The Costs (the kind with dollar signs)

So I’m retroactively doing my sixth blog post. I accidentally did my wrap up last time, but I think it works out because I am able to answer some of the questions I encountered when presenting on what I did to my class.

One question I have completely failed to address is the monetary cost of what I did. I hadn’t really thought it was very dramatic, but wow! I did not realize how much I spend on personal care products! Only one thing ended up being more expensive and that was the castile soap. I don’t mind though because I also use it for shaving (I use a loufa) and recently for washing my hair as well which actually works very well. My hair is happy together with an occasional vinegar wash. Shampoo and conditioner is madly expensive! Absolutely insane. Same goes for facewash. Would not use again even without the chemical and plastic costs. Baking soda and lavender are my new best friends.

Shampoo	Cost	Daily Use	Daily Cost	Weekly Cost	Yearly Cost
Herbal Essences Long Term Relationship Shampoo (300 ml = 20 Tbs)	4.79	1 Tbs	0.2395	1.437	74.724
Herbal Essences Long Term Relationship Conditioner (300 mL = 20 Tbs)	4.79	1Tbs	0.2395	1.437	74.724
Arm and Hammer Baking Soda (1 lb )	0.99	1 Tbs	0.03011	0.18071	9.39701
Honey (19 oz)	10.19	.5 Tbs	0.20098	1.20591	62.7076
Apple Cider Vinegar (gallon= 256 Tbs)	4.08	1 Tbs	0.01593	0.09562	4.9725
Kirk’s Castile Soap (1 bars)	1.093	0.0083	0.00911	0.05466	2.84266

Facewash	Cost	Daily Use	Daily Cost	Weekly Cost	Yearly Cost
Neutrogena Acnes Stress Control Facewash (117 mL = 11.8 Tbs)	9.49	.5 Tbs	0.402119	2.412712	125.461
Honey (19 oz)	10.19	.5 Tbs	0.20098	1.205917	62.70769
Lavendar (Bundle) ~ 2cups	5	.1 Tbs	0.03125	0.1875	9.75
Quaker Old Fashioned Oats (18 oz)	2.68	.6 Tbs	0.01772	0.106349	5.530159
Arm and Hammer Baking Soda (1 lb =  32.87 tbs)	0.99	0.3 Tbs	0.00903	0.054214	2.819106

Body Wash	Cost	Daily Use	Daily Cost	Weekly Cost	Yearly Cost
Kirk’s Castile Soap (1 bars)	1.093333	0.008333	0.009111	0.054667	2.842667
Dove Soap (1 bar)	1	0.008333	0.008333	0.05	2.6
Skintimate Shaving Cream	2.67	0.00119	0.003179	0.019071	0.991714

Your mileage may vary depending on your use and what your brand of choice is, but it’s hard to beat $.99 baking soda.

I also decided to go more in depth for the carbon and water costs of what I did.

This was really difficult. There are some things like water bottles, plastic bags, and cars where the water and carbon footprint has been studied extensively and there is all sorts of data online. This is not the case for local lavender, baking soda, and vinegar. These were much harder to find. The total footprint may be more or less than what I have estimated because I made a considerable number of assumptions in calculating the number. For example, I included the cost of transportation of the honey to my local grocery store. The distance was not hard to find. However, I don’t know the vehicle type or how many bottles of honey were transported together.

So this is a more accurate carbon and water footprint:

Before Carbon 7254 g CO₂/yr

After Carbon 36.4402 g CO₂/yr

Before Water 27.988 L/yr

After Water 25.0488 L/yr

Wrapping Up a Semester Without Shampoo

I started this project with a lot of reservations. Most of what I think of when I think about living more sustainably involve going back to the basics of my childhood. Like buying actual plates instead of paper plates. Or using a shopping bag instead of a plastic bag. Or making food instead of buying it prepackaged. Basically, in my head, good is what I grew up with. Bad is all these pesky disposable things I’m dealing with now that I’m living on my own with not a lot of stuff.

However, in my life, the majority of my waste comes from bathroom products. Disposable razors, feminine products, paper towels, toilet paper, toothpaste tubes, ect. And the majority of the chemicals I bring myself into contact with come from cosmetics, hair care, soap, and bathroom cleaners. But these have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. It was a very deep rooted habit to break myself of and begin to rethink. Was life without this possible? How awkward is it going to be to write about some of this?

You know what has bothered me for a long time? Alternatives to feminine products. That is a lot of gross, irredeemable trash produced. According to Lily Cup, the US creates 270,000 tons of waste from this alone. You know what I had never heard of? A menstrual cup. A reusable, clean version of a tampon. I know that was never presented to me as an option in any of those “Growing Body” conversations. You can check that out the latest version here.

Also disposable razors. There’s a ton of alternatives to this, and I am totally going to ask to for a safety razor for Christmas. My favorite alternative though is to just stop shaving and reject social norms. Can we please? But no. Even I am uncomfortable with the idea of just not shaving. Personally, I think the old fashioned straight razors are pretty cool, but my roommate and I both agree I would probably sever a major artery were I to try to shave my legs with one since I nick my legs with the baby plastic ones. These blades are a lot nicer and made to last.

Did you know there are bloggers making and sharing recipes for everything from foundation to lipstick to eyeliner. This website has recipes for just about every beauty product you could need. Basically, the moral of this whole project is if you’re looking to find an alternative to basically anything, someone has a recipe somewhere using all natural ingredients. Local is sometimes a little harder.

My shower shelf. (Not including my new bar of castile soap!)

These are just some of the alternatives I’ve discovered since beginning to question all of my toiletries not just my shampoo. Turns out living without putting chemicals in my hair or on my face is not really that hard. I took just an hour one weekend to gather supplies and put together my brand new hair and skin care product line, and I still have plenty! The final lineup: baking soda for shampoo, the occasional apple cider vinegar conditioner treatment, honey and lavender and oats facewash, and a bar of beeswax that makes amazing lotion and makes me smell like honey.

This is what my journey has resulted in:

I have also eliminated the carcinogens in my shampoo and conditioner from my routine (Do you think a hazardous waste facility will take my half full shampoo bottles?) as well as the microbeads present in my facewash. I also just this past week got rid of the animal products I have been using and started using castile soap. I’m kind of disgusted with myself that it took so long to switch. Added bonus: I actually know what all ingredients listed on the soap are! As far as the other chemicals go, I don’t know in what quantities they become toxic, but I am no longer putting those down my drain now that I have an alternative I know is not toxic in any quantity.

While the biggest carbon impact of showers comes from heating the water needed, ensuring that our wastewater is not full of chemicals interacting in our environment is vitally important. The cocktail of chemicals we put out may not only cause toxicity on its own but interact in the environment in unexpected ways. A study done in South Wales tested the wastewater discharge of two treatments plants and found high concentrations of chemicals in pharmaceuticals and personal care products corresponding to consumption patterns.

It’s all very well and good for us as consumers to be attempting to buy smarter, but how about we get some smarter products? Where’s the corporate responsibility in this? This goes back to one of my favorite books, The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard and a recent lecture in Global Green Politics. We don’t have a good, readily available option for all of this stuff. Buying online or making our own isn’t that hard, but why are corporations designing products that are wasteful and harmful instead of products that add value for the user and can be taken back and remade into themselves or a product of greater value. William McDonough talks about the new design specs we need to adopt to truly create a green industrial revolution and this means no toxics, no dangerous products, and no valuable materials dumped in holes.

There is a nation adopting this corporate responsibility and redesign model, and it’s Germany! This is hardly a surprise after hearing about the way they have embraced sustainability. In 1996, Germany enacted the Act for Promoting Closed Substance Cycle Waste Management and Ensuring Environmentally Compatible Waste Disposal. We’re just going to call it the Closed Cycle Act. This act contains the revolutionary idea that your mom always told you, you are responsible for your own mess. This Act puts the blame for reclamation, recycling, and safe disposal of the products squarely on the producers creating a huge incentive for them to make their products last longer, come apart for reuse easier, and recycle better. Their goal is to completely eliminate landfills by 2020! Right now, 14% of the raw materials for production in Germany are recovered from waste. Recovering Raw Earth Elements from household waste is known as urban mining. You can read more about that here.

The US almost had Germany beat on getting such a system implemented though how well it would have worked is unknown, since it died in Congress. In 1989, a bill called the Waste Reduction Act attempted to eliminate pollution and waste at the source. The US as a nation currently prescribes to the idea that once a product is bought by a consumer, the disposal of that product is on the heads of the consumer, and with products that are fit for nothing but a landfill at the end of their lives, what else are we to do, but throw them in the trash?

The USA as well as Canada and many other countries choose to deal with waste and pollution that looks like pollution is supposed to look: smokestacks, pipes draining sludge into rivers, toxic waste dumps, and the like. As consumers, we don’t imagine the neatly packaged, shiny, green leafed product might be toxic to us and the environment as well. A change in this perception is necessary in order to make government and companies know that we demand a better product: one that will last, one that will be safe, and one that will not come back as waste but as a brand new product.

Is it cheesy to say I am paddling off into a clean water future?

New Friends

I love how the deeper I go into the green culture the more interesting people I meet. When I came here freshman year it seemed to me that Purdue did not have a green culture. It was not obvious to me coming to campus that there was anyone on campus who might be doing something. Now, two years later, I have found an enormous and thriving green culture working hard at Purdue and in the Lafayette community.

I have been feeling like I’m pretty weird from the reactions I get about my project. Also, I just really miss soapy bubbles. My friend laughed and said she had tried the “No ‘poo” method with the baking soda as well but it made her hair all brittle, and she didn’t have time to wait for that transition to pass. I have not had that experience. The opposite in fact: my hair felt very oily for awhile. But there was confirmation. This is not a switch that would be an easy sell to the average or even interested person.

Then I met someone who lives like this for real!

He was the guide for my friend and I as we participated in De-Trash the Wabash. It came up just in passing and then suddenly he was sharing his ideas and telling me how he makes not only his shampoo, but also hand soap, laundry detergent, and all manner of sudsy things. His secret is castile soap. He melts it down and adds whatever he wants to it, mostly essential oils. Castile soap is an olive oil based soap, and he buys it completely plain.

(Side note: I’m a vegetarian. I don’t eat any kinds of meat including avoiding gelatin. I don’t like the idea that I am contributing to the death of animals when I have another option. I did not know soap was generally made from animal fat. So that’s got to change.)

I definitely want to try out this castile soap recipe. Even though olive oil is not a local product, it will still contain a lot less chemicals that will end up in waterways and especially less plastics. And bonus, the soap will actual make suds!

Fun fact about soap:

worldwide, the leading cause of death in children is hygiene related illnesses killing about 1.7 million children a year. These diseases would be preventable with adequate sanitation. You know where a lot of soap gets wasted? Hotels. They give you a whole bar of soap, and it almost never gets even close to used up.

But the soap doesn’t have to end up in the trash! It’s naturally antibacterial, so does not become contaminated by use. A group called the Global Soap Project receives donations from hotels of wasted soap that it reforms into bars to provide to people unable to get soap. You can check out what they’re doing here. They provide soap through Soap in Schools, Emergency Relief, and the WASH program to 32 countries. As so often happens, this is both an ecological project and a humanitarian one.

Trial #2: Facewash

My new arsenal of shower products.

So I’m not sure the average joe not driven by needing to complete this assignment would be willing to give up good smelling, sudsing shampoo to wash their hair in vinegar. I wish so badly that the honey went better for me. It sounds like it did work for others, but man that adjustment period where your hair has to get used to it lasting a month?!?!? No thank you says the world and even this girl. But I’m still trying other options on that front so hopefully I can get one that works for me.

HOWEVER, this face wash is awesome. This is an easy sell. Anyone who smells it and feels it is going to want it. Seriously, it’s wonderful.

But first, here’s why environmentally the facewash I was using before was not good. Neutrogena face scrub and many other face washes, body washes, and hand soaps contain plastic microbeads. These beads are supposed to provide an abrasive to clean out pores and remove dead skin. The beads are tiny. On the scale of a third of a millimeter. These beads are too small to be filtered out at treatment plants and so make their way out to the water.

In Lake Erie, scientists found 1.1 million plastic particles per square kilometer. In Lake Michigan, 17,000 pieces of this bitty plastic per square kilometer. Yeah okay so tiny bits of plastic. We can’t see it. Surely the big chunks of plastic would be worse. What are these microbeads going to do?

Plastics are dangerous because plastic absorbs toxins and chemicals very easily. The more surface area a plastic has, the better they absorb things like pesticides, flame retardants, ect. So a whole bunch of little pieces will absorb the chemicals better than the equivalent whole piece. The little microbeads pose a threat because they look quite a bit like food to the residents of the water. The little bits of plastic are approximately the same size as fish eggs. Scientists worry that the particles containing toxins will make their way up the food chain to larger animals and to humans. According to Stiv Wilson,  “If you ask me, as a plastic pollution activist, if I would prefer a milk jug in a lake or the equivalent amount of plastic in a milk jug in [plastic] dust in a lake, I would say milk jug every time.”

Some states like Illinois are working on a ban of the microbeads, but in the mean time, you can check your own stuff for words like polyethylene or polypropylene or if they straight up say microbeads and maybe give those products a pass. There are many alternatives being used including sea salt, apricot husks, and coconut shells. However, the biodegradable plastic you might also want to give a miss. It won’t biodegrade in natural conditions in the water. It has to be very specific. I have found another alternative in this beautiful concoction I have been washing my face in.

Lavender Face Wash

1 tbsp baking soda

2 tbsp oatmeal

1 tsp dried lavender

A little bit of honey

This is a recipe I got from this site. I started with dried lavender that we picked last summer at Lavender Hills. Picking lavender is an awesome experience because there’s just fields of beautiful purple rolling off into the distance. It’s also very cheap. A bundle is only $5 and is about the size in the picture above. I did not use anywhere near that much.

Baking soda and oats I bought in the normal way, but the honey also came locally like I talked about in the previous post. You make the powder separately by putting oats, baking powder, and lavender buds in a blender. Leave them going for a while because the finer the particles are, the better it will feel. But not too long because friction and heat. I made 8 times the recipe, or enough to fit in my little jelly jar. Then when I’m ready to use it, I mix a little bit with some honey in my palm and put it on my face like a mask. My mom prefers mixing it with water to make it more liquid, but I like the texture of the basic piece. It contains a nice abrasive made by the oats, an awesome smell of lavender and honey, a moisturizer in the honey, and a wash from the baking soda. This one I fully intend to use forever. It’s awesome.

Also, lavender is just awesome.

Lavender lemonade made from boiling the fresh stems of the lavender like tea and using it to mix.

https://news.vice.com/article/plastic-microbeads-from-body-wash-are-contaminating-the-great-lakes

http://www.npr.org/2014/05/21/313157701/why-those-tiny-microbeads-in-soap-may-pose-problem-for-great-lakes

Trial #1: Honey Shampoo and Vinegar Conditioner

Over labor day weekend I was able to pick out a great mix of stuff to try out on my hair and face. My first choices of recipes I picked because they were ridiculously easy, and I knew I could get them at home. Not to mention they sound delicious. Is that weird to talk about shampoo being delicious?

 

Shampoo #1: Honey Hair Wash

 

1 Tbsp on Honey

3 Tbsp on water

 

My recipe for this one comes from this site. She gives several reasons why honey is fantastic for your scalp.

1.  It’s around the same pH as your scalp helping to prevent dandruff.
2.  It’s moisturizing making your hair nice and soft (I will attest to this. It is very nice on my skin)
3. Honey doesn’t strip oils away, so oil production normalizes after a few washes (eh.. debatable)

So here’s my experience. I started using this shampoo on September 1, so I have been using it for almost a month. I pour a little bit of this delicious honey from a farm near my hometown into a travel bottle, fill the rest with water, shake it up, and pour it on my hair. My mom tried to pour it straight up into her hair and work it around which works but is a whole lot harder given that honey is very sticky.

Initially, I really liked it. It smells awesome, though interestingly, once it’s washed out, there’s no smell unlike all the smelly shampoos I’ve used. I guess because there’s no perfume component. It’s strange to get used to because it is watery and there are no suds. It feels like you’re just working water through your hair.

Biggest problem: The Transition Period

All of the recipes talk about this. The idea is that your hair has been overproducing oil to make up for what is being stripped from it by normal shampoo. When you switch to a shampoo like this, your hair doesn’t magically stop producing the overabundance of oil. So for me, my transition went from “This is great! My hair is so soft and curly!” to “My hair feels oily and dirty all the time”. It didn’t necessarily look it, and the curls were still very nice, but it felt awful. I think I might finally be nearing the end of this transition period/I’ve started moving to something new. But for the majority of women, you will never be able to sell this whole month of transitioning thing. It’s not true of everyone, but it seems to be most people. On the other hand, this shampoo might just not be for you or me.

I won’t be switching back to normal shampoo anytime soon, but I think me and the honey shampoo are not the perfect couple I was hoping for.

Also, honey is like $11 a bottle!

 

The Green Perspective

The German case study of Henkel shampoo I referenced in my last blog breaks down the lifecycle of shampoo. A very very small relative amount of greenhouse gas emissions goes into making the product with the biggest contributors from the production of the bottles. A plastic shampoo bottle weighs about 12 grams which is the equivalent .002 kg of CO2. Unlike water bottles, there has been little “greening” of the bottles by minimizing the amount of plastic used. I use far fewer bottles of shampoo than the average person would bottled water. I use probably about 12 bottles of shampoo/conditioner a year. This bottle also contributes to emissions through it’s end of life process, but again, the biggest contributor comes not from dealing with the plastic bottle but from the treatment of the waste water resulting from the showering.

 

By the Numbers-The Shampoo Project

I wash my hair almost every day, sometimes every other day, but it’s marching band season, and it’s hot. There is no way I can get around showering every day right now and still smell and feel clean. I almost always use Herbal Essences usually the kind pictured below. I like how it smells and I’ve used it since I first started buying my own hair stuff instead of stealing my mom’s. I also use Neutrogena face wash sometimes the cream wash and sometimes the scrub kind even though I know the scrub is made out of bits of plastic too small to be filtered out in the wastewater treatment plant. Not that either of these two face washes helps my face feel better, but it appeases my mother that I’m doing something about acne. At least I’m not using a facewash that leaves my face feeling like a layer of skin has been chemically burned away. My skin is sensitive, dries out fast, and is basically always unhappy for one reason or another but especially in the winter.

Herbal Essence Long Term Relationship shampoo and conditioner and Neutrogena face wash

Here’s some data about how much shampoo, conditioner, and face wash I use:

• About a tablespoon of shampoo and conditioner each
• About a tablespoon of facewash

These are the items I have decided need to go.

Wow I’m glad I did. Even at the end of this I sure am not going to be going back to Herbal Essences no matter how much I like the smell. Tests found that this shampoo in particular contained such a high level of the carcinogen 1,4-dioxane that it needs warning labels in California.

 

A case study done in Germany follows a bottle of Henkel Ag & Co. shampoo from raw materials through disposal including the carbon and water costs of actually using the shampoo and treating the water in the end. In total, the process creates 290 grams of CO2 per hair wash. Multiply this times two and expand out to the whole semester of fifteen weeks I would normally have used it assuming showering every day. That is 30,450 grams per semester. A plastic water bottle is generally worth 2-7 times the amount of the water contained, 16.9 fl. oz.

Herbal Essences is also guilty of using palm oil in their products. So is Neutrogena. Two strikes. Palm oil is a highly unsustainable product found in just about everything being sold in the US. Representatives from Greenpeace say that the worst contribution of deforestation to global warming comes from the chopping down of tropical rain forests fueled by a demand for the new crop of palm oil especially in Indonesia. Indonesia might not seem like a big deal in terms of global warming, but Indonesia ranks third on greenhouse gas emitters in large part because of the slash and burn of rainforests. This is also causing the extinction of our closest genetic relative: the orangutan.

Neutrogena has sought to curb this and are members of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.

These are my targets for this semester, and I’ll be documenting how well using natural and local shampoo, conditioner and facewash work as well as my new footprint.

 

 

http://www.greenbiz.com/news/2010/03/12/p-g-reformulating-herbal-essences-limit-toxins

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90714122

Click to access pcf_henkel_shampoo.pdf

http://www.theecologist.org/green_green_living/home/1273788/palm_oil_the_hidden_ingredient_causing_an_ecological_disaster.html

http://www.goodguide.com/products/336895-neutrogena-oil-free-acne

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/10/28/241419373/how-much-water-actually-goes-into-making-a-bottle-of-water

My new project

I’m a junior in Environmental Engineering at Purdue University. My minor is in Environmental Policy which is why this blog has been resurrected almost four years later. The assignment: pick an item to give up for the semester and chronicle those struggles or research an area where environmental progress is being made. My goal: make environmentalism a conscious part of my routine.

Me in a nutshell: I am a huge color guard fanatic having spun all through high school, continued with the Purdue “All American” Marching Band Golden Silks and their Winter Guard International Finalists (as of last year), and finally lived a dream by marching with the Blue Stars Drum Corps at Drum Corps International World Finals in Lucas Oil Stadium. I have serious boyfriend in the military who I am so proud of and consequently I have fallen in love with the world of the armed forces, and it has driven me deeper into my letter writing addiction. I also have a love affair with Lake Michigan that began as a child, and I hope to put this passion to use working with freshwater systems rehabilitating and preventing pollution. It is also the main subject of my photography.

Paddle Boarding at Sunset on Lake Michigan

I am also a huge environmentalist. An officer in both Engineers for a Sustainable World and the Student Sustainability Council. It all started as a child. An independent, headstrong five year old, I informed my parents that meat was no longer on the menu for me. I was going to save the animals. In a lot of ways, I’ve grown into that and become that person I thought I would be. In a lot of ways, I think I should have stayed that child. She knew right and wrong and plowed through on an unconventional path because it was the right thing to do. She never thought about “Maybe I can’t do this” or “Maybe I don’t have enough information” or “Maybe it’s too inconvenient”. Hang the costs, she was doing what was right and heaven help any concerned parents who got in her way. Now I’m too careful, too apologetic about my passion for the environment. I don’t want to be an inconvenience or make others or myself feel uncomfortable in our consumer lives.

I already am careful of plastic bag use, I refuse plastic water bottles whenever I can, I minimize paper towel use, and I have been a vegetarian for years. I would very much like to take on a different aspect of this challenge, but I am mindful, I am too careful, of the fact that my semester also includes Thermodynamics, Statistics, Biology, and Hydrology as well as a full 20 hours a week of the “All-American” Marching Band and another two and a half of ballet. Screw it. It’s happening.

Something I’ve really been dying to try is replacing my shower stuff with natural stuff. I have no idea what chemicals I am putting in my hair, on my body, all over my face, and consequently down the drain all in the name of beauty. I have heard and appreciate the fear of the waste water treatment plants being unable to cope with the cocktail of chemicals being sent into the drains from bathrooms everywhere. I want to replace my shampoo, conditioner, and face wash with natural (local?) products. Thank God for the DIY culture. Recipes are insanely easy to come by. This might even have the double benefit of fixing all the irritation that my skin seems to always have especially when the air starts to be drier. After this weekend, I’m going all natural.

Big

My favorite definition of the hugeness of he universe comes from the singularly remarkable book called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

The Guide says, “Space…it’s big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts compared to space.”

Think of it. It takes me twenty minutes to walk a little over a mile to the nearest gym. The longest car ride I’ve taken is 8 hours (Soon to be 12 when the marching band heads to Florida!). I found the US on a globe. It is tiny. Even that’s too huge a distance for my human-ness to comprehend. At that point, I have to stop thinking about me sitting there at several thousand times magnification typing this and just picture a globe. But it doesn’t stop there. The Solar system compared to Earth?  The distance from our sun to the next? The Milky Way compared to our solar system? The distance between our galaxy and the next? Don’t even start on the size of the universe. It could be infinite for all anyone knows, and I don’t know about you but my brain fries just trying to get there.

Now zoom back in on you. Now I could focus on how absolutely small we are. How inconsequential our actions are in the face of all that, but switch it around. We are part of something that is that big.

That doesn’t exactly give me a confidence boost or a feeling of importance, but I do feel like what I do affects something enormous, and it matters. Imagine a 400 piece marching band. They are perfect. Non-bandos won’t notice all the things that went in to putting on a perfect show, but from the girl who just finished band camp, it’s a lot. The feet have to be exactly in time. Sub-dividing the roll from heel to toe for goodness sake! The horns have to be at exactly the same angle up and in. The uniforms have to be worn exactly the same way: all plumes well cared for and all shoes shined. The guard points their toes with identical technique and spins in exactly the right planes. The drumline and the drum major are in perfect sync. They are not 400 individual marchers but a whole concept. Each of them has to do their job perfectly to make this idea happen, and they do it so well that no one realizes how much time and work went into it. There’s my analogy of the enormity of the universe and why each one of us matters hugely.

If none of the analogies helps, go outside and lay down in the grass and look up at the stars. You’ll get the same effect.

Whenever I grasp a concept like this, I have a feeling similar to looking up and up and up at a tall building and suddenly falling back a step because it’s so much huger than anything I expected.

Credentials: Life-long Nature Lover

We covered so much information today. Free time? Forget it. Our brains have to be working every waking second or the Summit isn’t doing their job. So, since I cannot even hope to cover all that with enough time left over to get a decent amount of sleep, this is the coolest part of the zoo:

We were divided into breakout sessions we chose last night. Everyone wanted “Conservation Through Veterinary Medicine”, “Role of Reproductive Science in the Conservation of a Rare Species”, or “Coral Reefs and Their Conservation”. I wanted “Courting and Controlling Consumers: Co-Evolution of Plants and Animals.” See, I stopped reading before the colon. I thought it would be more information like The Story of Stuff. But nobody else seemed particularly interested in it which suited me just fine.

During our last hour at the zoo (I hardly got to see any of it! It’s enormous, and we had a lot to do), seven of us rode the bus down a huge hill to Amazonia to meet our speaker. His bio in our workbook is one sentence with a picture of a frog: Ed Smith is a life-long nature-lover. This was in contrast to the numerous Ph.D.’s and years of work in important institutions. Okay then. From meeting him, though, it was immediately obvious that he not only knew what he was talking about, but he took great pride in the work that was done in his exhibit. He pointed out to us that Amazonia is the only exhibit that tries to capture an ecosystem’s diversity. I caught just a hint of disdain for the other exhibits. Our adventure began.

First off, if you have never been to Amazonia, it’s really cool. It’s a rainforest living indoors. Fish, stingrays, frogs, trees, plants, bugs, and even a monkey. Some of it is even  self-sufficient! As in some of the animals aren’t fed because all their food is grown in their exhibit.

As we walked through the exhibit, Smith told us a ton of information about everything we passed. Here’s some of my favorites:

There are maybe 25 species of catfish in the United States. In the Amazon, over one thousand are documented so far. One is one of the only creatures that can break down wood for food. A few eat berries and nuts. Both get their fill when the rivers flood, and they can swim in between the trees. The jaboticaba tree grows its fruit on its bark just for the catfish in the rainy season. Smith said that the flowers appear as soon as the rain starts, its flowers appear, are pollinated, and form fruit within a few days.

Another thing about fish in the Amazon, since the Amazon is hot and there are a lot of biomass and minerals dissolved in it, dissolved oxygen is lower than in other water. In his own words, some fish have “given up on the whole gill thing.” We watched the fish go to the surface to breathe!

If something has a good idea in evolution, everyone else copies it. He pointed out four different plants not even in the same category who had developed a “golden arches” of sorts, red and yellow, that attracted hummingbirds. The flower-like things weren’t actually flowers. They were just colors to let the hummingbirds know that there would be food later. Hummingbirds can remember the exact location of food and will return to it later. And their brains would fit on our fingernail! Then, once the flowers finally come out and are pollinated, the fruit is purple or blue because that lets tanagers know that it’s their turn to help the plant out and get some food in the bargain.

Plants and animals form defense mechanisms through evolution. One of the plants he showed us had leaves that would leave a horrible rash if they were broken. Several became poisonous to stop animals from making them into salad as he put it. Then creatures develop resistance to the poison so they can open up a new food supply the rest of the population can’t compete for. He showed us the poison dart frogs. They are poisonous because they overcame a poison in the leaves of the plants they atea nd like Gryffindor’s sword, chose to imbibe whatever makes them stronger. The most poisonous can permanently disrupt nerve impulses if their skin comes in contact with any membrane. They’re bright yellow because they certainly don’t need to hide. Right now, no reptiles can eat them. They’re at the top. Back in the USA, monarchs do the same thing when they eat milkweed. They become toxic to birds though luckily not to touch.

All this is just a bunch of random albeit really cool information, until you begin to see Ed Smith’s point. Without each other, none of these crazy and cool abilities, traits, and animals would have developed, and without each other, they cannot survive. When we hear about a single species going extinct, we don’t think too much of it especially if it’s a bug or a plant, but it’s a huge deal. Everything in nature depends on everything else especially if it’s a bug or plant. Back to that quote I used earlier by John Muir founder of the Sierra Club, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” And what my mother is so fond of quoting, “There are no small parts, only small actors.”

Overwhelmed with Possibility

Today was the first day at George Mason for the summit. This is how I figure it would go: Check in, settle in with our roommates, relax after all that travel, eat dinner, and go to bed at a reasonable hour. This is how it actually went: arrive at the airport, meet seven new people who flew in around the same time, check in, meet six more people, settle in and meet our three suite mates, talk to our small groups-26 new people, eat dinner with eight new people, listen to the man who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for meteorology work (Dr. Jagadish Shukla), and discuss environmental problems and solutions with our small groups. I am exhausted.

Dr. Shukla was cool don’t get me wrong, but the coolest thing so far is the people. I met a girl from Montana who only gets in accidents on Sundays. I met only two other vegetarians which I thought was weird. I met a girl who volunteers at a zoo and target trains the animals and has worked with a baby giraffe who was the first to survive a birth deformity of its hind legs. I met a bunch of people who are SCUBA certified. I met two girls just in my small group who love color guard and adore the Cavaliers, too. I met a girl who doesn’t like puppies. Again, weird. Three people who don’t like Harry Potter – even weirder. And a girl who brought her solar panel suitcase with her and grows algae in her bathroom to create biofuel. I am overwhelmed by all the talent and passion here. And what’s even cooler, I feel like I belong here, and I have something to contribute too!

Tomorrow I will remember my pen so I will be able to actually blog about what our incredible speakers say… Over and out.