, obviously, beyond my ability to judge. I’m more interested in perceptions of risk and confidence in experts. There are distinct differences by gender and race, with women and non-Whites expressing higher concern about environmental pollution/dangers and higher perceptions of risk compared to men and Whites. In fact, White men stood out from all other groups, rating potential environmental risks significantly lower than every other group. In the U.S., the gender gap is not explained by differences in scientific knowledge.

Given these differences, discussions of environmental safety and risk are often very contentious. Experts in both the private and public sector are disproportionately White men. Regardless of scientific knowledge, they may underestimate the risks involved compared to how women with the same scientific knowledge would (I don’t have similar data on how scientific knowledge might affect the racial gap). Science doesn’t just provide us with objective facts; researchers and those applying their findings must interpret the data. Individuals with the exact same level of expertise may interpret the same data on the hazardousness (or lack thereof) of a particular type of waste very differently, without anyone being intentionally deceptive or more clearly biased.

And not all groups have equal faith in science or, more specifically, the people engaged in scientific research. Scientists in the 1800s used supposed objective measures to prove that Whites were superior to non-Whites (and, thus, to justify slavery) and conducted the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, in which they allowed Black men to suffer and die of syphilis just to see what happened despite having a cure available. And the hazards of materials or pollutants often aren’t immediately apparent and may become clear only later (or may differ for adults and children, or due to cumulative exposure over time, etc.), which scientific analyses may not predict.

I’m not arguing that scientists studying the toxicity of the BP oil waste don’t have any useful information about whether or not it poses any danger to human health, or that data doesn’t help us come to more accurate judgments than we would if we didn’t take such information into account. However, in situations such as these that may be framed, particularly by scientists themselves, as an example of uninformed public opinion vs. fact-based expertise, the differences in interpretations and the fears of local residents despite assurances by researchers may be based in a number of factors that make the story, and conflicts over perceptions of risk, much more complex than it might at first appear.

Sources:

• James Flynn, Paul Slovic, and C.K. Mertz. 1994. “Gender, Race, and Perception of Environmental Health Risks.” Risk Analysis 14(6): 1101-1107.
• Bernadette C. Hayes. 2001. “Gender, Scientific Knowledge, and Attitudes toward the Environment: A Cross-National Analysis.” Political Research Quarterly 54(3): 657-671.
• Paul Mohai. 1997. “Gender Differences in the Perception of Most Important Environmental Problems.” Race, Gender & Class 5(1): 153-169.

This 40-second commercial for HSBC bank, sent in by Michelle F., is an excellent example of the way that non-white and non-Western people are often portrayed as more deeply cultural, connected to the past, and closer to nature than their white, Western counterparts.  Sometimes this is done in order to demonize a culture as “barbaric,” other times it is used to infantilize them as “primitive.” In this case, it romanticizes.

Running on both English and Chinese language channels, the commercial contrasts the wise Chinese man with the young, white man.  The music, the boats, their clothing and hats, and their fishing methods all suggest that the Chinese are more connected to their own long-standing  (ancient?) cultural traditions, ones that offered them an intimate and cooperative relationship to nature. Simultaneously, it erases Chinese modernity, fixing China somewhere back in time.

Other posts on the modernity/traditional binary:

Caveman Courtship

The White Woman’s Burden
De-Racializing the Modernity/Tradition Binary

Africans as Props for White Femininity
Women’s Bodies and the Modernity/Tradition Binary

Which Images Represent India?
The Unseen Middle East

The Primitive and the Modern in Kanye’s Love Lockdown
Our review of Avatar, the Movie
Porn Producer with a Heart of Gold

What Counts as Indian Art?
Whites can Reconquer the America’s with Kahlua

Primitive Child Offers Cures for Modern Ills

Or browse our tag on the false modern/primitive binary.

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.

Muriel Minnie Mae and an anonymous contributor sent in contrasting examples of cell phone marketing that draws on the idea of nature. The two ad campaigns, side by side, are a great illustration of how we can imagine nature to be either our enemy or our friend.

The campaign for the Motorola Brute portrays nature as aggressive and destructive.  The Brute is designed to beat nature in this battle (anthropomorphized as “mother”) by being able to withstand “extreme temperatures, blowing rain, dust, shock, vibration, pressure and humidity…”  Mother nature is a bitch, indeed!  She does deserve a slap in the face!

In dramatic contrast, this ad for AT&T cellular service portrays nature as the source of grace and beauty.  Cell phones bloom out of flowers and are carried on the wind by dandelion fluff:

The two examples together show us that the nature of nature is socially constructed; humans portray it in multiple ways, using it as a resource to tell stories about ourselves… and cell phones.

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.