This is just the bibliography from my project on vultures!
Friedrich, Paul. 1997. “An Avian and Aphrodisian Reading of Homer’s Odyssey.” American Anthropologist 99 (2): 306–20.
Smith, Anna. 2020. “AN INDIGENOUS EFFORT TO RETURN CONDORS TO THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST NEARS ITS GOAL.” States News Service, November 5, 2020.
Ogada, Darcy, Phil Shaw, Rene L. Beyers, Ralph Buij, Campbell Murn, Jean Marc Thiollay, Colin M. Beale, et al. 2016. “Another Continental Vulture Crisis: Africa’s Vultures Collapsing toward Extinction.” Conservation Letters 9 (2): 89–97. https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12182.
Haslam, Nick, Steve Loughnan, and Pamela Sun. 2011. “Beastly: What Makes Animal Metaphors Offensive?” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 30 (3): 311–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X11407168.
Royte, Elizabeth. 2016. “Bloody Good.” National Geographic 229 (1): 70–97.
Stara, Kalliopi, Lavrentis Sidiropoulos, and Rigas Tsiakiris. 2016. “Bound Eagles, Evil Vultures and Cuckoo Horses. Preserving the Bio-Cultural Diversity of Carrion Eating Birds.” Human Ecology 44 (6): 751–64. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-016-9864-3.
Markandya, Anil, Tim Taylor, Alberto Longo, M.N. Murty, S. Murty, and K. Dhavala. 2008. “Counting the Cost of Vulture Decline—An Appraisal of the Human Health and Other Benefits of Vultures in India.” Ecological Economics 67 (2): 194–204. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2008.04.020.
Ogada, Darcy, André Botha, and Phil Shaw. 2016. “Ivory Poachers and Poison: Drivers of Africa’s Declining Vulture Populations.” Oryx 50 (4): 593–96. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0030605315001209.
Henriques, Mohamed, José Pedro Granadeiro, Hamilton Monteiro, Ana Nuno, Miguel Lecoq, Paulo Cardoso, Aissa Regalla, and Paulo Catry. 2018. “Not in Wilderness: African Vulture Strongholds Remain in Areas with High Human Density.” PLOS ONE 13 (1): e0190594. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0190594.
Byrd, Brooke. n.d. “Of Love and Loathing: The Role of the Vulture in Three Cultures.” OF LOVE AND LOATHING, 13.
Nambirajan, Kanthan, Subramanian Muralidharan, Aditya A. Roy, and S. Manonmani. 2018. “Residues of Diclofenac in Tissues of Vultures in India: A Post-Ban Scenario.” Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology 74 (2): 292–97. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00244-017-0480-z.
Iati, Marisa. 2020. “The Latest Trouble at the Border: Vultures Are Pooping All over a CBP Radio Tower.” The Washington Post, January, NA-NA.
Swan, Gerry E, Richard Cuthbert, Miguel Quevedo, Rhys E Green, Deborah J Pain, Paul Bartels, Andrew A Cunningham, et al. 2006. “Toxicity of Diclofenac to Gyps Vultures.” Biology Letters 2 (2): 279–82. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2005.0425.
Cortés-Avizanda, Ainara, and Henrique Miguel Pereira. 2016. “Vulture Restaurants Cheat Ecosystems.” Nature 540 (7634): 525–525. https://doi.org/10.1038/540525e.
Burton, Adrian. 2014. “Vultures: A Future Foretold.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 12 (8): 480–480.
The first exposure I ever had to vultures was likely cartoons, where the image of huge, circling birds represented an omen of death to whatever character was roaming the desert, along with cacti and tumbleweeds. Their huge shadows loomed as they flew overhead, usually with only the occasional flap of the wings, like an ornithological grim reaper. While it likely didn’t register for me at the time, the birds carried the threat of the sequence of events between when a character collapses from thirst and when they are reduced to a comical skeleton. Its not surprising that there in no on-screen depiction of Bugs Bunny getting his eyeball plucked out.
The second, more memorable exposure came in the form of a small display in the LA Zoo that I saw as a child that I remember being fascinated by. It was a small display detailing the LA Zoo’s involvement in the California Condor Recovery program. What captured me most was the image of a baby condor being fed by a puppet crafted out of leather to resemble the bald head of an adult condor.
Photo courtesy of San Diego Zoo Global
At the beginning of the program, there were less than 30 individual California condors left, and they were all rounded up and brought to the LA or San Diego zoo as part of a last ditch effort to save the species. Condors are the largest land bird in north America and can live to up to 80 years old, but that comes with the drawback of not being precocious or prolific breeders. They won’t start reproducing until age five or six, and even then, they only produce one egg at a time and raise that chick for two years, resulting in a chick every other year at the most. However, if the couple loses the egg for any reason, they will lay another that same season, and if that egg is lost, they will try again the following year. By removing the eggs from the nest and rearing the chicks away from the parents, the number of chicks that can hatch in a year goes from one chick every other year to two chicks every year. There has been a lot of interesting discussion around the implications and practicalities of raising condors like this so they can be returned to the wild, especially since the first generation of puppet chicks where fascinated by rock climbers and once broke into someones home.
The years went by and the condors lived in my head a long with all the other birds I have been known to fixate on (last semester I wrote an ethnography on pigeons) but I didn’t think much on carrion birds specifically; in fact, I have never seen one in the flesh. But in 2020 two things happened: I read The Land of Open Graves by Jason De Leon, and a condor chick hatched at the LA Zoo.
The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail is an excellent ethnography by Jason De Leon describing his experience doing ethnographic research on migrant crossings through the Sonoran desert. He refers to the desert as a hybrid collectif, which includes all the biotic and abiotic hazards that contribute to the deaths of the people swallowed by the desert. US immigration uses the desert to their advantage by making it one of the only viable places for people to cross the border, and then waiting for those people to die. Vultures are key to the final stage of the process of “deterrence,” as those who die in the desert are picked apart by animals and their bodies are never found, or never identified. De Leon refers to this as necroviolence, or violence against a dead body to further harm the people around the victim. In Land of Open Graves, De Leon describes experiments using pigs to approximate what happens when a body is left in the desert. After a period of decomposition, the body is descended on by tens of vultures at a time, consisting of turkey vulturesand black vultures vying for a spot on the corpse, “a grotesque crescendo.” The birds scatter bones, clothes, and anything on the body more that 50 meters away from their original location, and completely skeletonize the body in a matter of days, making the window between death and complete disappearance less than a month.
Vultures basking in the desert, by Michael Wells, who collaborated with Jason De Leon as photographer for Land of Open Graves
As I was reading this book, I was also closely following the saga of a condor egg at the LA Zoo, dubbed LA1720, and with its very own hashtag. It was not the only condor egg scheduled to hatch, but there had been complications with this egg, as the chick was malpoistioned for hatching. As previously mentioned, condors are infrequent breeders, and the condor team at LA Zoo have since moved away from puppets to having the parents of the chick rear it, meaning the old trick of swiping the eggs no longer works and there are fewer eggs being laid in general, in the name of proper chick raising. In addition, LA1720 also had apparently important genes, and since all surviving California condors are descendants of a couple individuals, the preservation of any genetic diversity is paramount.
A group of dedicated professionals known as the condor team pulled out all the stops in making sure the chick hatched. You could even say that they hatched the chick by delicately piercing the shell to allow the chick to breathe, dripping antibiotics into the shell membrane, and then assisting the chick out with gloved hands, revealing a little alien.
Over the next 36 hours, the chick was monitored closely, had ointments applied, feathers fluffed, and was hand fed carrion out of a measuring cup. The eggshell had been saved for what was coming next.
The 7th slide of the post is a video of Mike of the condor team deftly placing LA1720 back in its original shell, making sure its little wings and head where tucked inside, and then loosely closing the shell up with tape, so that the chick could “hatch” in the presence of its parents. I was obsessed with this. There was something about this man in cargo shorts, who looked like he could’ve been one of my stepdad’s surfing buddies, casually putting a chick back in its egg like hes done it a million times before that brought back that same feeling I had looking at that condor puppet. All the lengths that people went to keep this animal from extinction, the intersection between zoological expertise and love was absurd and delightful.
And so there I was, watching this condor chick with absolute adoration while simultaneously reading descriptions of vultures ripping out the entrails of pigs that were stand-ins for humans. While the responsible creatures aren’t the same species, they are all carrion birds, and to most, a vulture is a vulture. Upon further examination, any bird described as a vulture is laden with contradictions. They are considered dirty while being the bird that cleans the world. They are thought evil though they never kill. They are majestic and otherworldly, yet highly impacted by humans and on the verge of extinction. They’re associated with capitalists but they are the ultimate anarchist freegans out there. So what gives? Who is the Vulture?
While writing about environmental engagement, I have to tread carefully. I grew up in Los Angeles where I volunteered and organized my high school’s march for our lives walkout. Then I moved to Portland to go to a liberal arts school for environmental studies. Obviously, my experiences with activism and engagement are not universal in the slightest. However, while discussing the idea of taking action, environmental or otherwise, I feel like my life has given me a little bit of insight on what makes people tick.
An important distinction to make is the difference between types of political actions; those carried out by individuals or nongovernment groups like protesting or voting, and actions taken by committees and politicians to get motions passed. I favor direct action myself, but that’s beside the point. The point is that these groups (if they’re smart,) will want to be able to say what they’re doing, how they’ll do it, and why. Often what befalls organizations that fail this step is paralyzation from infighting. What’s sad is that often the infighting is trivial, and ends a movement before it begins.
While looking for images for this post, I looked at a lot of people chained to trees. They’re usually older, but i guess younger people are out there destroying cop cars. Also, I really like the simplicity of this woman’s sign. STOP NOW! Very to the point.
About the reading, I believe that is precisely what is happening when it comes to California trying their damnest to rehydrate a place that was a desert, and always will be (its actually a chaparral biome, but you get the idea). You have to get the water for the golf courses people of SoCal from somewhere, and since everyone has NIMBY all the time, no one wants to be that somewhere. This is where you run into what is mentioned in the second paper, Clumsy Solutions for a Complex World.
I feel that the idea that current solutions are “clumsy” is a kind of discredit to said solutions. Unless everyone wakes up tomorrow with all the same values and priorities, all solutions will be clumsy, which is ok. We were all taught about compromise somewhere in elementary school, but along the way, we forgot what it was about. A compromise means when two parties are about to go through with action but disagree on some aspect. They negotiate and come to a middle ground, and the agreed-upon action is taken. Compromise is always a little clumsy just because it’s not exactly what either party envisioned. But you don’t love a cat with inner ear problems any less just because it falls off the couch sometimes, right?
In case you don’t know me personally, I’ll tell you now that I have a passion for agriculture. Specifically alternative agriculture for a new era. Specifically aquaponics, which I love with my whole heart.
Heres a system I put together for my AP ENVS class in high school. Its one of the best things I’ve ever done. An above shot of the things I grew. Look at that handsome basil.
If you recall my very heated strawberry post, I am generally frustrated with the conversations surrounding the future of food, especially GMOs. The reason people dislike GMOs is that it is a scary acronym like MSG. So here is my scathing hot take on GMOs: as long as GMOs are grown without artificial fertilizer or pesticide, it should be able to label itself as organic.
Shocking, I know. But the truth is that humans have been making GMOs since we started doing agriculture. Corn? GMOs. Wheat? GMOs. Dogs? GMOs. GMOs aren’t new in the slightest, it just used to take longer. Now we can do it quickly and with more options.
However, I would also be lying if I did not have one big problem with GMOs, and that has nothing to do with the science itself, but how it is abused by corporations. Near the popularization of GMOs, during a green revolution, private entities started genetically engineering their own seeds with lots of incredible benefits and then patenting them. The patent makes it so farmers can be sued for growing the crops unintentionally on their fields as a result of natural cross-pollination by local insects. Abuse in the same vein is making these organisms unable to reproduce outside of a lab and then giving these seeds away for free to farmers in impoverished countries. This then makes these farmers dependant on the genetically modified seeds, but unable to harvest them themselves, which means seeds must be bought year after year from the corporation that “generously” gave them away for free. It sounds like something out of a 90s movie starring a group of plucky young protagonists who take down the evil factory farm baron. But in reality, capitalism is just like that.
I’m planning on making some posts about my aquaponics projects after the semester ends, so stay tuned for that I guess!
Listen, I know that my last blog post was also about the intersection between the scientific and the social in environmental studies, but it’s not my fault that its such an incredible field. And you know things are about to get spicy when you type in the name of a threatened species of owl and Google autocompletes with “controversy.” So I am very excited.
Not to be that guy who uses the word layman, but I feel that the layman assumes that conservation happens because it should; we should save the animals, always. Unfortunately, it is much more complicated than that. Let’s say that there are an endemic species of mice in a field that are slowly decreasing in population. The only identifiable reason is that a species of snakes are eating them. They will surely go extinct if nothing is done. So you should kill the snakes? No! They live there too! They just gotta eat! What if you added a different species of mice so the snakes wouldn’t eat the threatened mice? And what, wreak havoc on the population distribution of the entire food triangle? Fools. Not to mention the nearby rural village depends highly on the money brought in by people coming to see these unique mice and buy tee-shirts and eat in diners and stay at motels, so the disappearance of those mice could destroy the town. This brings me to the northern spotted owl.
While the hypothetical mice situation falls close to the predicament of the spotted owl, I use the analogy for simplification, as the situation is more complicated than that, as always. Basically, the northern spotted owl was threatened by habitat loss by logging an encroachment by the barred owl. When logging ended, populations continued to decrease; so in an effort for conservation, a plan was proposed to remove a portion of barred owls to give the spotted owl some room. This did not go over well.
The contenders in question
Here is an unfinished list of questions this predicament brings to mind, in no particular order, because I have ADD:
Assuming the fact that humans have had such a broad and incalculable effect on the planet and everything on it, what does the word “nature” really mean?
Assuming nature includes humans and their activities, what would it mean to “let nature take its course?”
Do humans have a responsibility to try to direct nature in a way that we see is “right” or “best?” If so, what would that entail?
If humans do not change their course in destroying the planet at a breakneck pace, will nature cease to exist or will nature entail majorly roaches and rats, being all that’s left?
Should conservation efforts only be focused on organisms that humans benefit from or that we enjoy? Species go extinct a lot, why is the spotted owl any different? We made this world, after all.
I find all of this fascinating and infinitely frustrating because I, for once, do not have a solid opinion on this, as I feel like there are too many questions for me to provide an answer. I feel like we need to think about so much about who we are and what we’ve done and what nature is before we can move forward with any confidence. But we don’t have that time, or money, or interest really. The less cute parts of conservation aren’t very profitable.
A close friend of mine is a sociology major, and while doing the readings this week I mentioned the subject matter to them; how race plays into where people live, and thus the environments they are exposed to, how gathering data in the field can be affected by whose collecting it, etc. As we were talking, I was once again reminded about the broad boundaries of environmental studies, as most of the topic we were discussing fell more into their area of interest than mine, as I tend to hone in on plants. Nevertheless, this area fascinates me, as the intersection between the social and scientific tends to.
While reading Nading’s Dengue in the Landscape, I was struck with the complexities of disease management that I had not considered. The paper goes over the notion of assigning blame to any given person as a vector for disease, and how many efforts to track dengue focuses on the personal action of citizens, and not of broader problems like infrastructure left in the hands of the government. It reminded me of a problem I have with current mainstream environmental activism. Often a narrative is pushed saying that if all of us came together and biked to work and used fewer plastics and ate less meat the planet would be saved. This is problematic because it shifts the responsibility of environmental protection to the individual acts of the consumer; a blatant distraction from the auto industry actively trying to suppress affordable access to public transport or the irresponsible decisions of factory farms or the very fact that people own private jets.
Which brings me to another point about mainstream environmentalism; the ability to follow all the prescribed steps for “helping the environment” is inherently a privilege. Biking or using public transport to work implies that you live close enough to your work to do so, likely in a high-rent neighborhood in an urban area where other people also bike to work. Using less plastic means having the money to go to a farmers market or Whole Foods and putting your wholesale brown rice in your own reusable burlap sack. Eating less meat assumes that you don’t just live off of fast food, since its cheap and filling and readily available in the food desert you live in and doesn’t require you to cook after coming home from you two minimum wage jobs. People who aren’t upper-middle or upper class have little access for participating in environmental change under capitalism because they have to make sure they’re alive first. Worst of all is that these people are also the ones most affected by environmental issues. Water, air, and noise pollution all make neighborhoods less desirable, driving rent down, meaning that these places are inhabited by poor communities. Putting aside the fact that our country doesn’t have socialized healthcare for a moment; there is a reason why people in poor neighborhoods have shorter lives and more health issues. Their homes are literally killing them.
And that’s why environmental justice is so important; because specific groups of people based on race and income are being targeted as exploitable populations, as they often don’t have the resources to go up against oil companies. Environmentalism is for everyone, and it effects some more than others. We can’t ignore it.
This week, for the annual ENVS symposium, we were lucky to have Daryl Davis over to speak about his ongoing quest to answer a question that he’s puzzled over as a black man, “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?” Which, as a queer person, I have also thought about; what draws someone to blind hatred of a whole group of people?
Davis tackles this question in a way that could be seen as foolish or naive, possibly deadly. He travels the country (in between his gigs as a jazz pianist) meeting and befriending KKK members. Over time he has collected two dozen robes from those who renounced the KKK after befriending Davis, which he views as strides in the right direction. And who am I to argue? I have probably never changed someone’s mind like Davis has. And I think that’s because he’s one of the few people that can do what he’s doing.
Daryl Davis standing next to a KKK member who had just presented him with a “certificate of friendship.”
Before I state my opinion, I want to say that I have nothing on Davis, he’d done more, lived longer, and I know I could learn a lot from him. However, I would like to say that Davis could not have done this if he was a woman, or gay, or wore something else than collared shirts. Davis is a fantastic speaker, but it should be noted that he speaks in a way that is familiar to white people. If Davis was a young man, say in his 20s, he wouldn’t be able to do what he does. That’s why when people say that Davis’s approach towards eliminating oppression is the way we should all be doing it, I have mixed feelings.
First off, Davis put himself in considerable danger by meeting KKK members. He recounted the story of conducting an interview with a KKK leader when he was almost shot by the bodyguard when the melting ice in the ice bucket made a sudden noise. The oppressed should not be given the burden of changing the oppressor’s mind, especially when that task involves very real threats of violence against their body.
Since this is an ENVS blog, and this was an ENVS symposium, I will connect what I mean back to that. When two people are discussing an issue unless both of them are exactly the same in age, gender, race, wealth, and education, each will hold their own prejudice against the other for their different background and assume their opinion is superior (likely also indicating they consider themselves superior). And thinking that every person is willing and able to have their background involved either implicitly or explicitly in the conversation being had is short-sighted of the personal life.
In Daryl Davis’s documentary on his journey across America, speaking to KKK leaders, he interviews two young Black Lives Matter activist leaders, who refuse to shake his hand. And I understand why. I felt like they knew that they could not do what Davis was doing, provided they were willing to do so, simply because of background and circumstance. So they were hitting the pavement and trying to improve their community directly, which is unforgiving work. They thought Davis was taking an easy stance, fraternizing with the enemy.
I want to conclude by saying only this; what Davis is doing important? Yes. Should we all be doing it? No, because so many can’t. Davis’s method and direct action can co-exist because they must. Davis is one of the few people who could do what he does and people in his position should do the same. But neither of these types of advocacy are “right” or “best”. So don’t be mean about it, Daryl would be sad.
This Image was featured on a New York Times article on the recent IPC report. Original caption: Harry Taylor, 6, played with the bones of dead livestock in Australia, which has faced severe drought.
Class was particularly interesting this week, as in the midst of hurricane Micheal we discussed the recently released ICP report, which seemed to contain only bad news; that we are behind in our goal in reduced carbon emissions. And not just that; the report posits that even keeping the global temp from rising 2 degrees Celsius might be too much, and would have unmanageable consequences on the planet and that a maximum of 1.5 degrees should be strived for, which means that things must radically change now.
While nursing all these facts over my morning yerba mate, we were instructed to consider the above image; What did it represent? How did it make you feel?
Most of my classmates commented on the bleakness of the image, how the young child was representative of a generation inheriting a ruined planet. For me, it reminded me of my own childhood of wandering the dry plains in California, looking for plants and bones and fossils. Maybe that’s telling of the planet I grew up in.
I feel that most importantly it should be mentioned that while the report talks of the future, this picture was taken in the present. I feels like it should represent a possible future devoid of life. But we’re already there. The report is talking about something bigger, something worse.
According to the ICP report, we are teetering on the edge of disaster. I knew this, but its something else to point to one specific paper that people might recognize as reputable. We live in such a critical time, possibly the last opportunity to make it so the world can continue to support life, and yet we are at a standstill. To put it crudely, we have the tools to radically curb climate change, its just that the people who would have to take up the responsibility to use those tools are tools themselves. Unless all the shareholders for the top 100 companies responsible for killing the planet all of a sudden make climate change their immediate concern, those companies will still pursue profit above everything (and everyone) else. There needs to be a significant change immediately. I like direct action, but I won’t say more than that, lest I be put on a watchlist.
ContraPoints does an excellent youtube video about what I’m talking about, that mentions the IPC report and hurricanes and is more coherent than I am. It’s a little… vulgar? But its very fun. I’ll link to it here.
*Ted Talk Presenter Voice* But what if we are allSwaziland?
This past week was a transition from the perspective of environmental philosophy to that of the strategy of the environmental scholar in analyzing situations and their causes. This week we focused on environmental health, and were introduced to the concept of “situating.” Situating is an analytical strategy that essentially takes one specific scenario, finds each of the actors and effects, and then uses that analysis to apply it to similar situations.
Our in-class reading for the week was a paper written in part by our own Jim Proctor, titled Household-level environmental health in the Ezulwini Valley, Swaziland.” To quote directly from the introduction of the paper, The World Health Organization (WHO) states that environmental health “…addresses all the physical, chemical and biological factors external to a person, and all the related factors impacting behaviors. It encompasses the assessment and control of those environmental factors that can potentially affect health.” Things that fall within the realm of environmental health include access to drinking water, adequate sanitation, hygiene, effects of rapid urbanization on pollution, and climate change. Swaziland struggles with issues faced by most developing nations such as water, sanitation, and health. The study in the paper was conducted after a five-year effort by WHO to improve conditions in Swaziland, which while met with a degree of success, the improvements were felt primarily by those in higher income brackets. Sound familiar?
A considerable amount of focus was put on access to “improved water” which is any piped water. However, improved water is often not safe to drink, even though it is seen as an improvement to wells and streams. Not only that, but Swaziland struggles greatly with HIV, reliance on wood fuel, and lack of adequate disposal methods for solid and human wastes.
I feel like the analysis of the status of Swaziland is itself is evidence of the importance of situating areas before making statements about their condition. Having piped water is an important step forward regarding infrastructure, but that means nothing if that water is not safe to drink. Not to mention that one of the contributions for why that water is unsafe is because of contamination from unmonitored solid and human waste disposal.
The concept of situating I feel also speaks to the interdisciplinary nature of ENVS. So many practices went into the conducting of this survey, including aspects of sociology, resource management, and climate science. Not only is it important, but I find it fascinating.
This baby is the technological sins of humanity. Why don’t you love him, you absolute monster?
All discussion in 160 this week was dedicated to the journal Love Your Monsters, a collection of essays that center around post-environmentalism and the Anthropocene. Already both of these words are alienating to the typical reader, as well as the first year college student. We were asked in class to put our questions about the reading up on the board for discussion, and all I could muster was “What’s going on with all that stuff in there?” which is barely a question at all. I still don’t really know what’s going on, or if I agree with it. Maybe I’m unenlightened, but if that’s what I need to be to get this, let’s just say I won’t be doing any meditating.
There are many things that I do agree with, despite my possibly shallow reading of the text. Yes, humans have always evolved alongside and in conjunction with technology, and we should continue to do so, as is our nature. I also agree that green capitalism is whack, and serves more to reassure the consumer that they can participate in capitalism ethically and sustainably, which is categorically untrue. I also agree that moving forward we must examine the relationship the technological can have with the natural and that those two are not mutually exclusive. Rejecting existing technologies that had unintended consequences on the environment is irresponsible and super uncool. All of this is true.
And yet I have issues with this work. They say we need nuclear energy now, and say that the environmentalist paralysis out of fear of unintended consequence is unacceptable. I do think inaction out of fear will get us nowhere fast, but we know precisely the results of nuclear energy, nuclear waste, which we don’t have any great ideas of how to dispose of. I also feel that there are times where the work gets combative and dismissive of mainstream environmentalists, while also preaching about the innovation of their own ideas. Are they bad ideas? I would say no, if controversial.
Like I mentioned, I am a freshman in college, who took AP Environmental science once. These people have done this with their lives. But it cannot be ignored that if you cannot reach me, someone who is still forming their environmental manifesto in their head and who is ready to listen with an above average scientific literacy in comparison to the layman, I doubt you will reach anyone at all.