Conservation and Disney's Project Green

Olivia with the cast of Camp Rock; far left is Beth Stevens, Disney's Environmental Director; center is Vikki Spruill from the Ocean Conservancy.

Olivia and Jackson were on hand for the filming of a public service announcement for Friends for Change Coastal Clean-Up event and discovered all sorts of hidden trash on the beaches of Tampa. From soggy blankets to torn-up tarps, about 30 burlap garbage bags were filled with garbage.
Disney World has adopted several visible ecofriendly practices: paper straws, lidless drinks, brown paper towels, and an increased recycling program. But what was behind the scenes was even more impressive. The conservation efforts behind Animal Kingdom, from breeding a near-extinct species of kingfishers from Guam to rescuing oil-soaked sea turtles from the Gulf of Mexico, were evidence of a serious committment to the environment on a global scale. One collaborative project included Kenyan farmers, whose crops were being trampled by elephants. The farmers, unable to restrain the elephants, needed to find a way to keep the animals off their property without harming them. Disney scientists were able to discover how an elephant's fear of bees could keep them at bay. By working together, the Kenyan farmers and the scientists were able to create a border of bee hives that not only kept elephants off the farms, but generated a money-making crop of honey. This was just one of the many projects shared with us while we toured their facilities.

Disney's Project Green

About a year ago, our family visited Disney World. We had a great time, but also thought about ways Disney could be innovative and 'green' the park. I even wrote a blog entry about it. Little did I know that a year later, we would be invited back, as Olivia and Jackson participate in one of their new programs, Friends for Change/Project Green, a terrific initiative to get young people involved in improving the environment. Already a long-standing supporter of environmental groups like the Audubon Society, Disney's conservation program and its senior vice president of environmental affairs, Dr. Beth Stevens, have set ambitious goals in lowering the park's carbon footprint through cutting water use, energy consumption, waste, and emissions. Stevens, who recently won Audubon's Rachel Carson Award for her conservation efforts, has a philosophy about nature that we share--if people are inspired to love nature, they are more inclined to protect it. Like Rachel Carson, Dr. Stevens is helping to shape how our country views its relationship with the environment, a tradition of environmentalism that has had a profound impact on our family, especially Olivia and her fundraising efforts for the Gulf.
Check out Project Green's site for eco-friendly ideas on how to clean up your local environment. I plan on sharing it with my high school students, challenging them to set some eco-friendly goals for the new school year.

Green Goals

In its quest to host the 2004 Olympic games, Hammarby Sjostad, a neighborhood in Stockholm, Sweden converted the community into a green paradise. Though it was unsuccessful in securing the coveted games, the neighborhood gained great notoriety in its forward thinking use of trash. Everything gets sorted and sucked into pneumatic tubes-- food for compost, paper for recycling, and garbage for incineration, which is then used for energy. Even sewage comes back, serving as both fertilizer and biogas.

Clearly most cities are having trouble right now making payroll, never mind retrofitting the entire landscape with pneumatic tubes; however it did make me wonder about a place like Disney World. As I walked around the park, I saw many missed opportunities for Disney to set a more eco-friendly example. Plastic bags were used for even the most insignificant purchase, few recycling stations existed, no signs of photovoltaic panels, while energy was consumed in vast quantities. I shudder to think of the park's carbon footprint. One idea that I think could be truly inventive would be to put in piezoelectric flooring, panels which generate kinetic energy with foot traffic. Imagine if every person of the 44,000 who passed through the Magic Kingdom's turnstiles actually generated a percentage of energy. That might just put some meaning into the name: Tomorrowland.

And She Returns

A huge thank you to Jesse Neuman for his BDG posts while I was in a far away land of magic and oversized rodents-- aka Disney World. The trip was supreme family time interspersed with some philosophical reflection. If an environment is completely simulated, is it real? If you lose a camera, will it be returned? And if a tree falls in a forest, can Disney charge $17.95 for it? Disney did create its own reality-- spaces which seem plausible-- reality on Red Bull-- which transport you from the wild savannah of Africa to the wild frontier of the West. We wandered from China to Mexico, to Norway, to Italy in Epcot, rode every roller coaster, and soared in virtual space. What Disney does, it does well, and we all had a good time.