On Nov. 10th, 2014 Bay and Paul started our meeting working on an event that will be happening on December 6th. We came up with a few ideas to do with the rest of the kids who will be at Dinosnore, an event where the kids in Evolutions can spend the night at the Museum. Then later on in the meeting we had two guest speakers come in to talk to us.

The guest speakers told us a lot about their time traveling and going to UN meetings and youth assemblies. One of the speakers Ralien Bekkers was a Yale student  from the Netherlands and has a youth delegate program. The program is a 3 year program and people are usually paired with someone else so that way they can learn with someone else with more experience. She also went around the country to talk to young people to find out what they want from the government and the UN.

During the meeting we learned a lot about UN conferences and how the youth can be involved in them. We learned that during conference the youth have their own little mini meeting where they can come together to strategize and think together. Which I think is amazing because those kids who are at those meetings are probably going to end up being the people running the conferences in the future and because they started together at such a young age they can give the youth a voice and young people are more willing to listen and consider things, while sadly the older people are more set in stone.

We also learned that it is very hard for the nations leaders to come to an agreement at these conferences. Our guest speakers told us that their main problem is that they don’t know how to work together. At these conferences all the countries have big environmental problems and everyone is too focused on what's wrong with their country and who is responsible for the way the environment is. I think that the government thinks too much about pleasing people and trying to change their way of everyday living too much. But what they aren’t thinking about is the future. If they keep fighting and not wanting to change then everything will just keep getting worse then their kids will have to deal with the consequences. They need to remember you have to give a little to make the world a better healthier place.  

Video assignment

Since our meeting was cancelled, Matt assigned these two videos. Please watch them both and write up a paragraph describing something interesting, surprising, or confusing.You can just reply as a comment on this post. Thanks!

Video #1: This video is, in my humble opinion, quite inspiring and brings forth many issues that impoverished, urban communities face. Although it does not delve into too much detail about specific issues, it nonetheless raises concerns that many people face on a daily basis; including right here in New Haven!

http://www.ted.com/talks/majora_carter_s_tale_of_urban_renewal#t-844704

Video #2:This video is going to lay out the fundamentals of population growth and how our rising numbers are putting ever-increasing strain on the very ecosystems we so intimately rely on. Virtually all of our modern social and environmental issues stem from this concept and, through watching this video, will help put things into context for you. There are multiple videos on this page so be sure to watch the first one entitled "population" (feel free to watch the others if you wish)

http://planetearthherald.com/top-10-environmental-issues/

Summer Research Project

            Starting in November of my junior year I interned at the Yale invertebrate paleontology lab. Most of what I did was to catalog the fossils into a database. The purpose of this was to put all of these fossils’ information is in one place so that people doing research would have easy access to have information on many different fossils instead of having to spend much more time looking at all the different fossils individually. For example people researching climate change could quickly look at the locations of these different fossils to see things like the rise and fall of sea levels back then to be able to use it to predict future sea level changes.

            Over the summer I start to work on creating an interactive cart to teach children about these fossils. A few other people and I did some research on the fossils from the Ordovician and Pennsylvanian period, which was the two periods in which most of the fossils from my internship were from. We also created several videos for the people to view on a kiosk. These videos go through the process of how the fossils are found and taken out of the ground to how they are cataloged, put into the fossil database, and put into the collections. The some of the videos go over some information about the organisms that became those specific fossils and what we can learn from this information or the big idea of this database. We also designed a part of the cart where children would be able to look at some real fossils from these periods and be able to use the kiosk to be able to identify it and then learn something about the fossil that they are looking at.

Field Trip to Maritime Aquarium

        On Saturday, November 22 many of the Bay and Paul environmental group students took a field trip to the Maritime Aquarium. There we met up with a group of students which are a part of a program which is run there and is very similar to Evolutions. The day started out with us going into their classroom and we got to start an ice breaker. Once that was done we got the amazing opportunity to go behind the scene and not only get to see the shark tank from above it, but we also got to feed the sharks. After that we got to take a tour of the aquarium getting to see different things like sharks, turtles, otters, meerkats, many different types of fish and frogs, as well as many other types of animal the aquarium has to offer. We go to see the seals get fed and pet sting rays and moon jellies. Throughout this tour we get to learn about a lot of different careers that you could have in a aquarium in particular different jobs in science that pertain to the different jobs at the aquarium. After this we go to see an I-max movie about the coral reefs and learn about some of the animals that live there. After this we got to go back to their classroom before we had to leave to dissect a shark. With this we learned about   different things about its anatomy and things like how big its liver is compared to the rest of its body and why this important to it anatomy and things like how the fact that its liver is less dense then the water helps it to swim and not sink.

Project E-Waste

Cell phones, computers, batteries, and televisions... Every year new versions of these products come out!

That's great we're keeping up with technology but what do we normally do when those devices get outdated?

THROW IT OUT.

Throwing these unwanted devices are known as E-Waste. E-Wastes are detrimental to our environment when it's not disposed of the right way. It should be recycled rather being placed in landfills.

In places like Colorado, companies have already started to gain the attention of residents to recycle their E-Waste.

Since e-waste is increasing greatly by the numbers, we don't exactly know what to do with it. Companies gain electronics, but send them off to other countries for more space so they can break them apart and harness the most valuable materials.

However as consumers bring their goods to the company, they illegally transport devices with toxins, to China and have them break it down even more (for cheap labor reasons).

In the area of Guiyu, China, consequences are great. They found that pregnant women are 6 times more likely to end in miscarriages and that 7/10 kids have too much lead in their blood. Guiyu has the highest level of Cancer-causing dioxins in the world. These toxins cause kidney diseases and brain damage. Something should be done about this.

We can't exactly stop the production of E-Waste. That would mean we'd have stop putting out new technology as it's being innovated. But, it's really hard to manage and recycle e-waste. A way we can start to change that, is by slowing down the accumulation of E-Waste Americans are making by placing laws to regulate the manufactures from producing unnecessary amounts of products. Then we can figure out what to do with the waste. To limit the production of e-waste, manufacturers can limit the amount of toxins they use per device and sell their old devices (so other people can use them).

Information Retrieved From http://www.cbsnews.com/news/following-the-trail-of-toxic-e-waste/

~Anna Khairi

Hello!

I'd like to introduce myself to this blog. My name is Anna Khairi and I'm a new to they Bay & Paul Leadership program. I joined this program because I thought it was really interesting to see how my peers made a direct change to our community by simply talking about it. It really opened my eyes how environmental problems aren't just for adults to fix, but for us, the new generation, to continue that progress. I also grew up loving nature and all it has to bring. Environmental science is something that I've grown to be attached to since I was younger. Now I grow a new interest of film making and want to incorporate that to my love of science. I can't wait to continue on my high school career with this internship!

The Future Lack of Food and It's Impact

As for environmental issues that I find the most catastrophic and problematic, food has to be one of them. Now food offers so many topics to be discussed in terms of the enviornment. Food justice and making sure that everyone has the access to healthy foods is an important one... but so is the use of GMOS or genetically modified organisms/foods. While both of those are also issues that we as a society need to discuss, I think that the more problematic aspect of food is that we seem to be negatively affecting it due to climate change. Crop yield is being heavily affected due to the random and uncontrolled variability in our climate. There have been multiple studies conducted that state that "climate variability historically accounts for one-third of yield variability for maize, rice, wheat and soybeans worldwide -- the equivalent of 36 cubic tons" (Science Daily Article See Link Below.) This means that there is 36 cubic tons of food that has the potential to NOT be grown and distributed. This information is currently being used by policy makers to try to come up with a solution to grow enough food for the public, stabilize the income of farmers, and still be very cheap. This is a hard task especially since there has been a recent push to boost food security across the globe.

Reserchers hope to use this information to find "hot spots" or places where they believe crops will still grow regardless of the climate conditions. This is problematic because the response to these hot spots will most likely be to over farm and suck all of the natural nutrients out of the ground to then supplement with chemically-based fertilizers. This of course would hurt these patches of land even more detrimentally than climate change because the only solution as of right now is to wait a couple decades until the nutrients return naturally; Unfortunately,  don't have decades to wait . We have a food crisis now that will be exasperated when we over farm on the only areas that we can get crops from.

So of course the next question is what to do. Policy makers have to worry about short term solutions as of right now, or else they will have thousands of people unable to eat healthy food -maybe even starve- because they are unable to feed them. My solution would to be to share food. If bigger countries with a lot of resources and money were to ship crops to countries that don't have as much- that would save so many people. We just need to work on working together and not for "our own." Sadly, my solution is unlikely to happen in the near future. Hopefully, policy makers will see that if they care for the short term as well as the long term the method that we are using right now will have catastrophic consequences that will be seen sooner rather than later.

Science Daily Article:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150122133219.htm

Summer Internship- Dr. Hull and Dr. Thomas

This summer I worked in the Yale Environmental Science Center and the Kline Yale Geology Building with Dr. Hull and Dr. Thomas learning about oceanic paleontology. I worked in this lab with three other Evo-peers and Yale undergraduate and graduate students alike. I was lucky because my internship was centered upon two ideas. The first idea was to get basic lab skills such as operating a scale and using chemicals, and the second idea was a lecture-based discussion on topics revolving around geologic principles and theories.

For the lab portion of the day, we would work right along side the Yale undergrads as we washed our foramnifera samples. Foramnifera are "amoeba-like" creatures that live, and have lived, in the oceans for a very long time. The Foramnifera samples that the lab had were gotten from the Welvis Trench off the coast of Africa and were dated back to approximately 52.6 million years ago, in what is known as the Eocene Epoch. Forams (short for Foramnifera) are especially useful because the lab is able to use carbon dating to figure out the salinity levels of the oceans that the For ams lived in when they were alive. Since Forams have a calcium carbonate shell that dissolves in water with lots of salt, the lab was able to figure out which time periods had extremely salty water by counting ad dating the forams. The Eocene Epoch, where the Forams were mostly from, was a time in the Earth's history in which the temperature and sea levels very closely match models that current environmentalists have produced to show what our world will look like if global warming keeps continuing. The lab was looking for solutions to the climate change problems that we will be seeing in as close to 75 years.

After the lab portion ended, we moved from the Environmental Science Center to the Kline Geology Tower to learn about geology. We were then supposed to use this information to start a Geology Cart for the Peabody's Sci.Corp program that uses these carts to explain science based topics to every day vistors. In order for us to start the cart, we needed to be taught the basics. The meant learning with Matt, our mentor, about environmental issues and geology as a whole.

Overall it was a wonderful experience that I know I am very privileged to have participated in.

Summary of Jan 16th 2015 B&P Meeting

January 16th was the first Bay & Paul meeting of 2015! In this meeting the new cohort of Bay & Paul (B&P) members were finally able to meet with the senior B&P to begin thinking about environmental issues that are making a name for themselves in U.S. Politics and International Trade agreements. But this meeting was also dedicated to getting to know each member of the two newly conjoined groups; the topic we learned about in this meeting was the Keystone XL pipeline.

Prior to beginning our research, Andrea asked each of us how much we knew about the Keystone XL pipeline, our responses ranged from knowing a lot about the XL pipeline to just hearing about it for the first time in that meeting. After watching a short video explaining the logistics of the pipeline, we all took the time to share out questions that we still had about the pipeline or new questions that arose after watching the video. When we read all of the questions, it was evident our inquiries fell under three main categories; the impact on international trade (specifically the Middle East), the impact on the environment, and the domestic impact of the pipeline.

According to our interest we split into three groups and began researching and myth busting, mainly figuring out the reality behind political propaganda. I was in the international trade impact group, and despite knowing a good deal about the logistics of the pipeline, I found out many of my assumptions about the impact of the Keystone pipeline on Middle East oil trade was proven to be false. After reading abstracts and pages of research and predictions about the Keystone XL pipeline written by the Department of Energy and other bureaucracies, I was surprise to learn that the XL pipeline would have little to no impact on trade with the Middle East and developing countries. In fact the XL pipeline would actually cause an increase in demand for oil GLOBALLY, for every one barrel of increased production there would be a .6 barrel increase in demand. This would result in TransCanada (the company owning the Keystone Pipeline) to increase production of crude oil subsequently causing an increase of CO2 into the atmosphere ranging from 0 to 110 million additional tons.

The environmental group found that there have been frequent spillages from the Keystone Pipeline, one of which no one knows how to stop. This pipeline also will be crossing through Native American Reservations and National Parks, the reservation is home to roughly 30+ tribes. The domestic group found that most of the oil produced would not be using in the U.S., rather it would be traded internationally and secondly it would have little to no impact in gas prices within the U.S.

It was interesting to begin really researching and understanding the complexities of environmental issues, however what it made me realize is how difficult it is for a common citizen to take the time to research, develop a solid understanding of a political or social issue and use that knowledge to create their own opinions. It took B&P roughly 90 minutes to even hit on all of the major issues surrounding the Keystone Pipeline. For an average American with children to take care of and a job to hold down, that is a lot of time to commit to just ONE issue in the government. With that in mind I now understand why many Americans are in favor of the Keystone pipeline, political propaganda is not fact, business ads are not fact, but if that is all that a person is surrounded by... perhaps they can not help but believe it.

-Mairead Brennan

Dinosnore Event 2014

We had the annual Dinosnore event in December this year. There were approximately 75 people that attended, these people were Evo students as well as students in a similar program from the New York Hall of Science Museum. As a Bay and Paul leader we spent a bunch of time preparing our 3 hour slot for this event. 

This event was our first predatory step to planning the Maya Conference that we are hosting in August. The dinosnore event is our first chance to lead a large group in a workshop. In my opinion it was a huge success.

For our part of the event, we were easily identified by the green shirts that I made (green for environmental consciousness.) The participants were split into three groups that we randomly split up, which served to introduce them to people they may not have spoken to or worked with before. Our six Bay and Paul fellows ran three stations, and had rotations of approximately 25 students between each of them.

My friend George and I ran and created the icebreaker station that included two games. The first activity called for all 25 people to be in a circle. Small notecards and crayons were passed around, and they each shared out loud and wrote down one item they own that best represented them. After everybody in the circle had gone around, mentioning things like a laptop or fishing rod, they were assigned numbers one to three, again splitting up the group. These smaller groups were each a team, and they had all been shipwrecked on a deserted island. The only materials they had were the items on their cards. Each group had to come up with a solution to either survive on the island, or escape to safety using the items within their group. The activity turned out to be a lot of fun, and the groups really enjoyed it. We tied the icebreaker together with a lesson on looking at things in different ways, and being creative in their re-use of items.

The second game was a bit different; the students involved were split into 3 separate groups. This time, their objective was to create the lamest environmental-themed superhero they could, with three unique powers. The group with the most creative, lamest, and overall original superhero won. Our example was Captain Planet, holding several amazing powers, such as the ability to turn into a tree, but only once, and it's permanent. The power to summon unlimited amounts of wasps, but he can't control them, or make them go away. And perhaps his greatest earth-saving gift: He can turn carbon dioxide into oxygen, but only one molecule at a time. The groups really enjoyed this activity, and we had fun hearing their crazy ideas.

The only thing that I would change for next time is making the two activities more environment focus, our station was supposed to be based on meeting new people and networking, and we received feedback that this shouldn't have been the main focus. The other four Bay and Paul fellows ran stations about using materials that incorporated environmentally conscious words and the third station hosted a debate.

Dinosnore Planning Meeting

This week, Bay and Paul fellows met and began to brainstorm ideas to host an educational activity during the annual Peabody Evolutions DinoSnore event. Our group came to the decision that we will create a mock-conference between several different nations, such as China, Brazil, Nigeria, Fiji, and the United States. Each group's nation will have economic interests such as protecting their resources, which will take the form of oil, forests, and goods so that they may gain or retain wealth, and also environmental concerns. These concerns will include problems that these nations face in real life, such as poor air quality, deforestation, and pollution. The Bay and Paul fellows will perform a short skit demonstrating these needs and issues that countries face, and then the students participating in the activity will be assigned a role as a nation and collaberate to reach a consensus that will benefit all of the nations, and protect their interests. We have chosen certain countries to create a diverse and representative list of developed, developing, and undeveloped nations across 6 continents. These include The United States of America, China, Brazil, Fiji,Tanzania, Australia, and the Netherlands. The skit will lay down rules and guidelines for the younger students, and set up a series of problems that are similar to those our world faces today. The student's activities will follow, working in conjunction with the skit to attempt to resolve as many of the issues that they can in order to help the environment and promote international cooperation. Our meeting today was very productive, and we turned several different ideas into one solid project to work on for the December 6 event.

George Baldwin

Dinosnore Blog Post

George Baldwin

The 2014 Dinosnore event was a huge success. 75 people attended, including guests from Queens, New York. The introduction events went smoothly, and we all had a great time eating pizza, playing Dance Dance Revolution, and meeting new people. The Bay and Paul fellows, wearing festive custom Bay and Paul t-shirts, soon took over, and introduced the Bay and Paul aspect of the event. The students were split into three groups using color coded name tags, which served to introduce them to people they may not have spoken to or worked with before. Our six Bay and Paul fellows ran three stations, and had rotations of 25 students between them.

Zariah and I ran an icebreaker station that included two games. The first activity organized the group members into a circle. Small notecards and crayons were passed around, and they each shared out loud and wrote down one item they own that best represented them. After everybody in the circle had gone around, mentioning things like a laptop or fishing rod, they were assigned numbers one to three, again splitting up the group. These smaller groups were each a team, and they had all been shipwrecked on a deserted island. The only materials they had were the items on their cards. Each group had to come up with a solution to either survive on the island, or escape to safety using the items within their group. The activity turned out to be a lot of fun, and the groups really enjoyed it. We tied the icebreaker together with a lesson on looking at things in different ways, and being creative in their re-use of items.

Our second activity ran a little differently. The students were again split into three groups, but this time with different people. Their objective was to create the lamest environmental-themed superhero they could, with three unique powers. The group with the most creative, lamest, and overall original superhero won. Our example was Captain Planet, holding several amazing powers, such as the ability to turn into a tree, but only once, and it's permanent. The power to summon unlimited amounts of wasps, but he can't control them, or make them go away. And perhaps his greatest earth-saving gift: He can turn carbon dioxide into oxygen, but only one molecule at a time. The groups really enjoyed this activity, and we had fun hearing their crazy ideas.

These activities were a lot of fun to run, and we enjoyed getting to know the Evolutions kids from other classes. We received a lot of positive feedback, and good constructive criticism. The lessons we learned will help us run the Maya conference, and make the activities run much smoother by decreasing transition time, clarifying directions, and getting more involvement and enjoyment out of our participants.