Service Learning - Alexander Eyre Essay

Alexander Eyre
Professor Kate Holterhoff
15ENG102H001
Research Essay
June 5, 2009

Green Cincinnati

   It began in 1824 when Joseph Fourier discovered the greenhouse effect, the increase of climate temperatures due to the collection of certain gases in the atmosphere. This discovery went unnoticed until around year 2000 when scientists really started exploring its rising numbers and results on the environment. The greenhouse effect was observed to be harming crops in regions, causing extinction of certain animals, and decaying the ice caps on the North and South Pole of the Earth. Upon the release of this information to the public, articles began appearing in newspapers around the world, popular magazines such as Flaunt began creating the “green issue,” and Al Gore published his book, An Inconvenient Truth, an in-depth explanation of the impacts we are having on the environment (Friedman 1). These things increased people’s concern and understanding about their effects on the world and, in turn, the people wondered what they could do to help reverse this effect to shift the Earth back to a healthier state. The true severity of the greenhouse effect is debated in every country whether it is an issue that needs to be focused on now or later. In either case, the announcement and resulting talk of the uneasy environment has created hype around the entire world and thus created the global Go Green movement.

   The Go Green movement is a trend centered on improving the global environment through a variety of means. For a single person to take part, going green is a series of actions they can take to work toward this goal, one small step at a time. Actions such as recycling, using energy saving appliances, bicycling to work, and many other things are part of a person’s effort to make their mark on the environment minimal (“Live Green Cincinnati”). The philosophy behind going green is if everyone joins and lessens their impact, the greenhouse effect and other harmful changes will slowly decrease and eventually reverse themselves to return the Earth back to a more harmonious state. Yet, surely everyone is not going to join in overnight to help this cause; it takes understanding, persuasion, effort, and, of course, money for one to start such an endeavor. With this in mind, I took a look at the Downtown community of Cincinnati, Ohio to shed light on the efforts of individuals and organizations around the world. I asked myself the question, “what has Downtown Cincinnati done in order to Go Green,” and looked from there, and ended up coming across several organizations including Go Green Cincinnati, Live Green Cincinnati, and an effort of Go Metro. The remainder of this essay will be used to explore and analyze the efforts of these organizations in Downtown Cincinnati.

My search first led me to Go Green Cincinnati based in the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. A Downtown community council meeting was being held in the library on May 12th, which sparked my interest about the program. Several fliers lined the walls of the library, and the program was in the community agenda as regular business meaning it was something that was discussed each meeting. Its particular segment during the meeting was fairly short, just advertising the next event that was coming up later that month. The upcoming event, an opportunity to learn about getting around Cincinnati by bike, was enthusiastically discussed by the council and was even polled to how many people planned on going. This showed the groups excitement for the green events, rather it is there to really learn or socialize. The segment was ended by making sure everyone that planned on going left the room with, “make sure to bring your neighbors,” ringing in their ears.

   In order to better understand this program, I interviewed David Siders, the head of the Green Committee that runs the Go Green Cincinnati program. He stated that the organization holds monthly events in order to teach the citizens of Downtown Cincinnati how they can Go Green and bring this trend to their home to care for the environment. He elaborated on several events, including a discussion of organic grown foods, a three meeting event educating citizens how they can grow a garden in an urban home, and a two meeting event teaching people how they can earn LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification for their home. After the program discussion, David Siders stated:
The Gardening in the City programs were very successful last year, with an average attendance of 20 people at each program. The other programs to date have a smaller turnout, with averages of 6-10 people for each program, but participants have been very eager for green information, and have been very happy to learn about more resources at the Library and in the community.

Siders says that the events, while full of great information and lively people, are relatively small compared to the Downtown population and even the people going in and out of the library (“Interview”).
Analysis of Go Green Cincinnati uncovers several things that work well and others that could be improved. The organization makes sure to have regular events each month, which do a great job of educating the people about the Go Green Movement in a much applied manner. I am sure that these individuals go back to their home motivated and full of ideas, as David Siders made this his top priority. These events also cover many corners of the Go Green movement that are more difficult to explore in ones home without having someone there to hold their hand and get them started, such as gardening or gaining LEED certification (“Go Green Cincinnati”). While these events are great and full of motivating information, I wonder why these events are not more greatly attended. I feel that this is the greatest improvement the organization needs to focus on. The extent of advertisement of the events is fliers in the library and the community council members talking with their neighbors, confining their attendees to a very small populace. The program needs to reach out by putting these fliers in more public locations, so they can get a larger body of people coming to these meetings and jumping on the Go Green movement. If Go Green Cincinnati began to reach out and bring in more people, I am positive the organization will grow and ultimately be very beneficial to the Downtown Cincinnati community.

   The second organization also working with the Go Green movement in Downtown is Live Green Cincinnati. This organization works all around Cincinnati, but particularly works in Downtown where it is more difficult to persuade people to begin a green lifestyle. Like Go Green Cincinnati, the organization works to really educate its citizens about the Go Green movement and get them to develop green habits to apply to their home and lifestyle. Live Green Cincinnati even has a powerful mission statement to support their goal, “Live Green Cincinnati aims to inspire, inform, and enable change and action to build the momentum of the green economy in Cincinnati,” showing how they really target to motivate and teach people about the importance of going green (“Live Green Cincinnati”). They achieve this first by providing a large database of resources on how to start living green, and the locations of the areas to do so, such as recycling centers and hazardous waste plants. Some of the resources include free links to local businesses, books, magazines, podcasts, etc. all supporting the Go Green movement. The final important resource the organization provides is contact information of people around Cincinnati who have earned LEED certification for their homes. This allows citizens part of Live Green Cincinnati to explore going green from their homes and have reliable information to answer any possible questions.

Similar to Go Green Cincinnati, Live Green Cincinnati promotes events monthly in order to bring the community together and learn about the effects of going green. They, however, have these meetings much more frequently and advertise them in a few more public areas around Cincinnati. The organization really works to appeal to a broad range of people, by holding events that cover a variety of topics both green and similar. In a single month, Live Green Cincinnati helped bring people together to participate in a 5k recycling run, learn about gardening in an urban environment, and learn about effects of growing and eating organic foods. Some of the other events they support are Go Humane Cincinnati, which is a one day event for the care of animals. Although this event is not completely for the Go Green movement, they participate to bring more people into the organization. These are just a single month’s worth of events held by the organization to bring the community together (“Live Green Cincinnati”).

   After analysis of Live Green Cincinnati, there are many great things going on that reflect their mission statement well. First, the organization does a good job of displaying themselves as being passionate about the environment by carrying that strong mission statement and having a very informative website. This tells visitors to the site that they are motivated about the work they do and strongly support those people that do come to the events and learn about the Go Green movement. Second, the organization does a great job bringing the community together and teaching them a variety of means of helping their environment. They ensure the events appeal to a broad range of people’s interests and, upon drawing them in, they can further educate them. Not only do these meetings cover a large range of material, but a wide age group in order to bring in families and allow everyone to get exposed and learn. The final thing Live Green Cincinnati does well is connect individuals to others through the resources appearing on their website. This is important for a trendy thing such as Go Green, because it takes these connections to turn make the movement large. On the negative side, the organization, like Go Green Cincinnati, could do a little more advertisement of their events. Some events, such as the 5k run, are advertised all around town while others are just found online and in small sections of Downtown Cincinnati. I recommend they put a bit more effort into advertising events so that more people will learn to Go Green and the movement can take off.

   The final thing Downtown Cincinnati has done to work with the Go Green movement roams the streets on a daily basis. Any person walking throughout the community may realize six giant green buses roaming the town, which are the hybrid metros owned by the public transportation system of Cincinnati, Go Metro. These buses were released on April 22nd, 2009, just in time for Earth day, and run on both diesel and electricity. The buses mainly run on the downtown routes as they are more likely to be subject to constant stops and idle, which now are run on electricity when they were usually run on diesel. The hybrid metros were introduced and celebrated with a fashion show followed by a parade of the buses into Downtown Cincinnati where they were put into service the next day. The “Eco Go-Go Fashion Show” contained models wearing environmentally friendly clothing and walking over a runway of flowers coming off of the hybrid buses. The parade, fashion show, and hybrid buses were widely celebrated among Cincinnati citizens on Earth day and led to more funding, which may lead to more of such buses in 2010. The new metros outstandingly cut down on fuel consumption by 30% and hydrocarbon emissions by 90%, which will greatly reduce the impact on the area from its predecessors. This information, however, not displayed readily in the metros, which seems to me like a large waste of the buses. Much more advertised was the cost savings of using the metros on a daily basis. An article released by Go Metro reads, “it costs a commuter driving 30 miles round-trip per day from the suburbs to downtown more than $7,200 a year – that’s more than $600 a month – to drive. A Metro pass good for unlimited use is just $90 a month for Hamilton County service. In this example, the savings by riding Metro is more than $500 per month or $6,000 a year,” showing that it can save a person large sums of money if they use the metros rather than their own vehicle for transportation (“Go Metro”). While this is a great money saving tip, the hybrid metros could do more to display their impact on their community’s environment.

   Go Metro obviously did a wondrous thing implementing the hybrid buses in Cincinnati. They actively transport people around downtown while reducing emissions that contribute to the greenhouse effect immensely. The big green buses rolling through the area are definitely beneficial to the Go Green movement in Downtown Cincinnati. While these are doing a great job and being an obvious effort to help the environment, they could be doing much more with very little effort. The hybrid metros simply need to implement some wayt of educating the public about the buses each time they ride. Most of the people that regularly take the bus may not care, but it can leave an impact on a few. These few people bring the information to their home and another green household could be made. By also adding this small bit of information, it can create a greater respect for the buses and surrounding environment. This will have an effect similar to the “Broken Window Theory,” a term coined in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point, stating a small fix in an area can cause a large change, such as a repaired window on a house can cause greater care of the property (141). By helping people understand what the buses really are by putting up the small bit of information, perhaps it can be like one of these broken windows. The people now understand that Downtown Cincinnati cares in other ways about their health through these buses, and, in turn, respect the community more.

   Collectively, the three organizations could be doing several things that could maximize their effects in Downtown and spread the Go Green movement a little quicker. While the groups are on the right track by educating citizens and making harmful things green in the area, the organizations could do more to reach out and draw people into the movement. Both Go Green Cincinnati and Live Green Cincinnati have excellent programs, but they are under-attended relative to the Downtown Cincinnati population. In no means should the entire city attend each of these meetings, but it is necessary to get a variety of people from different areas within the entire population so the trend spreads. The organizations are greatly limiting their selves by focusing on the groups that currently attend. Go Metro can also reach out by advertising the effects their hybrid metros are having on the environment in their buses. Most people tend to pass these things by as outside events do not matter much on the way to their destination, but as they take the hybrids more and more often, they may pick up on these things and slowly learn them. The programs could also go so far as to work together and maybe advertise the events held by each of the groups in the metros. Then, if the citizens of the Downtown community riding the green metros gain interest, they can explore it by searching online or making a phone call. With a small and simple effort, I believe the organizations could work together to really make Go Green an important figure in Downtown Cincinnati, and the trend can catch on and spread throughout the community’s population.

On a more positive note, the more I understand about the Downtown Cincinnati area and its effort to Go Green, the more I realize that the area is doing a very good job. Go Green Cincinnati, Live Green Cincinnati, and Go Metro are all pushing for a greener Cincinnati and are having a positive impact on the community, despite the changes being slow. Because the Go Green movement is relatively new, I did not expect the area to collectively be doing much, but I found myself pleasantly surprised. The small Downtown community council has even made its own effort by creating a Green Committee and Go Green Cincinnati. Although the attendance of their organization’s meetings is small, they do make an impact on the area. Along side of the small effort of this organization, Live Green Cincinnati provides additional meetings and resources to bring more people together in order to educate and help them Go Green. Also pushing to become greener, Go Metro created six hybrid buses to provide green means to get around Downtown Cincinnati in an environmentally friendly fashion. Although the groups aren’t creating an entirely green community, they are providing the one necessary initial step to spread the Go Green trend. As they grow, so will the citizens passion to help the environment and the community can become one of the greenest in the world.

   Analysis of Downtown Cincinnati gives me a good feeling knowing that the community is going in the right direction with going green. Many positive things are being done to get people educated about the Go Green movement and to get them to bring it to their homes. I believe there is room for all of these programs to grow and start reaching to each end of Downtown to really get the area and people to become green. As our environmentally hazardous daily actions, such as riding cars instead of the metro, turn greener, so will the people of the community and the effects of the area can spread to the other corners of Cincinnati. I believe review of this community has created a perspective to what the rest of the nation’s cities and the world are perusing to make the urban environments greener. It is important for the Go Green movement to involve each of these cities and everyone within, because only then will it have its maximum effect and reduce the effects of the greenhouse effect and other things deteriorating our environment. It is obvious that a decent number of people in a city are well educated about going green, going so far as earning a powerful certification, but with a few small changes in a community, these numbers can grow greatly. The green city can then impact its neighboring cities and states, and eventually spread its effect over the entire world. At this point, the Go Green movement has accomplished what it was created to do, and the Earth will forever be balanced and the health of humanity will forever be great.

Go Back

Works Cited

Friedman, Tom. “Going for the Green: A History of the Green Bandwagon and Where on it Tom Friedman Sits.” Gawker. 17 April 2007. Web. 15 May 2009.
Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point. 2002. Boston: First Back Bay. Print.
Go Green Cincinnati. N.p., 2009. Web. 12 May 2009.
http://www.cincinnatilibrary.org/features/goinggreen.html

Go Metro. N.p., 2009. Web. 13 May 2009.
http://www.go-metro.com/
Live Green Cincinnati. N.p., 2009. Web. 12 May 2009.
http://www.livegreencincinnati.com/
Siders, David B. E-mail interview. 01 June 2009.

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Service Learning - Alexander Eyre Essay