GYF crew member uses McLeod tool

This past summer, GYF had a crew of 8 diverse youth undertake a trail maintenance and creation project at Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area in Sandy Springs, GA. The project, a YIP Program (Youth Internship Program), was part of the services GYF offers to public land owners under its cooperative agreement with the National Park Service to introduce diverse youth to conservation careers in the form of internships, service crews and energy conservation projects.

From June 27 to August 5, the GYF crew—made up of two Team Leaders and six Team Members and managed by Park Volunteer Coordinator Dave Thomas—were involved in training in CPR/First Aid, Safe Hand Tool Use, Invasive Plant Identification and Removal, use of specialized trail building equipment such as the Clinometer, and tools such as the Pulaski and McLeod. They learned about sustainable trail design and building, including trail gradients, cross-slopes, vertical camouflaging, and stone dressage. Armed with this knowledge, the crew ended up restoring and building different portions of visitor trails that needed repair or needed to be re-routed.

Though the project included a great deal of education, there was also some fun mixed in. Through seminars on environmental education given by Park Education Specialists, river rafting and cleanup trips, field trips to neighboring NPS sites such as the MLK Jr. National Historic Site, and a day at the park helping hundreds of visitors launch and retrieve their boats and rafts at the annual Summer Splash, the crew had a well-rounded experience over the six weeks.

Courtney and Amadi at Chattahoochee

The following testimonials are from interns who served on the GYF crew:

Morrese “Mo” Green

My experience working for Greening Youth Program this summer was wonderful. While working I learned important tips that will help me through out life.  The main one being that if you take care of your surrounding environment it will take care of you. Another reason why working for GYF was fascinating is because I plan on being an engineer and the sole purpose of an engineer is to use innovative solutions and ideas that will benefit the surrounding environment. Working for GYF has taught me so much and as a result I look forward to working for Greening Youth in the near future.

Courtney Scott

Working at the Chattahoochee National Recreation Area was an amazing experience. Not only did I experience new things, but I was able to figure out so many of my strengths and weaknesses. Working on those trails was the most manual labor I have ever done in my life and I loved it! Every time I see a trail I am reminded of my summer with GYF and how vital trails can be for protecting natural environments. I also learned all the ways people can destroy the environment; I feel educated enough to pass on that knowledge and even become an advocate for it. I have always wanted to go into an environmental career, but I never knew how much there is to offer. I don’t even know what I want to do now, but I do know I want to help the environment and I hope I can be as impactful as the staff at GYF. It’s experiences like these that prepare me to make the right decisions for myself in the future. I would recommend this internship to anyone who loves being outdoors.

Amadi Ozier

My experience at the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area vastly increased my awareness of our collective effect on our volatile environment. By working on existing trails within the park, I met dozens of hikers, joggers, and bikers who incorporate nature into their daily routines by persistently visiting the park. As they passed, they often shared words of gratitude and encouragement, vocalizing their appreciation of our attempts to maintain the state of the natural world. These encounters reminded me that, when I am picking up trash or removing exotic plant life or clearing new trails, I am doing it for every single one of the park’s thousands of annual visitors. I knew I was making a difference.

Miles Carrington
I had a great experience this summer working as an intern for GYF. I enjoyed the responsibilities that were given to me. This experience has opened my eyes to being green in all aspects of my life. I pay more attention to natural and how our slightest contact can have an immense effect in time to come. This experience has motivated me to minor in the Parks and recreation major at Clemson University. This small time in the summer has changed my outlook on national parks and encouraged me to bring others out to feel what the National parks experience is like.

Greening Youth Foundation had the opportunity this summer to partner with Camp Scene to sponsor 10 GYF students, who experienced a summer day camp like no other. These youth, ranging from ages 6-13, were exposed to exciting outdoor activities not typically available to them in an urban setting.

GYF’s participation in Camp Scene was made possible by the U.S. Forest Service’s “More Kids in the Woods” grant, which is intended to provide local community children more opportunities to experience the great outdoors, learn about nature, and build a lasting commitment to conservation and land stewardship.

At Camp Scene, each of its six week-long sessions focused on a different environmental theme. During two of the weeks, GYF and the U.S. Forest Service met with the campers bright and early to set the stage for their daily adventure.  Some pre-start activities included handling fossil remains, playing recycle relay, making a wetland, observing acid rain destruction, and singing sweet songs about nature.

Then they were off in the Camp Scene van to a day of true adventure. Whether it was hiking, rock climbing, river kayaking, white water rafting, scuba diving, tubing or swimming, they not only had the time of their lives but they also learned so much about their surroundings and the importance of being good stewards.

The following report was written by Mari Chiles, one of the GYF participants at Camp Scene:

I have been to cooking, science, soccer and writing camps throughout my summers, and a lot of them have been some pretty interesting experiences for me. But one camp that I will never forget is Camp Scene.

Camp Scene is an environmental camp that teaches kids how to care for and love the environment. Each summer, Camp Scene hosts six weeks of camps, each week with a different theme. Thanks to the Greening Youth Foundation, I was able to attend the camp week that focused on water ecology. But we didn’t just sit in a room and read or write about water. We did some things that I’ve never done before and would never dream of doing at camp!

Each day of the week I was there was an adventure. We kayaked six miles, went rock climbing, scuba diving and fishing for organisms in a stream and played at the beach. My favorite activity was white water rafting. My mom was afraid that all of these things would be unsafe for kids, but Camp Scene made sure we had fun and that we were safe.

One of my favorite activities of the week was rock climbing. I was nervous the whole ride to the rock-climbing center because I am very afraid of heights. Walking into the building and seeing the humungous wall with points jutting out of it and curves everywhere didn’t really make my stomach feel any better. But I faced my fear. Before anyone could climb the big wall, we had to go upstairs and try a smaller wall so that Camp Scene founder Scott Seitz could see how well we were at climbing. Not to my surprise, I was upstairs almost the whole entire time. It took me so long to finish that wall. I was amazed at some of those people who, like me, had never climbed before, but managed to get to the top the first time they tried. But little by little, I got higher and higher up the wall. Sometimes I would be scared out of my wits screaming to come down while my counselor would be telling me to go up a little bit higher. Rock climbing is a serious workout on your arms! But I pushed myself and got to the top of the wall. They even took a picture of me smiling down from the top. I was so triumphant! I was high-fiving everyone and I couldn’t wait to tell my mom and dad.

Mari (left) prepares to scuba dive

Another cool activity I got to do at Camp Scene was scuba diving. We went to a big building with a swimming pool and a bunch of gear and suits hanging up on the wall. Everyone had to jump into the freezing cold water so our instructor would be able to make sure we could swim. He made us practice breathing with the apparatus in our mouths so that we could feel what it was like to breath underwater. After that, we put on the vests and tanks and swam around. I was able to stay underwater for minutes at a time.

Remember when I said that white water rafting was my favorite activity of the whole week? Well, I am not exaggerating! It was probably one of the coolest experiences of my whole life! We white water rafted on the Chatooga River in north Georgia, almost in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountain Range. There are a lot of safety precautions when it comes to rafting so we had to take a whole lesson before we even got geared up. Afterwards, the 12 campers, two counselors, and Scott divided into three different raft groups and hiked off to the river with all our gear.

Rafting is pretty easy when everyone is in sync. The five campers are up at the front while our guide is at the back steering. Our guide told us many cool things about the different rapids—how to go through them and how many times to paddle. The craziest rapid on the river was Bull Loose, named that because it is a small channel of water that runs really fast and whips and kicks you like a bull! I was terrified to go on it because the other campers on my raft were telling me how scary it was. Our instructor even gave us special instructions to prevent anyone from falling out of the raft in one specific part of our rafting journey: when she yelled a specific command, we had to hunch down in between the seats. When we got to the tricky part of the river where we had to hunch down, everyone was totally under water for about four seconds! Water was running past my face and ears and I almost let go of my paddle! It was a very exhilarating experience.

White water rafting, rock climbing, scuba diving and studying and playing in nature made me appreciate the environment even more. For anyone who is a nature lover like me or loves trying new things and being adventurous, I would definitely recommend Camp Scene.

—Mari Chiles

(from RollingStone.com)

The world consumes 1 million plastic shopping bags every minute—and the industry is fighting hard to keep it that way

Shanghai landfill

By Kitt Doucette

American shoppers use an estimated 102 billion plastic shopping bags each year — more than 500 per consumer. Named by Guinness World Records as “the most ubiquitous consumer item in the world,” the ultrathin bags have become a leading source of pollution worldwide. They litter the world’s beaches, clog city sewers, contribute to floods in developing countries and fuel a massive flow of plastic waste that is killing wildlife from sea turtles to camels. “The plastic bag has come to represent the collective sins of the age of plastic,” says Susan Freinkel, author of Plastic: A Toxic Love Story.

Many countries have instituted tough new rules to curb the use of plastic bags. Some, like China, have issued outright bans. Others, including many European nations, have imposed stiff fees to pay for the mess created by all the plastic trash. “There is simply zero justification for manufacturing them anymore, anywhere,” the United Nations Environment Programme recently declared. But in the United States, the plastics industry has launched a concerted campaign to derail and defeat anti-bag measures nationwide. The effort includes well-placed political donations, intensive lobbying at both the state and national levels, and a pervasive PR campaign designed to shift the focus away from plastic bags to the supposed threat of canvas and paper bags — including misleading claims that reusable bags “could” contain bacteria and unsafe levels of lead.

“It’s just like Big Tobacco,” says Amy Westervelt, founding editor of Plastic Free Times, a website sponsored by the nonprofit Plastic Pollution Coalition. “They’re using the same underhanded tactics — and even using the same lobbying firm that Philip Morris started and bankrolled in the Nineties. Their sole aim is to maintain the status quo and protect their profits. They will stop at nothing to suppress or discredit science that clearly links chemicals in plastic to negative impacts on human, animal and environmental health.”

Made from high-density polyethylene — a byproduct of oil and natural gas — the single-use shopping bag was invented by a Swedish company in the mid-Sixties and brought to the U.S. by ExxonMobil. Introduced to grocery-store checkout lines in 1976, the “T-shirt bag,” as it is known in the industry, can now be found literally every­where on the planet, from the bottom of the ocean to the peaks of Mount Everest. The bags are durable, waterproof, cheaper to produce than paper bags and able to carry 1,000 times their own weight. They are also a nightmare to recycle: The flimsy bags, many thinner than a strand of human hair, gum up the sorting equipment used by most recycling facilities. “Plastic bags and other thin-film plastic is the number-one enemy of the equipment we use,” says Jeff Murray, vice president of Far West Fibers, the largest recycler in Oregon. “More than 300,000 plastic bags are removed from our machines every day — and since most of the removal has to be done by hand, that means more than 25 percent of our labor costs involves plastic-bag removal.”

The initial resistance to plastic bags came from manufacturers of paper bags, who saw them as a major threat. Environmentalists took up the cause of eliminating single-use bags in the 1990s, but they made little headway until a sailor and researcher named Charles Moore passed through the North Pacific Gyre in 1997 and drew international attention to the vast flood of plastic trash polluting the world’s oceans.

The first nationwide ban was enacted a decade ago in Bangladesh, after plastic bags clogged storm drains and caused massive floods. China issued a top-down order banning plastic bags in June 2008 — just two months before it hosted the Olympics — in an effort to reduce the amount of “white pollution.” Even though the ban is openly flouted by street vendors, it has still made a tremendous impact: In the first year alone, China decreased its use of plastic bags by two-thirds, eliminating some 40 billion bags — a move that saved the energy equivalent of 11.7 million barrels of oil.

The Indian city of Delhi boasts some of the world’s most aggressive legislation on plastic bags, not only fining individual users and businesses that hand out the bags but also threatening jail time for offenders and plastic-bag manufacturers. This year, Italy became the first European country to issue a nationwide ban on plastic bags, while Ireland places a 15-cent fee on every bag — a move that reduced usage by 90 percent in the first three months. All told, 25 percent of the world’s population now lives in areas with bans or fees on plastic bags.

While other nations have effectively cracked down on plastic bags, the U.S. government has left local communities to fend for themselves. In 2007, San Francisco became the first American city to ban plastic bags, and Washington, D.C., has imposed a five-cent fee per bag, cutting monthly use from 22.5 million bags to barely 3 million. Unlike attacks on plastic products such as Styrofoam, which were orchestrated by well-known environmental groups, the fight against plastic bags has been led for the most part by community organizers and concerned citizens who put pressure on their local businesses and governments. In recent years, a growing number of U.S. communities — from 30 townships in Alaska to the Outer Banks of North Carolina — have introduced some 200 anti-bag measures.

The widespread mobilization against plastic bags has sparked a counterattack by the plastics industry, which was slow to react to the rising tide of negative sentiment among consumers. Leading the charge to protect the plastic bag is the American Chemistry Council, an industry group whose members include petro-chemical giants like ExxonMobil and Dow Chemical. With 125 employees and more than $120 million in annual revenues, the ACC and its members are using their deep pockets and extensive political connections to overturn bans on plastic bags, cast doubt on legitimate scientific studies and even file lawsuits against anti-bag activists. The council, which spent $8 million on lobbying alone last year, has also put together a front group called the Progressive Bag Affiliates, made up of top bag manufacturers like Hilex Poly, Superbag and Unistar Plastics.

Experts suggest new policy to reduce toxic chemical exposure and subsequent burden of disease

In three new studies published in the May issue of the journal Health Affairs, Mount Sinai School of Medicine researchers reveal the staggering economic impact of toxic chemicals and air pollutants in the environment, and propose new legislation to mandate testing of new chemicals and also those already on the market.

Leonardo Trasande, MD, Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine and Pediatrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, analyzed the costs of conditions – including lead poisoning, childhood cancer, asthma, autism, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) – associated with exposure to toxic chemicals. Dr. Trasande and his team calculated the annual cost for direct medical care and the indirect costs, such as parents’ lost work days, and lost economic productivity caring for their children, of these diseases in children.

The researchers found the annual cost in the United States to be an estimated $76.6 billion, representing 3.5 percent of all U.S. health care costs in 2008. The breakdown includes: lead poisoning ($50.9 billion), autism ($7.9 billion), intellectual disability ($5.4 billion), exposure to mercury pollution ($5.1 billion), ADHD ($5 billion), asthma ($2.2 billion), and childhood cancer ($95 million).

“Our findings show that, despite previous efforts to curb their use, toxic chemicals have a major impact on health care costs and childhood morbidity,” said Dr. Trasande. “New policy mandates are necessary to reduce the burden of disease associated with environmental toxins. The prevalence of chronic childhood conditions and costs associated with them may continue to rise if this issue is not addressed.”

Dr. Trasande also reviewed an earlier study of 1997 data, which was conducted by Philip J. Landrigan, MD, and documented $54.9 billion in annual costs for childhood diseases associated with environmental toxins in the United States. Reviewing this prior analysis, Dr. Trasande found that while exposure to lead and costs associated with asthma had diminished, new chemicals and new environmentally-induced diseases, like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, have increased the overall burden of disease. Dr. Landrigan is currently Dean for Global Health, and Professor and Chair of Preventive Medicine, and Professor of Pediatrics, at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

In a related article also in the current issue of Health Affairs, Dr. Landrigan and Lynn R. Goldman, MD, Dean of the School of Public Health at George Washington University, propose a three-pronged approach to reduce the burden of disease and rein in the effects of toxic chemicals in the environment:

·         Conduct a requisite examination of chemicals already on the market for potential toxicity, starting with the chemicals in widest use, using new, more efficient toxicity testing technologies.

·         Assess all new chemicals for toxicity before they are allowed to enter the marketplace, and maintain strictly-enforced regulation on these chemicals.

·         Bolster ongoing research and epidemiologic monitoring to better understand, and subsequently prevent, the health impact of chemicals on children.

“Implementing these proposals would have a significant impact in preventing childhood disease and reducing health costs,” said Dr. Landrigan. “Scant legislation has been passed to reduce the risks associated with childhood exposure to toxic chemicals in the environment. Even though only six chemicals have been banned, we have seen dramatic benefits from that action alone. The removal of lead from gasoline and paint is an example of the importance of this type of regulation.”

In a separate article in Health Affairs, Perry Sheffield, MD, Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, evaluated the little-studied correlation between air pollution and infectious respiratory illness in children, and the resultant health care costs.

Dr. Sheffield and her team analyzed hospitalization data between 1999 and 2007 for children aged one month to one year who had bronchiolitis – a type of viral lung infection with symptoms similar to asthma – and monitored the air quality surrounding in the hospitals where the patients were treated. They found a statistically significant association between levels of fine particulate matter pollutant surrounding the hospitals, and total charges and costs for infant bronchiolitis hospitalizations.

Her team revealed that as the amount of air pollutants increased, infant bronchiolitis hospitalization costs increased by an average of $127 per patient. As a result, they concluded that reducing the average level of fine particulate pollutant by just seven percent below the current annual standard could save $15 million annually in U.S. health care costs.

“While more research is required to understand the full effect of air pollutants on infectious disease severity and health care costs, our findings are indicative of the tremendous impact new legislation on air quality control standards could have on the health of our children,” said Dr. Sheffield.