Name _________________________________________________________________________________________ Period _______________
SC08 Wall-E Project
Objective: Understand the impact of science and technology on human activity and the environment as
well as your place in the world – as living creatures, consumers, decision makers, problem solvers,
managers, and planners. The following outlines your responsibilities for the next several days:




Watch Wall-E
Complete Viewing Log portions (see pages 2-5)
Listen to This American Life podcast (see pages 6-10 for the transcript)
Produce an Output of your choice (see pages 11-13)
Rubric
10
7
5
Viewing Log
Completion of
at least 3-4 Viewing Log
portions per day.
Completion of
at least 2 Viewing Log
portions per day.
Completion of
1 or fewer Viewing Log
portions per day.
Film
Participating in
watching
at all times.
Participating in
watching
most of the time.
Not participating
significantly in
watching.
Podcast
Participating in reading
and/or listening at all
times.
Participating in reading
and/or listening most of
the time.
Not participating
significantly in reading
and/or listening.
Demonstrates an
understanding of
human impact on the
environment.
Alludes to human
impact on the
environment.
Does not demonstrate
an understanding of
human impact on the
environment.
Output
May connect to
concepts in the podcast
and film.
Refers to concepts in
the podcast and film.
1
No clear connection to
the concepts in the
podcast and film.
Wall-E Viewing Log
Date
Question
Describe two things that
happened today.
Response
Choose a character and
tell your feelings about
him/her.
List questions that come
to your mind today.
Draw a picture from the
movie.
2
Describe two things that
happened today.
Have you had a similar
experience to anything
that has happened in the
movie so far?
List questions that come
to your mind today.
Draw a picture from the
movie.
3
Describe the protagonist
in no more than 20
words.
How does the movie
remind you of yourself
OR what has it taught
you so far?
Predict what you think
will happen next.
Draw a picture from the
movie.
4
Would you recommend
this movie to others?
Who do you think would
enjoy watching it?
Tell the main things that
happened today.
Draw a picture from the
movie.
What questions do you
have about the movie?
How did you think it
would end? Did you
enjoy it?
5
This American Life: The Big Crapple Transcript (44:17-1:00:00 = 16 minutes)
Ira Glass
Act Three, "The Big Crapple." So you've probably heard the acronym NIMBY, short for Not In My Back Yard. And can I
just say right now, please, Public Radio listeners, do not send me emails telling me how you've always thought that it
should NIMB, because "backyard" is one word. I'm tired of hearing it. Just keep that thought to yourself. Anyway, NIMBY
is a community-- I think you know this-- yelling, we don't want your nuclear power plant or your prisoner or your
whatever. Anyway, Zoe Chace has this story of perhaps misplaced NIMBY-ism.
Zoe Chace
A few months ago, I was going to a party with my friend. And we were getting ready together. And while we were putting
on our dresses, I started doing this thing that I do a lot, which is comparing, like, how do you put on your eyeliner so well?
And that's such a nice bracelet that you're wearing.
And then I noticed, dude, your armpits are so smooth. That is what I want. How do you get them so perfectly hairless? And
she was like, I laser. I laser off the hairs. My mind was blown. Yeah, this is expensive upfront, but cheaper in the long run,
because the hair doesn't come back. And it looked so nice.
Sometimes I hear about the way somebody solves a problem, and I cannot get it out of my head. Why don't I do it that
way? That just seems better. This is how I felt when I learned about the way they deal with garbage in Europe.
Compared to the United States, Europe, well, Northern Europe, seemed like a garbage utopia to me when I first heard
about it. There are all these fancy incinerators. And they're incredibly efficient. They barely pollute. The amount of
hazardous chemicals that come out of these things is equivalent to a fireplace.
And on top of that, some of them are really pretty. This one in Denmark looks like a gay club with twinkly lights. This one
in France is all covered with grass. And the whole point is they convert garbage into energy. They produce steam, which
heats their homes and businesses.
We do not do this in the United States. We do not have these super efficient, beautiful garbage to energy incinerators-- not
that many of them, anyway. More than half of our garbage goes to landfills. And as you know, landfills are pretty much the
worst. They release methane, 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. To be fair, incinerators also pollute. They
produce carbon dioxide and ash, just a lot less pollution than landfills.
Germany, Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, they landfill almost nothing. They recycle around half their waste,
and they burn the rest of their garbage in these things that generate electricity and heat.
All right, so when I heard about this, I wondered, why do the Europeans have so many and we have so few? And the
answer really boils down to, this is not Europe. This is a big country. We have a lot of land. Landfilling is just so much
cheaper here. And that was the answer to my question.
Except there are a lot of places in the United States where there's not a lot of space, where land is super expensive, like
New York City, where I live. New York doesn't deal with any of its garbage itself. 80% goes to a landfill somewhere else.
Trucks get on I-78 and drive hundreds of miles to Eastern Ohio to drop off my Chinese takeout containers.
Sending our trash away cost $300 million a year. That's just for the transportation. New York kind of seems like the
perfect place for a fancy new waste to energy incinerator. So why don't we have one here?
This actually comes up all the time in New York. It's been debated over and over, and it never happens. And I know exactly
why. So let's go back to pretty much the very first time a waste to energy incinerator was proposed, 1980s New York City.
Back then, New York was stuffing all its trash into these towering landfills all over the city. Norman Steisel was the
commissioner of New York City sanitation, and he remembers.
Norman Steisel
The trucks literally could not climb the hill. It was basically such a sharp peak that they couldn't get to the top to
dispose any of the waste.
6
Zoe Chace
So they were driving up basically a volcano in the Bronx that was built on garbage.
Norman Steisel
Right, it's all built out of garbage and dirt. And there were these vast underground fires which took literally
years to put out and get under control.
Zoe Chace
Not only were they scary, the landfills were almost full. So Steisel and the Koch administration decided to put in these
waste to energy incinerators like the ones they had in Europe then, one in every borough-- the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn,
Manhattan, Staten Island. But the problem in New York City is everywhere you go, someone is there, someone to say, not
it.
In this case, the first incinerator would be built in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, right near a community of Hasidic Jews. Like I
said, any community in New York would have come up with a reason they should be not it. And the Hasides told Steisel
one of theirs.
Norman Steisel
The waste to energy incinerator would remind them of the Holocaust experiences. And when I tried to explain to
them that as a son of a Holocaust survivor myself, I thought they were demeaning that whole experience. And
there was one rabbi in particular who accused me rather publicly of being the young Dr. Mengele experimenting
with the lives of Jewish women and children.
Zoe Chace
Lots of people for many reasons did not trust the Steisel-Koch plan in New York. No neighborhood would take them. But
the plan lingered. The mayor still wanted to do this seemingly logical energy generating less polluting thing for New York
City. But what sealed the fate of the New York incinerator was when New York's garbage became an international incident.
Tom Brokaw
This is the continuing saga of a homeless garbage barge, 3,000 tons of New York garbage floating from port to
port looking for a place to be dumped.
Zoe Chace
Here's Tom Brokaw in 1987. For weeks, night after night, he reported on the wandering Mobro garbage barge. You might
have heard about this. It was a really big deal.
Here's what happened. A landfill in Long Island was full. A guy out there cut a deal to send it to North Carolina, ship the
garbage on a barge down south, and they'll put it in their landfill. Except once it got to North Carolina, someone said they
saw a bed pan on the barge, medical waste, and they wouldn't take it. So the garbage barge set off on this journey of
rejection. Alabama-- nope. Louisiana-Man
While I would like to help them, we just don't have room for it, and we do not intend to allow them to bring it
into Louisiana.
Zoe Chace
The barge tried to go to Mexico. But the Mexican Navy came out into the Gulf and fought them off.
Tom Brokaw
Speaking of geography, the tiny, poor Central American nation of Belize, well, it too says no to the garbage.
Zoe Chace
The barge led the world news at night. It led Johnny Carson.
7
Johnny Carson
Take your barge up into the Gulf of Persia. And there is Iran. Dump it right there.
Zoe Chace
Florida? Nope. The Bahamas-- no. The barge was a tragic figure, a pariah. It went more than 5,000 miles back and forth in
the ocean. And with nowhere to go, it finally returned to New York. There were court battles around what to do with it,
and environmentalists seized upon this moment. Eventually, the city figured out it was mostly paper and cardboard, and a
bunch of Greenpeace people hung this banner across the garbage saying, "Next time, try recycling."
You might have thought with all this anxiety about garbage and what to do with it, this would be the moment for
European-style waste to energy incinerators to take off. But it turns out the biggest opponent of waste to energy
incinerators is the recyclers-- yeah, the recyclers.
Eric Goldstein
We believe that Americans don't want to burn their trash, that they'd rather recycle it, and they'd rather produce
less of it. Because they realize that there's a cost to trash.
Zoe Chace
This is Eric Goldstein, avid recycler in New York City. He's been with the National Resource Defense Counsel for more
than 30 years. He is resolute against incinerators. He thinks that incinerators actually discourage recycling. They compete
for the same stuff. And less recycling, that's worse for the environment.
If you don't recycle, he says, then it's like you have to use natural resources to make a new thing every time. It's better to
use the plastic from a plastic bottle as much as you possibly can rather than drill for more oil in order to make brand new
ones. But it seemed weird to me that you'd have to choose. Like in Germany, they recycle more than 60% of their garbage
and incinerate almost 40%. We went back and forth about this a lot.
Zoe Chace
In Germany they do both. They do both.
Eric Goldstein
But that doesn't make it right.
Zoe Chace
But it's better.
Eric Goldstein
It would be better if Germany were to recycle more and compost more and reuse more and generate less waste.
Zoe Chace
But they're recycling so much more than we do.
Eric Goldstein
So that's why we need to focus on recycling.
Zoe Chace
But then why do we have to not burn trash while we focus on recycling?
Eric Goldstein
City officials only have so much time, energy, and resources to transform waste policies so that it places
recycling and prevention and composting as the cornerstones-- requires a lot of work. It's not going to be easy.
And it's probably going to take another decade or so before that transformation is complete in places like New
York City.
8
Zoe Chace
While that's going on, he says, we can't let officials be distracted by incinerators. This has been the philosophy that rules
New York to this day-- focus on recycling. The latest attempt to getting a European-style waste to energy facility in New
York happened three years ago in 2012 under Mayor Bloomberg. And it did not go well. At the time, James Oddo was a
councilman on Staten Island. And he remembers being at an event when a city government guy approached him. And he
said this.
James Oddo
Just keep an open mind. Don't fly off the handle.
Zoe Chace
The guy knew the issue might be sensitive. Because when it comes to garbage, Staten Island has lost New York City's not it
game for decades. In 1948, Robert Moses built a landfill on Staten Island, Fresh Kills. It's old Dutch, means Fresh Stream.
At the time, he promised it would only be around for three years. 50 years later, it's one of the biggest landfills in the
world.
James Oddo
When you were a kid, and you went to the Staten Island Mall on a hot summer day, you used to kind of take a
deep breath in the car, and get out of the car, and kind of run to the mall. Because you didn't want to deal with
the smell. This history for native Staten Islanders is something that we never forgive. And any time an issue
having to do with solid waste arises, Staten Island elected officials get their back-up.
Zoe Chace
So in 2012, the Bloomberg people called Staten Island to talk about this great new technology for dealing with waste.
We're exploring lots of different places to put this facility, they said. Except when the city put out the official document
calling for bids, they had only one suggestion for where to build it-- Staten Island, on top of the Fresh Kills landfill. James
Oddo predictably flipped out. He said no.
James Oddo
Our dance card was filled. And now it was time for some other boroughs to sort of run point on this new
technology. It wasn't going to be Staten Island.
Beryl Thurman
Manhattan, 42nd Street.
Zoe Chace
Times Square.
Beryl Thurman
Times Square. I want it right there on Times Square where all the tourists are, where all the attractions are. Let
it go in a place like that.
Zoe Chace
This is Beryl Thurman. She works on environmental justice issues, and she lives on Staten Island.
Beryl Thurman
Staten Island doesn't trust the city of New York in anything that has to do with garbage.
Zoe Chace
Even knowing all this, the Bloomberg administration moved ahead with their plan. In April 2012, they got in touch with
the people who would bid on the proposal and organized a bus tour out to Fresh Kills to look at the proposed site. Only
something very weird happened right at the time the bus was supposed to show up.
9
A nearby compost plant, which was mostly wood chips, caught on fire. And it was actually a major fire. There was smoke
blowing up over the interstate. You could see it from Manhattan. The bus tour was cancelled. The smoke reminded Staten
Island of what burning garbage might mean for them.
And the next day, when Bloomberg went out to thank the firefighters, he got an earful from the Staten Island politicians
infuriated about the waste to energy proposal on Staten Island. And an hour and a half after he left, Bloomberg's deputy
mayor pulled the deal. No incinerator or gasification or heat turning trash into energy European-style, nothing-- not in
New York, where someone is always not it.
And while I was researching this story, someone raised the point that the compost fire was awfully well-timed. I asked
Beryl about this.
Zoe Chace
Were there conspiracy theories about who started the fire?
Beryl Thurman
Well, you know, it was-- you always have that in the back of your mind, you know?
Zoe Chace
It was fortuitous.
Beryl Thurman
It was, wasn't it? Wasn't that amazing how that worked out? What? [LAUGHING]
Zoe Chace
Are you saying what it sounds like you're saying?
Beryl Thurman
I'm not saying anything other than, it was really kind of ironic. It's just one of those coincidences.
Zoe Chace
The official word from the fire department said the wood chip set themselves ablaze. I guess that happens. Fresh Kills is
closed. New York City's landfills are full. Now the plan is for New York to incinerate a lot more of its garbage, more than a
third.
But the catch is, not in New York. New York will pay to haul our garbage to places like Niagara Falls and Delaware Valley
to waste to energy incinerators that were built there 20 years ago. So those places will get the benefits-- some electricity
and some heat-- from my Chinese takeout container. And you're welcome. Because New York certainly does not want that
here.
10
Acrostic Poem – Option 1 of 3
An acrostic poem, sometimes called a name poem, uses a word for its subject. Then each line of the poem begins
with a letter from the subject word. This type of poetry doesn't have to rhyme.
1. The assigned term or word is written vertically (up and down)
2. Words, terms and concepts related to the term are written horizontally (back and forth) off the letter in
the vertical term
3. An illustration representing the term or word must follow the acrostic poem.
4. A 3 to 5 sentences explaining how the horizontal words and terms AND the illustration fit the vertical term
or word must follows the illustration.
Acrostic
(the word should be about waste,
the environment, etc.)
Illustration
3-5 Sentence Summary
11
Concept Map – Option 2 of 3
When making a Concept Map the main theme or concept is the center bubble of the concept map. Branching off
the center bubble are related concepts or topics. An explanation must be written to explain how or why the set
of bubbles are related.
Humans and the Environment
Explanation
12
T-Shirt Art – Option 3 of 3
Design artwork for a t-shirt representing one of the assigned concepts: waste, the environment, etc.
1. Front of shirt must have artwork (minimum of 4 colors) showing the concept.
2. Back of the shirt must have a 1 or 2 line ‘cute or clever (but CLEAN)’ saying using the concept.
3. 3-5 sentences explaining how the artwork and saying get the concept across.
Front of Shirt
Back of Shirt
3-5 Sentence Explanation
13
14