Environment

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The Fraud of Plastic Recycling

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The Fraud of Plastic Recycling

CBS Sunday Mornings, 2024, 5:02… About 48 million tons of plastic waste is generated in the United States each year, but only 5 to 6 percent of it is actually recycled. A new report from the Center for Climate Integrity, "The Fraud of Plastic Recycling," accuses the plastics industry of a decades-long campaign to "mislead" the public about the viability of recycling. Correspondent Ben Tracy talks with the report's co-author, Davis Allen, and with Jan Dell, a former chemical engineer, about an inconvenient truth surrounding the lifecycle of plastic.

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Cooked: Survival by Zip Code (2019)

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Cooked: Survival by Zip Code (2019)

Cooked: Survival by Zipcode (2019) tells the story of the tragic 1995 Chicago heatwave, the most traumatic in U.S. history, in which 739 citizens died over the course of just a single week, most of them poor, elderly, and African American. This is a story about life, death, and the politics of crisis in an American city that asks the questions: What if we approached poverty through the lens of disaster management?

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Hillbilly (2018)

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Hillbilly (2018)

Hillbilly (2018) examines the history and continuation of disempowering rural stereotypes. Though the film is based around the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the content extends far beyond our current political landscape. It is also engaging to watch as it masterfully integrates media stereotypes from popular shows and movies. Some prominent sociological concepts evident in the film include othering, codeswitching, and cultural appropriation as hillbilly may have become the new hipster..

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Ecofascism

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Ecofascism

Vice, 2022, 9:58… Concerns surrounding the environment and the climate crisis are no longer just the focus of liberals and the left. Eco-fascism is a growing racist ideology on the extreme right, marrying the ideas of environmentalism with white supremacy and ethnonationalism. With the climate crisis worsening by the day, eco-fascist thought has deepened alongside it.

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Shady Homeowners & Hot Renters

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Shady Homeowners & Hot Renters

Vox, 2021, 6:48… It’s time to stop looking at trees as a form of “beautification.” They are, instead, a living form of infrastructure, providing a variety of services that include stormwater management, air filtering, carbon sequestration, and, most importantly for a city like Phoenix, Arizona, they cool the environment around them.

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Unsustainable American Burials

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Unsustainable American Burials

Vox, 2017, 5:51… The modern way of burying a body, the "casket in the ground method" most of us are used to is horrible for the environment. It uses an incredible amount of resources, emits toxic pollutants into the air, and pumps the ground full of formaldehyde, which is known to cause cancer. It's also prohibitively expensive. The average cost of a modern funeral costs between $10,000 to $12,000. There are a number of greener options available though. Cremation uses less resources and requires less space than a traditional burial, but isn't perfect. There are more experimental methods on the horizon such as promession and alkaline hydrolysis. No matter which method we choose, it's clear that we need to reform how we bury the dead.

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Environmental Injustice in Chicago

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Environmental Injustice in Chicago

Vice News, 2021, 5:01… A small group of activists in Chicago's Southeast side just finished a month-long hunger strike to protest the movement of a metal shredder to their neighborhood, saying it will cause dangerous pollution and make their community sick. They're calling it an environmental justice issue -- and they see it as life or death.

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Race, Pollution & COVID-19

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Race, Pollution & COVID-19

Vox, 2020, 9:02… Across the US, black people are dying from Covid-19 at disproportionately high rates. While there are many different factors at play behind the stark racial disparities — there’s one possible reason that’s been lurking in the air for decades: pollution. The long history of segregation and housing discrimination has long put black people at greater risk of living near chemical plants, factories and highways, exposing them to higher levels of air pollutants. These pollutants have had a chronically negative impact on health, leading to conditions like hypertension and asthma. Now, those same diseases are associated with severe cases of Covid-19, and showing that where you live can determine whether you survive from Covid-19.

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Unsustainable Death Care

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Unsustainable Death Care

Vice News, 2020, 6:48… Americans are largely fearful and avoidant of death and dying. This is partly a consequence of the professionalization of death care which removes and sanitizes death from everyday life. Embalming makes a corpse look life-like, but it is also terrible for the planet. Traditional cremations also require an unsustainable amount of resources while releasing pollution into the atmosphere. So, what can you do to not further damage the earth upon your death?

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Beneficent Polluters

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Beneficent Polluters

PBS Newshour, 2019, 9:51… UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild traveled to Louisiana, the second-poorest state, to explore why its neediest populations simultaneously rely on federal aid and reject the concept of “big government.” As Paul Solman reports, the author and professor discovered many residents feel betrayed by their state's government for failing to protect them from toxic pollution that risks their health.

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The Symbolism of The Lawn

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The Symbolism of The Lawn

The Atlantic, 2018, 2:26… Michael Pollan explains how front lawns are endemic to America—and emblematic of the country's hypocrisies. “The conceit of the American suburb is that we’re all in a great park together,” Pollan says in the film. “The lawn symbolizes that continuity.” And yet, Pollan explains, despite the fact that lawns are the largest irrigated crop in the country, Americans tend to avoid using them.