Undergrad Thesis

Hey, y'all!

Just as a heads up, I'm going to be compiling work for my senior thesis on this blog as part of my dissemination requirement! It's super relevant to sustainability, as I discuss farmers' markets and such.

At this point in time I don't have it organized enough to post, but when I do I think I'm going to use a page format rather than a blog post. I'll let y'all know when I get there.

In the meantime, good luck on all y'all's finals!!!

Jess

Rough Waters

I have a problem.

I'm currently skipping my senior thesis class right now because I didn't do the work I was supposed to for today, and I don't want to talk to my TA again about what I didn't do.

The semester is almost halfway over and I have nothing to show for it.

I honestly have no idea what I'm doing. I've never written a thesis before, and only like two research papers (maybe) in my field. I'm just really frustrated because I feel like my TA hasn't done a good job of explaining how the hell to do this. I want to do well; I want to write an awesome report. I want it to be insightful and useful. But at the moment I'm frozen with anxiety over perfecting a sentence.

I keep changing the direction I want to go in. Probably because I've done so little research. It's hard for me to set aside so much time to read when I feel like what I'm reading isn't relevant.

I don't know what I'm doing, and I think I need someone other than my TA to help guide me. Perhaps another grad student? I know a few now and they all seem cool.

I don't know what to do moving forward, honestly.

Anyway, if you read through all of this, thanks I guess.

Hello! And also, poop.

Hey y'all,

(Actually I figure I don't really have any readers at this point, which is just as well.)

In an effort to regain some confidence in my writing, I've decided to start this blog back up and do a daily thing where I spend an hour rambling about what I've been learning or thinking about. I'm taking a lot of really interesting classes at the moment, which means I have a lot of thoughts cascading around in my head. I'm also working on my undergrad thesis, but not being in a habit of writing has caused me a lot of problems lately.

Even getting this down has been a struggle so far. Phew. Ok. Time to get moving.

I guess I'll kick things off by discussing a project I'm interested in doing: a composting port-a-potty. Of course, it's much more complicated than that, but that's really the only way to describe it. Last fall I was introduced to a really awesome book: A Toolbox for Sustainable City Living, by Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew (PDF here, buy on Amazon here). Super inspiring, definitely worth a read if you're interested in that stuff. The best part is that they have schematics and instructions for how to build things they describe, instead of just talking about how they work. For example, there's a huge section on water management: how to create an aquaculture setup, how to capture rainwater effectively, and how to purify greywater with constructed wetlands. Anyway for whatever reason, I was thoroughly intrigued by the waste-management section, especially in terms of how to take care of human poop. Maybe I just have a sick mind, but human waste has always, like, interested me? Like, not in a sexual way, no thanks, not me (not my kink). But the fact that there's so much of a taboo about it. (For example, I clogged the toilet at my boyfriend's house and had to ask his dad where the plunger was. I was so embarrassed.) Also, think about fact that we poop in purified water. Like, any other used water from the house is considered graywater. But poopwater is blackwater, and must be handled with care so as to not spread human pathogens. Wouldn't it be better if we just didn't contaminate the water in the first place?

Enter the composting toilet. It takes your poop and turns it into compost. Some like to call it "humanure." I am one of those people.

The idea is simple. Farmers and gardeners use livestock manure to fertilize their crops, so why not use our own? Also, if you're eating from your own garden, recycling your poop means that you don't permanently take away nutrients from your hungry plants. Your kitchen scraps are just a fraction of what your babies grow for you. (Most popular crops are annuals and therefore less than a year old and therefore are babies.)

Unfortunately, there is a problem here. The law. Specifically city code. Scott and Stacy go more in-depth, but basically city admins don't like when people keep their shit in their yard. The fear is sanitation. True, in the past there have been issues. I think back to when people were first getting used to living in cities: they'd just dump their shit out the window onto the street, and then everyone got cholera and died. Well, not literally everyone, but it is definitely an issue to consider. However, the way we're doing things now, we're taking all the yuck (as well as all the water), putting it in a giant pipe, maybe cleaning some of it, and dumping it somewhere else. I wouldn't want to be wherever the end of that pipe is! Poor fish. Composting your shit, in contrast, feeds the nutrient cycle in a garden, creating more wealth instead of just making a mess somewhere else. Yay!

So I want to switch the focus a little bit. I've gone on long enough about how poop needs to go somewhere, but not so much about the fact that it needs to come out of us first! Having to poop sucks, especially when there's something else important going on, especially when you're not home and able to go in your own bathroom. Like, for example, when at a political demonstration!

Yeah, I know, that was a bit of a reach. But not really. I was at a rally recently and after like an hour I really had to pee! I'm thankful that I wasn't too far from campus, and was able to get back without too much struggle. But with protests, rallies, and demonstrations becoming commonplace due to the political climate here in the US, I know I'm not the only one who has had this issue. In the Toolbox, Scott & Stacy included an anecdote from when there were a lot of protests happening in Florida: Someone attached a toilet seat to the top of a 55-gallon barrel, strapped it onto a cargo tricycle, threw a tarp over the top for privacy, and rode it into battle, so to speak. It was a big hit, apparently. I wish they had written more about it, but I guess I could just drive over to Albany and talk to Scott myself.

So at the moment I'm working through designing a portable latrine, basically. I want it to be easy to use for anyone who may be at a protest. I don't like the idea of climbing up a ladder and covering myself with a tarp in order to relieve myself. While all the basic essential elements are there (storage, privacy, a seat), the construction is ramshackle, and I'd like to make something that looks a little more elegant. I want to be able to hitch it to a bike, but also to detach it. The storage bins need to be able to be removed when full so the contents can be left to compost. I'm thinking it would be useful to separate the urine and feces, since poop requires 2 years to cure and urine can be applied to garden soil immediately (diluted, of course). I'd also like to have both a sit-down stall and a urinal stall.

Anyway, I don't have a set design yet, and I feel like I'm going to need to start building it and go through a couple iterations because I'm really not very good at keeping my drawings to scale. With a design in which every cubic inch counts, I can't be off on my measurements. I'll include pictures next time I post about this, too.

Well that's it for now. It was nice chatting. Have a good rest of your day.

My journey to where I am today

Since this is my first post, I'm still figuring out how to blog... Just work with me here, alright? I'll get the hang of things in no time.

In other news, let's celebrate my first blog post ever! (Tumblr doesn't count, unfortunately!) I thought I'd start things off with where I am in my sustainability education, and what has brought me here.

Let's go back in time... way back!

I started caring about nature from a young age. You know how kids are always interested in the world - asking questions and such. Of course, "outside" is so big compared to inside the house. There is so much to explore, and a lot of what goes on "outside" is nature-related. I grew up in the suburbs, so I always had a backyard with trees and flower gardens and a play set and a deck or patio. My mom would plant flowers, and she taught me the names of all the plants growing in the gardens in the yard. That passion for knowing about the natural world around me never left, as it often does when we get older.

As I grew up into my "big kid" phase and my early teens, my love for the outdoors became pronounced as a love for camping and playing in the woods with the boys in the neighborhood. Then in high school, I took my first environmental science course. That was the turning point, in a manner of speaking. Even though the class was not what I hoped (most of the students were 12th graders who wanted to do nothing for their last semester in high school), it still showed me that the environment meant enough to me for me to want to help it in my career. It was also in high school that I read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, which opened my eyes to some issues with the food system in place in America. I wanted to save the world! So I decided that environmental engineering was the right field for me to go into, and I started looking for colleges. I decided on Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a smallish engineering school ten minutes from Albany, New York. As I write this, I'm sitting in my dorm room, a third year student here at RPI, but no longer am I an engineering student! Instead, last spring, I changed my major to Sustainability Studies.

During my first two years here, I was planning on doing a Sustainability minor, so I was taking a few sustainability classes. The first one I took my first semester here was called Nature/Society, and it was totally different from what I expected it to be. The description said it would be about the relationship between nature and society but mostly we discussed the history of technology in America and took ethnographic notes on field trips. But hey, we took field trips. That was cool. But what I really missed in that class was a focus on nature. Nature, the thing I loved so much. I didn't understand why so much of the focus of the class was on society!

A good number of my friends were also in sustainability classes, and we would discuss things we were learning. During my second year, one of them and I would talk about what he was learning in Environment and Society. Sounds similar to the first class, but they are actually quite different. This one is your standard intro to sustainability, showing all the issues in the world like climate change and dams and stuff like that. It also gives an introduction to environmental justice. My friend had a really hard time adjusting to those concepts. Things like feminism and racism and classism and how they tie into environmental issues. I found it interesting that he had such a hard time with these concepts, since he was otherwise a very competent student. Talking with him about it also introduced the idea to me that sustainability was more about just the environment. I had become somewhat acquainted with social justice ideas through my casual use of tumblr, but never had I applied these concepts to my love of nature. Once I took the class my friend did, I was well-prepared and able to start tackling the big questions involving sustainability.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that sustainability is not just about the environment, as I once thought. There are three main components, known as the triple bottom line: ecology, economy, and society. All three facets have certain requirements to survive, so all three must be put into consideration. It is true that the ecology part is suffering greatly right now, so we're focusing our attention there. However, there are many economic and social problems that relate very closely with the environmental ones. Unfortunately, solving three problems at once instead of just one makes this job a whole hell of a lot harder. But of course, that's exactly why I started this blog.

My goal here is to explore sustainability topics I'm learning about in my classes, as well as things I do on my own, so that this valuable information can be passed on to you, my readers. Also, as this blog grows, so shall our knowledge of sustainability.

The journey has merely begun.