China QQC

"Challenges that impede prograress in energy savings include low fossil energy prices due in part to energy and fuel subsidies, an incomplete market-drivers policy, and the lack of capacity building for energy saving."

So from what I can tell, China is trying really hard to make themselves more energy efficient and produce less greenhouse gases, but people still prefer to buy fossil fuels because it's cheaper and there's not enough dedication to get the renewable energy movement down. What is a market-driver's policy?

An Inconvenient Conversation

An Inconvenient Conversation

Lynn Le

4/5/11

First off, we talked about how appropriately named this project was. Inconvenient is right, and because of inconvenience, I talked to a separate person for this assignment, and not my parents. Not only that, because I don’t care enough to do more than necessary for lack of my own time, I will honestly say here that I simply got the questions answered in interview format. There was no requirement that said this had to be in sentence format, so I am presenting this raw.

What forms of energy are available?

Wind, Tidal, Solar, Nuclear, Coal, Natural Gas…

What are the benefits and drawbacks of current energy sources?

Turbines of all sorts are expensive to build, Nuclear can have environmental drawbacks and can be dangerous, Solar panels take up a lot of space, Coal is bad for the environment, and Natural gas is limited.

Nuclear doesn’t have any immediate effect to the environment and is efficient, Wind takes up little space and has no effect on the environment, same with tidal. Solar is cheap, doesn’t hurt the environment and can be efficient. Coal is cheap and convenient, and natural gas is environmentally safe.

How can we provide the energy we need while maintaining ecological balance?

We can do away with harmful sources of energy and instead put in environmentally friendly means of energy.

How does climate change?

The change in climate is mostly natural. It’s natural for climates to change every once and a while on earth, as seen with the changes that the earth has already gone through. That is not to say that pollution is not a factor as well, it’s just that climate changes because it simply does.

How do we study global climate?

We take data about rainfall, temperature, snowfall, and etcetera.

Why is there a disconnect between what science is telling us and what the public and politicians are doing about climate change?

This is because the politicians are using climate change to further their careers. They don’t care for the facts, so they don’t pay attention to them. The public is similar. They listen to the politicians and the media and not what scientific journals are saying. Both are under a sort of state of hysteria where they only believe one thing and won’t look at the facts, even if they are presented to them.

What role, if any, do morality, ethics, and spirituality play in addressing climate change?

There is only a role when it comes to solving climate change. There are the issues of deforestation to create places for cleaner energy, there’s cost issues… and of course, there’s always the one crazy person who thinks global warming is a sign from God.

What leads some people to commit themselves deeply to addressing climate change -- and not others?

Some people commit themselves to the problem—creating less greenhouse gasses, dealing with cleaner energy, etcetera. Others are looking to repair the damage done to the earth. This is probably because some think prevention is more important than dealing with the damage already done, while others want to focus on repairing what we have then preventing it from happening again.

What is the hardest thing about addressing climate change?

The fact that the effects of anything we do can barely be seen. Every change we make, every tree we plant, there is no tangible evidence of the good we have done, so it can be difficult to motivate change. 

Back to 1983

Back to 1983
Wednesday, March 29, 2011

So it’s spring break, and there really is a lot and nothing to do. After getting back from a convention this weekend, I was tired and I honestly didn’t feel like doing anything at all.
I spent most of Monday and Tuesday cleaning up the stuff from the convention—freebies, uploading photos, putting away my costumes, fixing the props that got broken, and contacting the friends I had made there by finding them in places online.
There wasn’t much to do after that.
So on Wednesday, I slept in. I didn’t even hear my alarm go off, so I guess that counted as not using it. I woke up at some ten or eleven o’clock, had my breakfast—or rather, brunch, since it was pretty late…—and waited for lunch by talking with my sister in our room.
That’s what we always do in the mornings—it’s what gets our mind going and thinking, so when we have time, we usually talk for hours.
So then it was lunch time, and when we got out there, our mom had prepared us a Vietnamese dish that really required no oven. It was washed cold white noodles with the eggrolls and barbeque meat we had leftovers of from the previous day, with some herbs and covered in fish sauce, which was really just lemonade with some garlic and stuff in it. We mixed it all together and ate it—it’s not as unpleasant as it seems, it’s actually one of my favorite dishes.
After lunch, which I had seconds of because I loved it so much, I went and read some Japanese comics from my brother’s shared shelf—since I was bored and I had nothing better to do and I had been meaning to get around to reading them.
So most of my week in general was reading through one series called Chrono Crusade, which I finished that day. But so long of reading kind of hurts my body since I’m stretching out on the bed so much. So I went to the living room and played chess with my brother and sister, which I won once against my sister but lost all the other times. We had set up the chess board before for one of Dave’s math homeworks, and hadn’t bothered to put it away, so we might as well have used it.
The rest of the night was pretty much just reading manga and playing chess and talking to my sister.
Now onto answering those questions on the blog, I didn’t feel much need to communicate with anyone since I was being lazy that day. News about Japan came to me when my parents were talking about how outrageous the media was about this radiation thing, since it really was being blown out of proportion, but other than that I don’t listen to the news on a regular basis anyway so I didn’t change much there.
Obviously, since I’m on the computer so much, giving up the computer was the hardest, but I like reading comics too so it wasn’t that bad. The least hardest was probably TV since there wasn’t anything good on during the weekdays anyway. I wasn’t really surprised with how easy or hard it was to live a day without electronics, since I’ve done it before and it’s not that big a deal. The only thing I missed was talking to my friend who I usually talk to every day, but I didn’t talk to her during the convention either so she understood since I do get pretty busy. I’m surprised I didn’t do any drawing though, I thought I would have when I got this assignment.
So now onto the next assignment from the only teacher who really assigned us any homework over the break.

Intro Paragraph and Outline

WSDE Essay: Why we buy aesthetically appealing food and food packaging.

Original thesis: We have been conditioned to buy pretty, packaged foods by marketing and advertising schemes designed to make us think we would feel better about ourselves if we bought this product. It's not true that it would make us feel better, but our subconscious mind is drawn toward it and the convenience of packaged food.

            McDonald’s, Burger King, Coca Cola, Sprite, Gatorade, Snapple, Lays, Doritos, Cheetos, Hershey’s, Nestle, Kirkland, Kellogs, Ralphs, Albertsons, Vons, Walmart. What do all of these have in common? Packaged foods and brand names. More than likely, every household will have one of these products or go to stores that sell these products. They are often bought based on advertisements seen on television or the sheer convenience of “needing” such a brand and having it on the shelf of the nearest store. But they aren’t products that a person might actually “need”, they are products companies make people think they need and it will make them feel better if they get it. People are conditioned by marketing and advertisements to buy the most convenient, colorful, packaged products to fulfill a false desire.

I.                   Conditioning

a.       Raised by marketing

II.                Marketing

a.       Psychology

b.      Colorful packaging

c.       Price and economy

III.             Convenience

a.       Comparison to old days

b.      Obesity

c.       No one wants to look around for other things

IV.             Closing

a.       Often, the false desire isn’t necessarily good for health

b.      What can change?

c.       What can make it better

Blue Gold Commentary

I didn't know Los Angeles was such a barren desert--I know we live in a desert, but it never occurred to me before that our "prosperity" came from such a long way. I certainly learned a lot about the pipelines and dams that provide humans water, but also a lot about the disadvantage of trapping that water.
I have known for my whole life that water is an unstoppable, always moving force. That humans have learned how to contain it seemed like a good thing, but then I learned from the movie Blue Gold: World Water Wars that there is a reason that water is not supposed to be inert. Chemicals, bacteria, and nutrients are moved and dispersed through the water as it flows, so keeping it still kills the nutrients and gives chemicals like mercury and other things like bacteria the chance to grow. It also creates oxygen bubbles, so the water is no longer good anymore.
Dams were built to stop water so industries, who use it most and pollute it most, can bottle it up and sell it back to us. They take a lot of water and don't put it back, so the water sources are depleting quickly--this isn't the way nature meant for it to be. Water was meant to go in a cycle--to return to the place it came from eventually. But because of the way our cities are built, the water can't be returned in a natural way. It goes through the sewers, polluted by trash and other human waste, to go to the ocean, where it pollutes the ocean too.
It's sad that not only do we destroy our water, we destroy ourselves and we don't even realize it. The privatization of water is causing us our lives--we literally have to pay money to live. And those who don't have money, like in developing third world countries, can't pay that money. So they cannot live. Is this what the world has come to?

Annotated Bibliography

My Essay Topic: Why we buy aesthetically appealing food and food packaging.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Dangerous-Food-Additives
It's a list of chemicals and additives found in food and on food packaging that could be dangerous to you. But it seems we still buy these things just because they are appealing. I think  it's helpful since if we do look on food packaging, we can find these chemicals on there and this article links them to dangerous effects.

http://undergroundwellness.com/why-we-buy-unhealthy-foods-part-one/
This is about a psychoanalysis of why people buy more appealing things. It says that companies market their products to attract out subconscious mind, so that we'd feel better about ourselves if we buy this product. One of the things I'd definitely add to my essay would probably be a little social science and psychoanalysis, not only of the consumer but of the marketer.

http://www.examiner.com/food-in-new-orleans/why-we-eat-unhealthy-foods
This talks about why we buy cheaper and easier food, and how advertising and conditioning has made people get used to doing so. It talks briefly about how we'd go for a cheaper, nearer, easier, more efficient and most available choice and get obese. It also talks about how we get little exercise with today's technology as compared to the past when most people didn't have cars so they had to walk or something. This is a little bit of psychoanalyzing, with all the reasons why we buy the brand stuff or the cheap stuff or the most marketed stuff.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/how-about-them-wrapped-apples/
This is an interesting article about how food packaging is important. It explains the effects of packaging, how it prolongs shelf life, so that food wouldn't be thrown out and cause more methane gas emissions, which is more potent than CO2. It might be a good point to include in my article.

http://www.truth-it.net/packaged_food_industry.html
Talks about the convenience of packaged foods' affects on our health. It goes over how the chemicals in packaging are hazardous to human health.

http://quazen.com/recreation/food/reasons-we-buy-packaged-bread-buns-or-rolls/
A list of reasons of why we might buy things (in this case, bread from a store). It might account for some of the psychoanalysis stuff.

QQC

"Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible."

This quote was interesting because I remember Robert Kuhl saying something similar about corn, about how we only buy things that are aesthetically appealing and if they aren't, we don't buy them. Why is that? Why do we care so much that our food looks perfect?


That in itself can be an essay topic, exploring why people like things that look perfect rather than taste better, or buy things that were sprayed with chemicals to be preserved rather than something local even if it's not pretty. It works especially here in San Diego, where it seems a lot of our food and water supplies are imported from elsewhere.

Six Degrees of Separation

A photo of my presentation board on graphics tablets.

The flow chart I made of my product, its components, the components of its components, and where everything came from.

Write Up

For this project, I researched the components of a tool I use for drawing every weekend or so: my tablet. The model I use is a Wacom Intuos3 Pen Tablet, which uses a USB cord to connect to the computer and comes with a mouse (called a puck), a battery-less pen and its stand, and some extra pen nibs for when the older plastic ones get worn down. The research I did was based around this model, though for my presentation I used a generic model since taking apart a Wacom to find out what it was made out of would be costly, not to mention illegal since Wacom’s designs are patented and protected.

Wacom is a Japan-based company, but their products are manufactured in China and shipped all over the world. I explored many of the components that make up the tablet, the pen, the puck, and the packaging. I also looked into where the tablet goes after it has reached the end of its lifespan.

First, I’ll talk about the packaging. Like most things you buy, it comes in a cardboard box. That cardboard box has been printed with inks, made out of pigments and dyes, using the flexographic process. The flexographic printing process is what makes it look shiny and high-quality, since cardboard usually absorbs ink and makes it spongy and dull. The cardboard itself is made out of various types of paper, glued together using a starch-based adhesive. The paper comes from woody trees and plants, things with cellulose in general, which use a lot of water and sunlight to grow. These trees and plants are cut down and made into paper by a factory, of course, and there are numerous costs involved in making it—like electricity, gas, delivery, packaging, and much more.

Moving on, plastics are a common product in almost everything, and tablets are no exception. My Wacom Intuos3 has a sleek resin coating on top and plastic buttons—its whole shell is pretty much plastic. Seeing as tablets, as well as most other technologies, are made in China, the materials to make it are probably mined or manufactured there too. It’s made of rubber, celluloid, heat and radiation, and thermosetting polymers or thermoplastics, which in itself is made by celluloid and rubber as well. Resin is also a component in plastic, and those come from trees, particularly coniferous ones like pine trees.

The pen and puck are made of plastic too, and both of them also include rubber. The most common type of rubber used in technology industries is silicone rubber, since it’s easy to obtain and mold. It’s made of an elastomer or elastic polymer, and is a saturated rubber, meaning it can’t be cured by sulfur vulcanization—in other words, can’t be made into something more hard and durable. This too is produced in China.

The puck has other components besides plastic and rubber, of course. It’s also got a felt material on the bottom to keep it from scratching the tablet surface, similar to the pen stand which is also made of plastic and felt. It also has its own printed circuit board (PCB), which is what makes it function internally. But I’ll get into PCBs more in depth later. Since I’ve talked a little about the puck, I’ll talk about the pen too.

The pen, also called a stylus, for a Wacom Tablet is unique in the sense that it is a cordless, battery-free pen, which makes it slender for ease of use. Tablet pens are able to connect and function with the tablet easily because it has an LC coil and capacitor circuit inside. An LC coil, also known as a resonant circuit or tuned circuit, has an inductor (represented by the letter L) that stores energy in a magnetic field created by an electrical current, and a capacitor (represented by the C) that is composed of a pair of conductors separated by a dialectric insulator. When a voltage passes over the capacitor, it creates a static electric field which is stored in the dialectric. The LC circuit receives an electromagnetic signal from the graphics tablet, which is what allows tablets to sense pressure and if the stylus is touching the drawing surface or not.

The most research I could do on any component of a tablet, however, was on the printed circuit board. The PCB is the main reason a tablet can function—everything else was just a shell to protect it from damage and such. The PCB is a series of conducted pathways that connect it to other electronic components, such as a USB cord which can be connected to a computer. It tracks signals etched from copper sheets that were laminated to a non-conductive substrate such as fiberglass. There are many components to a PCB, as well as methods of making them and their individual parts. Silk-screening, photoengraving methods, through-hole construction, and surface-mount construction are all methods used in the construction of a PCB. It also uses many metals, such as heavy copper in sheets or foil, tin and lead, anti-corrosion materials such as gold or nickel or soder to mask it, and tungsten and carbon for the drill bits to make holes in the PCB to mount it. There are various elements involved as well, like ammonium persulfate, hydrochloric acid, and ferric chloride, and it has other materials for packaging and protection like antistatic bags, conformal coating, conductive ink, and dialectric.

PCB is made with fiberglass, which is made of plastic and glass, which is made using heat and sand. It’s also kept together using epoxy cement or adhesive, which is made of resin and polyamine. Copper sheets are etched onto it using electroplating techniques, which include the use of electric currents, water, and metal. It goes through oxidation as well, using chemicals like SO4, which is a sulfate, or salt or sulfuric acid.

Because of these metals and plastics that go into making a PCB, the tablet, the pen, and puck in general, it can’t be thrown away when it becomes useless. It has to be taken to a recycling center to be “properly disposed of”, which then ships it across the country and to China to be taken apart. They use boats, planes, trucks, and all sorts of vehicles to move it around. That in itself takes a lot of fuel, which contributes to pollution.

When the tablet is dismantled in China, the only parts that are saved and recycled are the precious metals, like gold and nickel and such, but the other things like plastic are trashed. The bad working conditions means that workers will have health issues, such as malnutrition and exposure to toxins in the plastics they are working with. The poison also contributes to pollution and contamination, both of which lead to lowered fertility rates and birth defects, and, often, death. Due to these effects, the population of China is altered in a negative manner.

Despite its small size and seemingly simple construction, the tablet is a complex thing comprised of multiple parts, which are comprised of even more parts. These impact the environment and economy through the numerous methods of creation and transportation, as well as the toxins and gases the products release as they are manufactured, so it’s a large contributor to pollution. Its production is the source of poor working conditions, low labor cost and income, health issues and lack of help, and indefinitely, the death of hundreds and maybe even thousands of people who live in the electronic wastelands of China.

The Cove Commentary

            This documentary The Cove was definitely made to bring awareness to the dolphin slaughters in Taiji. It proves its argument, that it is inhumane and cruel, through various shots of the actual slaughter. It focuses on the techniques used to kill the dolphins as well as the town’s resistance to let the knowledge of it get public. There are many instances of the fishermen provoking the camera men and such as well.

            The “protagonists” of the movie are trying to stop this injustice, and they make it clear on why. Some of the reasons are that dolphins are intelligent creatures that are dying every year by the thousands, that it’s unhealthy for people to eat dolphin meat since it’s laced with so much mercury, and that dolphins shouldn’t be held in captivity since they will die from so much sound surrounding them. Experts and activists are filmed explaining why they die, why there’s so much mercury, and why they were hunted so fervently. They are talking mostly when idyllic images of jumping and swimming dolphins in shining blue seas are filling the screen, trying to show something worth saving.

            The movie was meant to make the audience watch intently as the secret operations took the screen and gasp and cringe in horror when they see the waters turn red. They chose the shots they did specifically to make an impact. They wanted to show how dangerous it was in Japan to try to gather the evidence that they did, how they were watched every moment so they couldn’t do much, how it really was possible for a sea of blood to exist, how heartbreaking it was to hear the dolphins cry. They explored the effects of it, the foreshadowing of bad outcomes like a plague of Minamata disease that had happened before in the past. They showed grotesque images of deformed and sick and dying people. They showed dolphins floating with their bellies up in aquariums because they metaphorically bled through their ears and to their death.

            It tries to show the fishermen and town officials’ points of views, but they show them as people who make up excuses to continue the dolphin slaughter practice because it makes good money. It probably doesn’t show that the fishermen are poor or not doing well and they need jobs like this to survive. There are other points of views that should have been explored more, like the people in Tokyo and the other big cities in Japan who knew nothing about the dolphin slaughter. Did so few really know about it? They should have interviewed more people and found statistics.

            However, the film certainly educates about how dolphins act and react to humans naturally, and it reveals the practice in Taiji that most of its audience probably didn’t know about before. It brings light to a dark matter that most would rather remain ignorant to, but it certainly got a lot of limelight and now it seldom can be ignored. What people have changed their lifestyles because of this, or become active?

Weed pictures

Reading Questions

How exactly can eating locally not be better than eating globally? I saw something about the cost of production, how trucks use more gas than trains, but I don't quite understand.

Supplemental Information

"Though strong global demand and tight supplies are bringing misery to some poor countries, the price surge is a sign of improving conditions in emerging economies. That's because increased demand is caused in part to rapidly rising standards of living, according to David Malpass, president of economic research firm Encima Global."

http://www.jrf.org.uk/media-centre/minimum-income-2009
The author states that the cost of living is rising twice as fast as inflation, and it's getting harder to live on low incomes. Most of the budget is going to items that have risen sharply in price, such as food. Increasing unemployment rates and job loss affect people in ways that means they don't have even half the minimum income they need to survive. The minimum standard is there to help keep sight of what is unacceptable.
The article doesn't seem to address what exactly is acceptable, and why the standard can't be changed as more and more people are falling below the standard. Have their standards been set too high? What are those standards? Why can't they lower it, and why do they need to keep people above the standard of living? While it's unacceptable to live in poverty, I'm sure some things are okay to be sacrificed or compromised--taking shorter showers, or some luxury like tea or so...

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/aug/19/food-movement-rising-exchange/
It's basically about how the food we eat is cheap food, and even though it costs less, we are faced with the affects of diabetes and obesity. The cost of food versus the benefits of nutrition has caused us to become an unhealthy nation. With the poor they have no other choice and are extremely unhealthy, and with the more wealthy, they try to save a buck by buying processed food rather than fresh produce. While cheap food is the pillar of our economy, the standards of living call for nutritional value that most can't afford. The price rising cost of food makes it so that nutritional food like vegatables are more like luxuries rather than necessities, and our economy isn't any better as consumers buy it less and less and go toward the packaged goods.
It's the opposite of the statement at the beginning, I think, and while there is a demand to be healthier, no one will take initive, therefore the standard of living is lowering. Is the fact that Americans are buying cheap, unhealthy food and becoming obese with diabetes really "the standard of living rising"? We eat more than any other nation but I don't think we're better off, are we?

Links

Alpine Strawberries Mignonette
http://www.groworganic.com/renee-s-garden-strawberry-alpine-mignonette.html

Genovese Sweet Basil
http://www.seedsofchange.com/garden_center/product_details.aspx?item_no=PS15864

Community-supported agriculture

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community-supported_agriculture and http://www.localharvest.org/csa/

Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is a socio-economic model of agriculture andfood distribution. A CSA consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farming operation where the growers and consumers share the risks and benefits of food production. CSAs usually consist of a system of weekly delivery or pick-up of vegetables and fruit, in a vegetable box scheme, and sometimes includes dairy products and meat.

CSAs generally focus on the production of high quality foods for a local community, often using organic or biodynamic farming methods, and a shared risk membership–marketing structure. This kind of farming operates with a much greater degree of involvement of consumers and other stakeholders than usual — resulting in a stronger consumer-producer relationship. The core design includes developing a cohesive consumer group that is willing to fund a whole season’s budget in order to get quality foods. The system has many variations on how the farm budget is supported by the consumers and how the producers then deliver the foods. CSA theory purports that the more a farm embraces whole-farm, whole-budget support, the more it can focus on quality and reduce the risk of food waste or financial loss.

Advantages for farmers:

Get to spend time marketing the food early in the year, before their 16 hour days in the field begin

Receive payment early in the season, which helps with the farm's cash flow

Have an opportunity to get to know the people who eat the food they grow

Advantages for consumers:

Eat ultra-fresh food, with all the flavor and vitamin benefits

Get exposed to new vegetables and new ways of cooking

Usually get to visit the farm at least once a season

Find that kids typically favor food from "their" farm – even veggies they've never been known to eat

Develop a relationship with the farmer who grows their food and learn more about how food is grown

Variations

As you might expect with such a successful model, farmers have begun to introduce variations. One increasingly common one is the "mix and match," or "market-style" CSA. Here, rather than making up a standard box of vegetables for every member each week, the members load their own boxes with some degree of personal choice. The farmer lays out baskets of the week's vegetables. Some farmers encourage members to take a prescribed amount of what's available, leaving behind just what their families do not care for. Some CSA farmers then donate this extra produce to a food bank. In other CSAs, the members have wider choice to fill their box with whatever appeals to them, within certain limitations. (e.g. "Just one basket of strawberries per family, please.")

CSAs aren't confined to produce. Some farmers include the option for shareholders to buy shares of eggs, homemade bread, meat, cheese, fruit, flowers or other farm products along with their veggies. Sometimes several farmers will offer their products together, to offer the widest variety to their members. For example, a produce farmer might create a partnership with a neighbor to deliver chickens to the CSA drop off point, so that the CSA members can purchase farm-fresh chickens when they come to get their CSA baskets. Other farmers are creating standalone CSAs for meat, flowers, eggs, and preserved farm products. In some parts of the country, non-farming third parties are setting up CSA-like businesses, where they act as middle men and sell boxes of local (and sometimes non-local) food for their members.

Shared Risk

There is an important concept woven into the CSA model that takes the arrangement beyond the usual commercial transaction. That is the notion of shared risk. When originally conceived, the CSA was set up differently than it is now. A group of people pooled their money, bought a farm, hired a farmer, and each took a share of whatever the farm produced for the year. If the farm had a tomato bonanza, everyone put some up for winter. If a plague of locusts ate all the greens, people ate cheese sandwiches. Very few such CSAs exist today, and for most farmers, the CSA is just one of the ways their produce is marketed. They may also go to the farmers market, do some wholesale, sell to restaurants, etc. Still, the idea that "we're in this together" remains. On some farms it is stronger than others, and CSA members may be asked to sign a policy form indicating that they agree to accept without complaint whatever the farm can produce.

Six Degrees of Separation 1

3 objects I'd possibly like to research:

Car
My mom drives me to school every day, and I ride the car to go everywhere like to the store (even on the weekends). So I wonder where the car comes from, and its impact on the environment.

Computer
I use the computer for homework, art, chatting, etc. I know the recycling of computers have a major impact on environment and economy too, what with needing to be sent to China to be taken apart. So I want to research the full impact of computers on the environment and people, before and after its creation.

Tablet
I draw a lot, and oftentimes on the weekends my sister and I use my tablet to draw on the computer. It's a simple slab of plastic, but I'm sure a lot goes into making it and sending it to where I am.

1 Reflection From Monday

I read comics. Comics come from stores. The stores get them from factories/publishers. Factories cut trees to get paper and materials to make the comic. Publishers get the content from editors, who get it from artists/writers. Artists/writers get supplies from art stores. Art stores get supplies from other factories, who get their materials from elsewhere (I don't know where).

So a lot of trees are cut down to print books, and a lot of gas is used to get places/make deliveries. Cutting down trees means less trees to take in CO2, and gas emissions release CO2. So the comics I read contribute to pollution and reduce the ways to prevent it.