The Green
   
      In this Issue...
 
  Quote of the month:

"… our actions link directly back to nature. Collectively and individually, we have a great responsibility to protect the ocean and the wonderful creatures that live there.  If we all do just a little, together we can give a lot." 

Laird Hamilton

Articles
 
 
  • Letters to Dr Green - Thanksgiving Chaos and Dying for a Breath of Fresh Air - aka Samantha Page, San Mateo HS, San Mateo
 
 
 
 
 
Artwork and
Photographs
 
  • Art of the Month:  – Fall Flurry - by Kevin Shen,  Irvington HS, Fremont
 
 
 
 
 
  • A Close-Up Look at Crater Lake - Blue Bliss, Reaching High, Wizard Island Ye Ole Battleship and a Thousand Grasping Hands - photos by Kevin Shen,  Irvington HS, Fremont
 
Videos & Audio
 

November 2006

 

Art of the Month

Fall Flurry

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I was sitting at my desk, gazing idly out the windows, when suddenly I saw a flock of birds diving and swooping as low as twenty feet off the ground. I rushed outside with my camera and chased the birds to where they had newly settled. There I waited until they took flight again, and this was what I caught.
- by Kevin Shen, Irvington HS, Fremont
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Anime Magician  

by Joshua Martarella, Jr, Stone Valley MS, Alamo

 

 

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Letters to Dr. Green
dr. green

EarthTeam’s own environmental “advice” columnist with a prescription for what ails her readers – and the Earth.

Thanksgiving Chaos?

Dear Dr. Green,

I am a vegan and I am really worried about Thanksgiving. My entire family is heavy on meat-eating, and I feel like my cousins, uncles, and aunts are all going to give me a really hard time for avoiding the turkey. My family already abuses my vegan decisions to the point of calling me “anorexic”—and with my distant family who is even less understanding, I absolutely do not know what I am going to do. I have held my vegan ways for almost six months now and I definitely don’t want family to be the reason that I give in.  Do you have any advice for my situation?

With anxiety,

Chaos Awaits

Dear Chaos Awaits,

I know what you are going through to some extent.  Even my boyfriend didn’t approve of me becoming a vegetarian at first, but eventually he got over it.  The most obvious advice that I can give you is to stay strong through Thanksgiving because although it’s a big deal to you, your family will easily forget about it.  What I really advise you to do, however, is purchase a vegan turkey! Cook up fake turkey (which is actually tofu) and eat it instead! They will never know. Here are ingredients to an awesome vegan thanksgiving:

INGREDIENTS
  • 6 lb / 2.7 kg firm tofu
Cornbread Stuffing
  • 1 cup / 175 g diced onion
  • 1 cup / 175 g diced celery
  • 1 T sesame oil
  • 1/2 t sage
  • 1/2 t thyme
  • 1 t parsley
  • Salt and pepper to taste
  • 3 cups / 350 g cubed whole wheat bread
  • 2 cups / 225 g cubed corn bread
  • 1/2 cup / 100 ml vegetable broth
  • 1/2 cup / 75 g walnuts or pecans (optional)
Basting Liquid
  • 1/2 cup / 100 ml sesame oil
Gravy
  • 1 onion, diced
  • 2 T oil
  • 1 cup / 100 g sliced mushrooms
  • 5 T flour
  • 2 cups / 400 ml vegetable broth
  • 1/2 cup / 100 ml soy sauce
  • 1/2 cup / 100 ml water
To find out how to make the feast using the ingredients, visit http://www.vegan-food.net/recipe/822/Tofu-Not-a-Turkey/

Good luck and let me know how it goes!

Dr. Green

Dying for a Breath of Fresh Air

Dear Dr. Green,

OK, I've heard that the indoor environment can be dangerous and I've read about all the chemicals that our bodies are holding from one of your previous articles that explored The Body Burden.  I know that a lot of this indoor pollution comes from our furniture, carpets and houses, so what can we do right now that will help us "clean up" our indoor environment without having to throw out our furniture or move from our houses?

Dying for a breath of fresh air,

Claustrophobic

Dear Claustrophobic,

You’re absolutely right, the indoor environment CAN be dangerous. In fact, indoor pollution is generally more polluted than outdoor.  Instead of dumping out all of your old furniture, you can easily purchase an air purifier. American Lung Association claims that air cleaners are able to eliminate “gases, odors, chemicals, and particles.” This sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me, although air purifiers can be expensive, ranging from about $150-$500. They are available to buy from Sharper Image, Oreck, and many other companies.

Other ways to get rid of air pollution include simply throwing away perfume or air freshener (yes, you may want to stick with lighting a match after going #2).   Believe it or not, 75% of American households have pesticides in their house.  When one thinks of pesticides, the image of a dangerous bottle of poison probably registers. However, it seems that people fail to recognize the fact that these poisons include insect repellent and disinfectants, products that we don’t acknowledge as especially perilous.  

Maybe it’s time to get rid of these products—after all—not so long ago American Association of Poison Control Centers reported that 79,000 children had been exposed to poisonous pesticides.

My advice: set aside a couple of hours on a nice Sunday, blast your favorite music, and rummage around the house tossing products that you can simply live without.

Happy Toss Day!

Dr. Green

References:

http://www.airpurifiers.com/home/ala-indoor-pollution.htm

http://www.epa.gov/iaq/pesticid.html

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Pinole Valley HS students remove the fennel from the park
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From a lesson by Teens Touch the Earth
- photo by Cynthia Zuniga,
Adams MS, Richmond
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Teens Touch the Earth in Richmond  

By Joshua Martarella, Stone Valley MS, Alamo and Cynthia Zuniga, Adams MS, Richmond

On the last Saturday of October, students from three different high schools came together in Richmond for a restoration project for EarthTeam. Students from Pinole Valley, Richmond High, and the Oakland Military academy met up with EarthTeam at the Miller Knox Shoreline in Richmond. These students met Salli Lundgren and the "Teens Touch the Earth" coordinator and East Bay Regional Parks naturalist, Bethany Facendini.

Special visitor – John McCutcheon – from the American Red Cross came to tell the students about opportunities to work with Americorps, like he’s doing.  He’s finding out what career he wants to go into while he’s working with youth in the Bay Area.  He came from Maryland and got to travel to Washington D.C. for training.  He chose to come to California to work for one or two years.   He loves what he’s doing and says that he has made some “great connections in the Bay Area”.   He told us that some Americorp members become fulltime employees after their internship. 

In his job, John visits schools to be a guest speaker in classes and assemblies, preparing students for disasters like earthquakes and fires.   He said that some of the Americorp volunteers are in Texas right now to help with the floods there.  It can be very important for people to speak more than one language so they can help out in parts of the U.S. where people don’t always speak English.   At the end of his service, John will get $4500 for college, as an educational grant.  Having Americorps on his resume is also helpful when he applies to college and for jobs.
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“Looking here at the lagoon, I can see nature close up, but then I look farther and I see the houses and the refinery, the bridge and the dock and I think about how we make changes around us.” Photo of the Miller-Knox
quote -by Chris DeLeon, PVHS, Pinole
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You can learn more about being in Americorps at the website www.americorps.org

Chris DeLeon, a 12th grader at Pinole Valley, said, "Humans affect the environment and that's why the environment is important to make the world a better place for all of us.”

A Mechanical Digester – for Your Left-Overs

By Sandra Nguyen, Piedmont HS, Piedmont

Have you ever been to a restaurant, looked at all the left over food on your plate and felt bad for wasting it? Well some of the trendiest restaurants in San Francisco -- Zuni Cafe, Jardiniere, Oliveto and Boulevard among others --  are now working together with Ruihong Zhang, a professor at UC Davis, to put this waste to use. The professor of biological and agricultural engineering has been working between a Davis private firm and Onsite Power Systems Inc. on a food "digester" for eight years.

The Digester, revealed October 24th, extracts fuels as well as fertilizer from kitchen and yard wastes, and is far more efficient than any other models in terms of gas production and cost. The system employs anaerobic bacteria (anaerobic means without oxygen) to break down wastes in large tanks, yielding copious volumes of flammable gas. Eight tons a week that come from these restaurants in San Francisco will be sent to the digester.

Ideally, there will be power plants based off of this patented digester and each ton of waste will produce enough gas to supply ten homes. About twenty different companies or municipalities already have expressed interest in buying the devices. California Integrated Waste Management Board estimates that twenty two million tons of wet organic waste is produced each year in the California state alone. If this waste was used in plants like the digester that Zhang has created, then it would generate the daily equivalent of over a million gallons of gasoline. Not only will this give us an alternate energy supply, but also cut the sizes of landfills across California. There has been much progress in society, but finally here is a change for how we handle our garbage. For centuries, we have been handling trash the same way, burning it or burying it. We should look forward to the day where we look at this digester as a conventional energy source.
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Birds Among Us
by Kevin Shen, Irvington HS, Fremont
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Blue Bliss
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Ye Ole Battleship
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Crater Lake – A Summer Tradition
A Crater Lake photo album

I visited Crater Lake this summer as part of a family tradition of visiting a national park every summer. Although Crater Lake is indeed one of the smaller parks I have visited, it never ceased to inspire awe from each new perspective. The clarity of the water is a pure and magnificent blue (living up to its fame as clearest body of water), and the intimate inhabitants of the crater possessed just as many wonders. It was these wonderful scenes that moved me to photograph and preserve Crater Lake.

- by Kevin Shen, Irvington HS, Fremont

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Wizard Island
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A Thousand Grasping Hands
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Trash to Treasure - Video

By after school club at Stewart School, Pinole, 5 – 8th grade

                  video link
        Click camera to view video (1.9mb)

Natasha

Coastal Cleanup at the Berkeley Aquatic Park
By Natasha Gupta, Monte Vista HS, Danville

Sept. 2006 –  EarthTeam’s official restoration kick-off for this school year
I stepped out of my car and walked on the muddy, wet ground as I watched a yellow school bus pull into the meeting area.  A stream of smiling students came out of the bus dressed in sweats and chatting with  other, all waiting a busy day cleaning up the litter at Berkeley Aquatic Park.  I looked around at all the teachers and volunteers and slowly the area filled up with more people as cars drove in.  Sitting on a bench with a pen and pad, I could only be amazed by how many kids, teenagers, and adults poured in to help with this cause.
The Coastal Cleanup at Berkeley Aquatic Park, an event that has taken place since 1985, was attended by 150 students coming from Acalanes, Northgate, San Lorenzo, and Berkeley High Schools.  This statewide environmental event has made it into  the Guinness Book of Records for the largest organized cleanup, with over 700,000 participants throughout the years.
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The huge number of youth volunteers was moving towards adults assign in the coordination of the event. As EarthTeam’s executive director Sheilah Fish told me, “It’s inspiring, hopeful… there are many environmental challenges and after today we hope young people will take initiative and be propelled to help out.”   I asked Chicory Bechtel, an EarthTeam volunteer and coordinator directing one of the cleanup groups at the park, what her reaction was to seeing the number of students attending this event.  “My reaction is real happiness and joy,”she said.  I’m really happy to see all these kids come out to help with the environment.”

I asked Linda Bandrowski an AP Bio and Biotech teacher at Northgate High School, what had brought the 60 students attending from her school to this event.  “Most kids are here because they care.  These kids realize that if they don’t take an active stand now, the world will not be like the world they’re living in now.”  Many students also came as representatives of various environmental clubs, for their community service requirement.  Seniors Joe Engada, Jieven Paulo Salta, and
Harold Tafur were members of San Lorenzo High’s environmental club, an organization which requires students to participate in various cleanups and to plant native plants at their school.  Said Engeda, “We want to serve as an example for our school and encourage others to follow.”  I asked them about what kinds of trash they had found and they looked at each other and chuckled as Salta told me, “We found a lot of things you wouldn’t expect; people are really not very discrete about their trash.”  Allison Cooper, a student from Albany High said, “We’ve mostly seen little pieces that people think won’t add up, but they do.” 

Many students claimed to find car parts, chunks of metal, and one volunteer even found a stuffed monkey that could sing and dance (after one of our EarthTeam reporters took the batters out of his camera to try out the monkey).  Many students wee surprised to find out how quickly their garbage bags had filled up.  In response to seeing the huge amount of garbage in the park, Roxennea Firouzian, a freshman at Acalanes High School said, “We need to put in more trash cans to keep the park clean.  There needs to be more awareness of what’s going on.” 

At the end of the cleanup, students gathered in the meeting area and cheered as they watched every trash bag hauled up to the scale.  Over 5000 pieces of trash had been collected in this one morning, an overwhelming amount usually collected in one month of regular cleanup.  It was a productive day for the volunteers, happily munching on Subway sandwiches and chips as they spread out in the meeting area for a social time.

Even though students were happy with the results of their efforts, many felt driven to continue to help with the problem of excessive waste.  As Acalanes junior Helen Banach said, “This is such a big problem; even doing a little is doing something.”

Robert, from Northgate HS, wins the prize for “weirdest thing found” at the clean up.  His stuffed monkey sings and dances.
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Robert, from Northgate HS,
wins the prize for
“weirdest thing found” at the
clean up. His stuffed monkey
sings and dances.
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It’s Happening at the ESA – Videos Making Memories

By James Theodore, Environmental Studies Academy,  Martinez

We’re making a movie.  Allied Waste and the Friends of the 5 Creeks are sponsoring a movie, that the Environmental Studies Academy students are making.  We’re calling it the “Oil in Creeks” video and it emphasizes the effects of putting used oil in creeks, where it comes from, where it goes, alternatives of what to do with the oil and how to get people to know the steps taken in these choices.

Just remember it’s always your choice. The steps you take to recycle your used oil can be to bring your used oil to a certified auto shop or just leave it on the curb in a milk carton or jug with your garbage and recyclables on garbage night. The effects it has on the creek are: polluting the water, cutting the oxygen down in the water and infecting and killing the fish and other life.

E.S.A. students have interviewed an auto shop mechanic and manager, a man by the name of Igor Skaredof who collaborates with the E.S.A. to teach about maintenance of the creek and data collection which took place last school year.

plankton
by Jimmy Dam
Oakland HS, Oakland
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Lana Husser has devoted her time to the E.S.A. to instruct the proper camera stances and use of all its’ features, editing, effects, and voice recording along with these lessons. For those who participated in last years’ and the rest of this school year would agree that the impact that Lana has made is memorable, inspirational, and almost beyond words of understanding.

I myself will remember the lessons I was taught and not to be afraid to handle digital cameras and the editing equipment.

Editor’s Note: The video will be used by Allied Waste and the Friends of 5 Creeks to teach the public in the Central Contra Costa area to recycle used motor oil and also to publicize the good work that they do.

Environmental Studies in Spanish Class?

The year’s hottest topic can be part of every class

By Dyani Main, St Mary’s HS, Berkeley

The environment and global warming aren’t subjects you’ll see being taught in schools along side math and English; however it is possible to integrate this learning into our educational system. There are many teachers out there who are willing to dedicate some time during their classes to help teach students about what is going on and what they can do to help in the world around them. Many teachers may not know how to do this without diverging too much from their subject. I believe it is possible to relate these immensely important topics into every subject. My Spanish teacher Sra. Diaz is a powerful environmentalist or “ecologista”. She wanted us all to know about the horrible things that are happening in the world around us and inform us of how we could help. Sra. Diaz made a plan to get the movie An Inconvenient Truth with Spanish subtitles in order to not only teach us about global warming but to also help us out with our Spanish environmentalist lingo. She also located a list of words that express the environment and global warming that were translated into four different languages. Click here to download and print this glossary for your class. 

Sra. Diaz is an inspiration to many teachers and environmentalists. Through creative thinking and teaching she was able to incorporate what was going on in the world around us into a foreign language class. We here at Earth Team want to thank her for being such a motivating environmentalist. We hope that more teachers will realize that they too can teach kids more than just the classic math and science.

Here are some other ideas to add the environment to everyday classes.

Science- Write the chemical formula of all the toxins that are being emitted into the air every day by cars and machines.

Math- Calculate how many tons of trash a day is produced in America if every America produces on average about 4.5 pounds per day,

History- Discuss how the Industrial Revolution not only took away jobs from many working people but also started a wave of pollution.

English- Write a research paper on how individuals can change the environment for the better, and give extra credit if these plans are put into action.

Have any ideas on how teachers and schools can help kids learn about what they can do to help the world? Just e-mail them to Dyani@earthteam.net and I will be sure to post them on the next issue of the EarthTeam  GREEN NEWS.


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In the middle of the UC Berkeley campus, you can find the lovely, hidden Strawberry Creek (left) and watch water striders enjoy the sun (below).   Photos by Anastasia Gordon, DeAnza High School, Richmond

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Student Environmental Leadership Weekend (SELW) 2006

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If you missed the EarthTeam SELW on Oct 14– 15, you need to hear what students are saying about it.  Then you can start planning to be there next year. 

“I liked how we can  meet more and new people and make new friends and at the same time learn about our environment and having fun.” Arsikh Jawaid, 11th Grade, Pinole Valley HS

“The speakers and workshops were awesome. I loved the Renewable Energy and Food Justice.” Sarah Dutra, 12th Grade, Washington HS (Fremont)

“My only regret is not knowing about EarthTeam before.” Connie Ip,

10th Grade, Skyline HS

I made a new friend, great food, awesome entertainment.” Lauren Cates, 12th Grade, Washington HS

“So much fun. I had a blast!” Kyle Sigler, 11th Grade, Northgate HS

“It was amazing to meet so many energetic people who were interested about the environment.” Emily Thomas, 10th Grade, College Park HS

“Everything was nice. The best thing was interacting with people from other schools.” Arthur Jones, 11th Grade, Pinole Valley HS

Learning to make fire at the survival

skills workshop at SELW

“[I liked] just being here with my friends, meeting new people, and trying new things.”

 Renae DiBartolomeo, 10th Grade, College Park HS

“I learned about the environment and what I could do to better the community I live in.” 11th Grader, LEJ (Literacy for Environmental Justice)
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A Yurt, part building, part tent
at Camp Arroyo
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Students enjoyed the dramatic
skits and the hip-hop workshops
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“We didn't know what to expect when we got there, we were a little scared actually. We ended up learning many things over the weekend, thanks to [EarthTeam] and the whole Camp Arroyo staff. Not to mention the food! The food was great! We all really enjoyed the poetry, ropes course, rock climbing, singing songs at the campfire, the hip hop theatre, and especially bonding with the other campers. So thank you for preparing a splendid weekend of fun for us and other schools around the Bay.” Michelle Mac, Jocelyn Fuentecilla, Monica Le, 10th Grade, Pinole Valley HS

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Learning to make fire at the survival
skills workshop at SELW
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Photos were taken by EarthTeam interns.

See you at next year’s SELW!

Recycling Posters

Click poster to download and print for your school
poster 1
by Darren Hung, DeAnza HS, Richmond
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poster 2
by Daria Robinson, DeAnza HS, Richmond
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