Also on today’s menu:
Recycling Becomes Profitable Again
Small Farms At A Disadvantage
Another 50-Year Milestone
Michael King, an attendant at the Sandwich MA Transfer Station, has resigned after his superior objected to him taking the time to photograph the dogs accompanying their owners to the site for use in a charity calendar that would benefit the Animal Rescue League in Brewster MA. For King, the dogs were more important than the job.
Paul Tilton, town director of public works, said his objection was to an employee using town time for an individual hobby, and he also said that people have been bitten in the past when giving dog treats at the transfer station.
King, who has taken more than 150 canine photos, with their owners’ consent, said he still intends to produce the calendar by Halloween.
Recycling Becomes Profitable Again
Many towns, particularly those using “single-stream” recycling, gave up their recycling efforts after China, a major global purchaser of recyclables, stopped accepting what in many cases was contaminated material in 2018. That led to a dramatic decrease in the price of recyclable materials. However, recycling markets began to improve at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It began with a marked increase in the price of cardboard in April and May 2020, when businesses and schools shut down, cutting off the steady supply of high-quality cardboard that they generated. Cardboard pricing has continued to climb steadily as the economy improved and brought an increased demand for consumer goods, many of which are shipped in cardboard boxes.
The price of plastics also improved as the price of oil increased, because virgin plastic is derived from oil. Companies like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and others promised to increase the amount of recycled material used in their packaging, leading to increased demand and higher prices for some plastics. The most valuable plastics are the translucent milk and cider jugs (Number 2 HDPE Natural) which are selling at record high prices because that form of plastic is versatile and can be turned into a wide variety of products of any color.
Small Farms At A Disadvantage
Farmers have always labored at the mercy of the elements, but climate change has brought wildfires, drought, prolonged heat waves, and power outages that have made farming even more uncertain. Many see small-scale sustainable farmers, who have direct access to consumers, as the way to keep the food supply going, but economic policies favor large industrial farms that rely on chemicals and fossil fuels and raise only a few types of livestock or crops. Without access to the same subsidies, technical assistance, and other resources available to large-scale operations, small farms are struggling to survive.
Jeanne Merrill, policy director at California Climate and Agriculture Network, a coalition of sustainable and organic farming organizations, says, “It is getting much harder with water constraints, with heat events, with catastrophic wildfire to survive.” Sustainable agriculture is “urgently needed” to tackle the environmental and climate crisis, agricultural experts argued in a 2019 paper, but small farmers are “at a distinct disadvantage.”
Small farms rely on people and organisms in the farm system to do the work, with fertility coming from animal manure or from soil-building cover crops. Pest control comes from planting flowers that attract beneficial insects, or from creating a functioning ecosystem where no single population of organisms gets out of control. “In most indigenous food systems, there was not a clear distinction between wild lands and a farm,” said Liz Carlisle, an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Ecological agriculture is a functioning ecosystem that looks, in many ways, like the surrounding natural ecosystem.”
Another 50-Year Milestone
Fifty years ago today, September 23, 1971, Dartmouth College’s Class of 1975 met for Convocation in Webster Hall. Some members of the class had a chance to meet earlier, during the “freshmen trip” — hiking in the White Mountains or at the Second College Grant in Wentworth’s Location — which ended with the groups converging at Moosilauke Lodge for hot meals and tall tales.
The ’75ers were the first class where freshmen were not required to wear beanies to set them apart, and the last all-male class at Dartmouth. I was one of the students randomly selected to sit in on the discussions about going co-ed, and cast my vote to make the change, which I felt was necessary to end the misogyny I was seeing among many of the students who had never interacted with women on a daily basis.
The Class of 1975 also was the first class of Dartmouth’s year-round operation, where students attended during the summer and had another term off. It was a way of admitting more students without having to build new dormitories. The plan was unique at the time, but did not remove the need to add new housing in the years that followed.
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