ESE360

12/02/2014

Jiyang Zhao

Jane Sullivan

For the recent participation of Race for Zero Waste competition, will the MTD (Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District) give reward to encourage the employee for recycling the waste, like giving out cash or bonus for recycling? Like identify a sustainability champion within MTD and give him/she reward [1]

Is there is some employee, workers or even mangers of Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District that do not believe the importance of environment sustainability? If so, will you make any effort to do some sort of sustainability education on them?

Since recently MTD make a commitment to make sustainability part of MTD’s strategic objective, will there be a compromise or trade-off between the quality of MTD service and the achievement of environment sustainability [1].

Tyler Rotche

Is it true that the University of Illinois has to invest in local coal as a state policy, for instance University of Illinois has to buy certain proportion or certain amount of coal produced in Illinois? If it is true, do you think such policy will set up a barrier to eliminate the coal-burning plant in our campus?

Do you think if there is any short term negative effect of divesting the coal industry? For example, loss of job offer in the local community.

[1] http://www.cumtd.com/the-inside-lane/green-light-going-for-gold/

[2] http://prairierivers.org/about/staff/

[3] http://www.dailyillini.com/opinion/columns/guest_columns/article_06c6c598-4bfe-11e3-9441-0019bb30f31a.html?mode=jqm

ESE360

11/11/2014

Jiyang Zhao

 Canis lupus (Gray/Timber Wolf)

Canis lupus, also known as Gray or Timber Wolf, is one of the four state threated mammals in the state of Illinois. Canis lupus is also listed as the Federal endangered mammals. Canis lupus is classified as the Least Concern (LC) species worldwide. Gray Wolf has the largest shape among approximately 41 wild species of candid [2]. Although the exact body size vary in different geographic locations, in general, the total body length range from 100 cm to 130 cm for males, and range from 87 cm to 117 cm for female, as measured from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail [2]. In other words, the size of Gray Wolf is similar to the size of Husky or German shepherd dogs at the same ages, as in fact the Gray Wolf is the sole ancestor of all the dogs.

The average weight of male is about 55 kg, with a variation from 30 to 80 kg [2]. Whereas the average weight of female is 45 kg, range from 23 to 55 kg [2]. The height of Gray Wolf is about 60 to 90 cm for both the females and males. Even though the name indicate that Gray is the fur color of Canis lupus, it actually among different regions, from pure white fur color for the Arctic populations, to mixtures of white, gray, brown, cinnamon and  even uniform black color in other regions [2]. Interestingly, Gray Wolf share alike behavior and body language with domestic dogs, include marking its territory by urination and they will laid down on their back to show obedience to others just as the dogs do.

Reference

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_wolf

[2] http://eol.org/pages/328607/overview

[3]http://vivanatura.org/canis%20lupus%20baileyi%20extraphotos.html

ESE360

10/21/2014

Jiyang Zhao

Paper 3 outline

Thesis statement: Sustainability is very important in buildings such as the new ECE building in U of I since it not only provide benefit for environment but also bring financial benefit in the long run.

Hook (grab readers attention): The invention of LED light here in U of I by Nick Holonyak made it possible to use less energy for the same amount of light intensity, which make sustainability more achievable in buildings

Introduction:

Buildings in the US account for great percentage of carbon dioxide emission; primary energy usage and electricity consumption. Sustainable practice in the process of planning, building, construction, maintenance can largely decrease these percentage.

Different from using more renewable energy such as wind energy and solar energy that is financially more expensive than conventional energy source, despite the improvement for environment.

Sustainability in building will not only improve the local environment by decreasing the environmental degradation; reduce the usage of energy and nonrenewable natural resources; provide less harm to human health for both the local community and the occupant inside the building, but also provide financial benefit by cutting down the operating cost and increasing building value in long run.

Main argument 1: New ECE building will strive to achieve a net zero energy usage (the building supply all of the energy it needed), and no energy waste (all the electricity coming to the building will be consumed with no waste energy) by a series of initiative innovation

Supporting detail:

#1 Array of photovoltaic cells planned to be implemented on the roof

#2 unused electricity of the new ECE building will be provided to the battery cells for charging electric automobiles

#3 Employment LED light with long and thinner shape to decrease the energy usage and light waste

#4 Personal air circulation device implemented in the chair of auditorium in order to avoid the useless heating/cooling by the central Air-conditioning. Hence cut down the electricity usage

Main argument 2: New ECE building use passive design to use energy more efficiently

Supporting detail:

#1 The shading structure outside of the main entrance help utilize the solar radiation (sunlight) in Winter by the greenhouse effect and avoid overheating in the summer, since sunlight will only go pass the shading structure in the Winter due to its relative position with regard to the building. Hence it keep the building warm at winter and cool at summer.

#2 Encourage biking and walking by building showroom in the underground floor

Potential barrier:

Significant amount of funding is required to construct such a giant building that meet LEED sustainable building standards, it is estimated $95 million dollars is used for this building, which set up a huge financial barrier for other institutions to follow through.

[1] http://cnx.org/contents/1741effd-9cda-4b2b-a91e-003e6f587263@43.4:73/Sustainability:_A_Comprehensiv

[2]

http://www.smithgroupjjr.com/news_releases/university-of-illinois-at-urbana-champaign-to-start-construction-on-electrical-and-computer-engineering-building-designed-by-smithgroup#.VEXEOPnF98E

[3]

http://www.smithgroupjjr.com/projects/electrical-and-computer-engineering-building#.VEXEN_nF98E

Jiyang Zhao

ESE360

16 September 2014

Native planting leads to a better biodiversity and environment sustainability

To be honest, I fell a little disappointed when I acknowledged that prairie is just the name given by the French to the grasslands that cover or once covered the central portion of the North America, as James Ellis described (5). After all, it is just grassland, just imaging the scene of a taller version of your backyard law.

Fortunately, after the trip to the Prairie Restoration planting at Florida Avenue and South Orchard Street, it turned out that I am totally wrong. The prairie we visited, which cover about 2.7-acre no-mow zones, is the very first prairie planting set up by the University of Illinois, as an ongoing project of the Illinois Climate Action Plan (iCAP) (“Prairie Restoration at Florida & Orchard”), funded by the Student Sustainability Committee of University of Illinois (“Habitat Restoration Hints at Lost Prairie Beauty”). It took five years to reconstruct this precious prairie from merely a regular turf lawn, with the help of non-revenue volunteers, most of them are from a student organization called “Red Bison” of University of Illinois, some professors that are expertise in the Prairie planting also took part of the project by organizing and guiding the entire project.

Before entering the prairie that is partially blocked by the overgrowing plants, I was already impressed by the beauty and uniqueness of this prairie planting for the first look. Standing beyond the outside edges, the prairie look quite similar to a hedge maze, mainly due to the three narrow pathways that are zigzagging across the prairie. One can easily discover the bio diversity among this prairie, just by looking at the general characteristics of those plants; yellow, pink, red, brown flowers, ranging from 1 feet to about 7 feet high. Dr. John Marlin, manager of this project and who organized and coordinated the work on the prairie, told us that that there are about 30 to 40 native species in this prairie. I was a little confused by the word native species, since the saying of Dr. Marlin do imply a negative view towards those non-native species, indeed, the word “native” were used so often during the interview as a part of the trip so I started to ask myself, why are those “native” things so important? We were talking about native plants, native insects, native birds, native mammals like bison, even the ring fire set up by group of Native American. What are the benefits for restoring the “native” ecological system at this time?

It is all about the way ecological system works, according to Hays, most of the non-native plants are not eatable for native insects, or even toxic for the native insects (“Letter from Birdland: Our pollinators need more love”). Those native plants also need the help of native insects as they important pollinators for reproducing, the next important fact is that the native insects are actually the main food source for native birds, especially for the young native birds (Hays, Letter from Birdland: Our pollinators need more love). The relationship can be explained as a sort of domino effect, non-native plants would lead to reduction of native insects, which will subsequently lead to reduction of native-plants due to loss of pollinators, which will largely reduce the native birds due to lack of food resources. You do not want this happen not only because you are an insect or bird or plants lover but also due to the loss of biodiversity, restoring the native plants in the prairie is like a reverse process to improve the biodiversity. Biodiversity is not the only reason for planting this prairie, another reason for planting new prairie is that prairie is great method to control the carbon dioxide emission, as prairie has a greater ability to store the carbon dioxide. That is the main reason for Student Sustainability Committee to fund this project.

According to Dr. John Marlin, there are about 160 native species in the prairie of Illinois originally, only 30 to 40 of them was restored in the Prairie we visited. Professor Ken Robinson, an expertise in the area of prairie planting, reminded us that hardly any native birds had been attracted to this prairie, due to the relative small size for this prairie currently, but they believed eventually native birds will perch their nest around the prairie as it grow bigger. A large number of insects were easily observed in the prairie, Professor Ken Robinson once pointed to a bee resting on a purple flower and said ‘“you will see this very often in the sunny day, we call them ‘sleeping bee’”, he told us during a sunny day (we were there in a cloudy day), enormous amount of bees will rest and sleep on the flowers, and it will look like a layer made up insect set on the surface of flowers from the view of further away.

Ongoing seedling and weed removing is still taken place through the natural growth cycles of prairie, but there are also other fascinating ideas about the prairie, as we merely finished the field trip, Dr. Marlin told us “May be we will restore bison in someday”, regarding the fact that bison actually played a huge role in prairie planting, as they unintentional boost the prairie growth by grazing and trampling the grassland. It will definitely be a great scene to see.

Work cited

Habitat Restoration Hints at Lost Prairie Beauty, Illinois Sustainable Technology Center. < http://istc.illinois.edu/news/news6_prairietest.cfm>

James, Ellis. Understanding Prairie in the Prairie State.

John. Marlin. Personal interview. 11 Sept. 2014

Ken Robinson. Personal interview. 11 Sept.2014

Mary Lucille Hays, Letter from Birdland: Abuzz with life, The News-Gazette. 20 July. 2014, web. 15 Sept. 2014. < http://www.news-gazette.com/living/2014-07-20/letter-birdland-abuzz-life.html>

“Prairie Restoration at Florida & Orchard.” Web. 16 Sept. 2014. < https://icap.sustainability.illinois.edu/project/prairie-restoration-florida-orchard>

ESE360

Jiyang Zhao

When I was in middle school, roughly seven to eight years ago, my mom worshiped a guy from Taiwan who wrote several books about food nutrient, and also had some videos lecture about food selection; food and nutrient. After read his books and watching his lectures, my mom began to follow his ideas and suggestions about food selection without any hesitation.

Here is some of his suggestions: do not drink milk since milk is only good for cattle; do not eat red meat, including mutton, beef, pork and chicken, since the red meat contain hormone that will cause sexual precocity and other issues; buy more local product fruit, and avoid importing fruit or any fruit that had been refrigerated during transportation.I know some of his suggestions looked entirely insane but you have to understand developing countries like China that was still fighting for hunger at that time did not really acknowledge about the how their food was produced. The food quality issues in China like the hormone and antibiotic inside the mean just came out to public in recent years. Apparently, things turned out that it was totally a fraud, that guy is not even a physician or nutritionist, he was put in jail in Taiwan due to commercial fraud crime.

But I have to admire that some of his suggestions was kind of appropriate, like more local purchase of food or eating less fast food. Our family kept some of his correct ideas and followed it when purchasing food. Benefit by the economy growth in China, my family can afford more options for the food, we started to choice organic vegetables and fruits that was way much expensive that normal food in grocery store like Walmart or Carrefour, again it was about seven to eight years ago. Although there was no authoritative agency to make the certification like “USDA Organic logo” things. That’s one reason for my family to buy organic food in Chinese Wal-Mart. Our family also planted a small size peach farm, in order to avoid the possible hazardous pesticide residue of commercial fruit.

Before the interview with Lisa, I post “what is the impact of the University at the size of BIG10 on the local food system? Like how U of I change the local food business.” As one of my questions, the related topic was discussed in the following interview. As Lisa claimed, currently the more than 90% of food purchased from the dining hall of University of Illinois-Champaign (UIUC) was from region outside of Champaign County. Since the food production chain in Champaign County cannot support such a large scale of demand by the UIUC. As Lisa pointed out, all of the food from the Urbana’ Market at the Square (one of the largest and most diverse farmers’ markets in Illinois) ^[1] can support the all the dining hall of UIUC for only 8 hours (Lisa Bralts, September 25, 2014). It does not really surprise me as most of the agricultural land of Champaign and central Illinois is merely cornfield. However, Lisa then illustrated the food policy for the University of California system (UC) like UC Berkeley; UC Davis and UC Santa Barbara.

The new food policy of the UC system focus on buying a significant of food that is locally grown. With Lisa emphasized, their food policy is “very aggressive” (Lisa Bralts, September 25, 2014). The research after the interviewed proved her standpoint, the UC colleges started to use more food that is locally grown or even campus grown, that are also organic and no genetic modified, UC Davis now use campus grown starches to make cupcakes; bread and desert for the dining hall ^[2]. It is very interesting how the UC schools overcome the lack of local food supply problem, and more researching can be done as we go to Student Sustainable Farm next week.

[1] http://urbanaillinois.us/market

[2] http://dining.ucdavis.edu/sus-agriculture.html

Could there be an easier way to buy the food from locale farm? For example, I really want to buy the strawberries and other fruits they produced from Freeland’s strawberries, I like to try the gelato made ice-cream (less fat and more intense flavor than the traditional American ice-cream) from Prairie Fruits Farm. And also the eggs and the turkey from 7 sisters farm. They look so good! But usually, you can only buy their product directly at their farm or some sort of county fair like the “Urbana’s Market at the Square” we have here in Urbana downtown. Not even mention that the farm open time (when they can buy their product by walking-in) is very limited and appointment is generally needed. Why can’t the farm set up a counter that labeled “local food” in some grocery store? It does not have to be at Wal-Mart or Meyers, but why not the local farmers sell their product in some kind of whole-food store like the “Common Ground” we have here.

What is potential impact of pop-up restaurant on the local restaurants?

What is the impact of the University at the size of BIG10 on the local food system? Like how U of I change the local food business.

Do you think “cracked truck” will succeed, in the standard of food business?

ESE360

Jiyang Zhao

QUIZ for “Understanding Prairie in the Prairie State”

 #1 What are the three major types of prairie in central North America, as stated in the reading?

 #2 Rank the intensity of annual precipitation of those three types of prairie, from the least annual precipitation to the annual largest precipitation.

#3 There is a well-defined eastern boundary for the prairie in North America, True or False?

 #4 Which of the following mountains is the ecological boundary for the prairie in North America, according to the reading

1. Mount Hector
2. Mount Dana
3. Mount Rocky
4. Mount Jefferson

 #5 Which of the following can distribute to the natural firebreak?

A. Wetlands

B. Rivers

C. Streams

D. All of the above

 #6 Which of the following object have growing point beneath the soil surface, in general?

1. Grasses
2. Woody plants

 #7 According to the observations of prairie flora, a habitat patch larger than 10 acres will have roughly how many native species of local plants?

1. 100
2. 10
3. 1000
4. 700

#8 Briefly explain the benefit to intentionally set fire on the open prairie, in the perspective of human being?

ESE360

Jiyang Zhao

As an international student with a different native language from English, my writing experience can be a little different, in my home country China, writing is required specifically for every Chinese language exam, pretty similar to the writing test of SAT, there will always be a subject about writing an essay in the Chinese language test, and that subject will make up more than half of the exam total score. So I started writing papers and short essay from roughly age 6 to 7, which is grade 1 and 2 in elementary school.

Unfortunately, I regard myself as person that has limited writing talent, there appropriate writing training and writing skills education are definitely what I am looking for. It’s sadly to say, but I do not write a lot unless it is necessary, I do write papers and assignments for the school, I may write curriculum vitae or project planning in the future for my career, and I may write any other things, but they are all necessary tasks for me, that’s why I am not really secure for my abilities as a writer, since in my opinion, people will not do really well for the things that are not are truly loved. Whereas I fully understand the importance of writing in our daily life, besides academic and career writing, sometimes I regard writing as a similar activity like work-out, you will focus on the result of lifting weight rather than the process of lifting weight, the same idea can apply to the role of writing in my life, right now, writing is just a way, a mean for me to achieve certain goal.

I also recommend this two websites for writing.

About transition words

https://www.msu.edu/~jdowell/135/transw.html

About citation

https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/

Homework 2
ESE360
Jiyang Zhao

#1
“At least one utility scale wind turbine will be installed by fiscal year 2011, with the goal of installing two additional turbines if feasible”

Is that wind turbine installed? If so, where is the wind turbine being installed? And how is the energy generated by that wind turbine transferred to U of I? Is it exclusively used by University of Illinois?

#2
“The Student Sustainability Committee has partially funded a Campus Bike Project initiative that will provide a place, tools, and supplies for minor repairs f bicycles on campus, and has been providing some bicycle parking funding as well. Research is also being conducted on the feasibility of implementing a bike sharing program on campus. A substantial increase in convenient and safe bicycle parking on campus would also encourage more biking, as would convenient locker and shower facilities at places of study and work”

“Also, at the end of the year when students move out of the dormitories, Housing donates many of the items left behind to local charities. Additionally, they annually donate approximately 16,000 pounds of clothing and other goods to charity.”

Have that bike sharing program being implemented?
Is there any way that those ownerless bikes (how much are they?) can be utilized by the students, with a low charge of even free?

#3
“The Office of Sustainability Vision document proposes two grand sustainability challenges: (1) To maintain or restore natural ecosystem function while providing essential human services; and (2) To sustainably raise the quality of life for the world’s poor to acceptable levels.

How to define “acceptable levels” and “world’s poor”?
Is there any specific standard for them, like the poor people are household have a daily income below 1 US dollars?

#4
Why the amount of energy generated by coal and natural gas being so different each year? And why would the portion of the energy generated by natural gas and coal so different?

Reference

http://sustainability.illinois.edu/pdfs/Climate%20Action%20Plan.Final.pdf