FINAL PROJECT: IAN ENGORON

Ian Engoron

ILS 252 Final Project

ME FIRST!

Where to begin? Everything I learned, or experienced might be a better way to put it was new to me? The completion of this project coupled with the lessons of this course has opened my eyes to so many new things. Sustainability has taken on a completely new meaning, and this is after having taken an environmental sustainability course and plants and man last year. That was the whole point of this course and the final project though in my mind, not necessarily to make you question what you know every time you learn something new, but to offer you a new perspective, a new lens to look through, when analyzing our world (that was the most important thing I took away from this class). The final project will for me be the most memorable thing in the course, and I don’t want that fact to go under appreciated.

Throughout the semester we have been dissecting mans history and trying to understand how/what we can learn from it as well as why it has left us in the position we are today. By taking a unique perspective, in the sense that so far in college I have not had any course like this, and trying to comprehend this matter by gaining insight into mans co-evolution with his surroundings, I, and I hope the rest of the class, have been given a rare and very beneficial opportunity. We have been given the chance, and the tools necessary to help us view our lives with an attitude we are unaccustomed too, and that is one of society first, not me first.

Ideally there wouldn’t even be a distinction, which during the height of the Roman Empire there wasn’t and that is why there were, up till that point, such a successful empire. The me first vs. society first attitude should be so similar that a conscious split should require intense deliberation and unusual circumstances. I am not claiming that the two attitude are the exact same, nor that an individual should posses all characteristics of one attitude and none of the other, what I am claiming is that as individuals and a society, we have to redefine what the me first attitude means to us.  What Americans, and many others in the world, seem to be forgetting is that personal happiness and responsibility can and indeed should cooperate and synthesis with societal happiness and responsibility. Although I wasn’t fully aware at the time, looking back I can now see this is where my project began.

When we were first told we had this rather large task to finish by the end of the semester, my feeling at the time was like that after hearing of a similar announcement in any other course. That was because I unfortunately didn’t understand the motivation behind it. So like most other big course requirements I looked at it with an uninspired and disdainful view, I approached this project, in the beginning, with a me first attitude. What I should have realized was that just as much personal pleasure, if not more, can be gained from doing something like this, as I could gain wasting my time playing videos games on a couch. Especially now that I am looking at that statement in writing, it has never made more sense. Much like our friend Zander Srodes, What I needed was a spark to ignite my incentive. Zander Srodes is the young gentleman who was lighting fireworks off on his neighbors beach front, and after that neighbor explained the harm he had done to the natural environment around him, specifically to turtle hatchlings, he had the epiphany that resulted in the fusion and unification of his happiness and responsibilities and societies happiness and responsibilities. That is what it truly means to be sustainable, and I don’t know if it is too late to reverse the harm we have already done, but we all need to come to the same epiphany if we are going to ensure the long term future of our species.

After having watched Zanders TED talk, I realized my moment happened when we went to picnic point during lab earlier in the semester. I had been there before, just like Zander had been to that beachfront, but this time under a different context. Previously I had gone seeking to satisfy some personal desire, like Zander, which in my case although it wasn’t causing any harm, it wasn’t doing any good either. On this trip to picnic point, I was going with different intentions, I was going under the guise of education and learning, and that is exactly what I did. Leading up to our field trip so to speak, we had been talking about the relationship between systems and sustainability, and our role in that relationship.  Throughout our time there we discussed topics specific to picnic point, like the invasive weeds, and we discussed more over arching topics like how the plant life the American Midwest has developed and evolved over time. At the end, as we were leaving the wild and heading back to the bus, I lagged behind the group for a second to stand on the shore of the lake and look out over the place I had grown (without much trouble) to love and call home in recent years. If I had to pick a moment in my life that defined the lessons of this course, it would be then. While I couldn’t articulate it at the time, something resonated in me that would make me realize the extent of the selfishness present in my life. Selfishness that wasn’t compatible with a sustainable life style

After that it was easy to find motivation to work on my project. I found that I wanted to do it instead of had to do it. Ironically that only made things harder. Before this I would have been more likely to care less about this project, but now, because I cared, that meant I wanted to put more effort, pay more attention to detail, and a choose a meaningful topic. Unlike Zander, I didn’t have a hyper-specific motivation, but I had somewhere to start. After my presentation Peter (The TA) asked me a question that went something like, “why did you choose to put the wind turbines in the lake, there are plenty of farms near by that might be a better choice?” I unfortunately panicked at being asked a question by the TA and answered incorrectly; my response was along the lines of “because the lakes are the closest, and therefore most efficient place to put them. And because I got the inspiration for the project on the shore of the lake.” The reason I specifically choose to put windmills in the lake was because I thought the idea would face a lot of resistance. A main reason you assigned the project to us was to push ourselves to recognize the effort and sacrifice (that we should want to make) to attain sustainability, so my project would be about pushing the public to do the same. This came to fruition with the presentation. Up until then it was about collecting data and an analysis of the feasibility, in the second half of the presentation, what I hoped to accomplish (and only the audience can tell me if I succeeded) was to challenge the audience to come to analogous, although less exaggerated, epiphany to the one Zander had. The reason I purposed to put the turbines in the lake was because I knew it would be a controversial issue and it is those kinds of issues that really open people’s eyes. A message I was trying to send is that the lake is a luxury we are lucky to get to enjoy, it is not our right to enjoy it. That is the idea behind sustainability and that was the inspiration behind my project.

 

In terms of actually getting the research and physical work done, all it took was the motivation, which I already had, and two neat things called the Internet and the library. A quick recap of the content of my project.

 

I purposed to place Wind turbines in both lake Monona and Mendota, as an alternative, cleaner, and more sustainable source of energy, 5 in Monona and 2 in Mendota. Given wind speeds, placement, and mechanical ability of the turbine, they would be able to supply enough energy to satisfy on average, 2800 households annually. Unfortunately, with the cost of installation being $3 million per turbine, and the cost of energy produced by wind turbine, as opposed to more traditional and dirtier sources like coal, being on average $3 more per kilowatt hour than its fossil fuel counterparts, the project is not financially practical. There were also other reasons for not putting turbines in the lake, use of the lake for fishing and boating, unpleasant sight and noise, and disrupting bird flight patterns. I was however surprised to find that, in a survey I conducted, 4/10 people, who made a very uninformed and informal decision, said they would be alright with putting turbines in the lake in the name of sustainability, even given costs. I thought the number was going to be lower. So maybe we do have some hope yet! If I could leave you with a few final words, it would be that this project has taught me that sustainability is not easy or fun or even a good choice necessarily when you look through the lens of the me first attitude, but when you look at this project through the lens this course gave us, you understand sustainability is exactly those three things.

 

Here is a link to the Zander Srodes TED talk “The moment it found me” found on youtube.com