Envrionmental organizations Activity 10 - Lorraine O'Connell

I discovered that New York City Environmental organizations are quite nice to talk to. I use to work in accordance with an environmental agency and they weren’t very nice so I expected this project to be like pulling teeth. Quite frankly it was the opposite thank goodness. I called three environmental organizations: TIMES-UP, New York City Environmental Fund-Hudson River, and Environmental Defense Fund. All Rights Reserved. What was most surprising was the amount of organizations solely based in New York City. Yes I understand we have hundreds of environmental problems but I though it always to be more productive if it were a nationwide thing, but hey that’s probably why I’m not going into the environmental field.
But what I found out from the three organizations is that there are a lot of issues in New York City they gave me lists and lists of issues like pollution, littering, toxic waste disposal, garbage issues, lack of trees, car pollution, factory-like industries, and so much more. But the three topics the three organizations concentrated on were car pollution, water pollution, and industry pollution.
TIMES-UP is an organization that encourages the use of bike riding to cut down on the car pollution that causes a million problems. They told me that they are concentrating on this one for a number of reasons. Some of them being that the car industry has grown so much and that more and more cars are being put on the street which adds to the carbon dioxide levels in the air. This leads to the higher amounts of asthma patients and other respiratory problems for the youth. So they are trying to encourage more and more people to ride bikes, they have implemented more space for bikes to be parked and they are also trying to encourage a shared space on the road initiative. I found this organization to be most interesting and most productive.
The New York City Environmental Fund organization was interesting but they didn’t have a well rounded environmental impact. They were solely concentrated on the cleaning of contaminated water. Which is amazing don’t get me wrong but I from what I got they don’t seem to care much about any of other environmental issues. Because the other organizations had more than one project going on that combated multiple environmental issues while this one was just the cleaning of the Hudson River. Unless there were different organizations within it that had other projects but I was unable to ask since the woman was in a rush. But none the less I found out their most pressing issue is the contamination of the Hudson River and its impact on the rest of the city. They feel with the cleaning of the water we can use it for the different environmentally friendly things. Such as they feel that allow it is extremely expensive they want to find a way to use the Hudson River as some type of energy producing tool.
The last organization was Environmental Defense Fund their main goal was to cut down on pollution. They are implementing a recycling program, an anti-littering program and strive on teaching the youth at an early age how to cut down on pollution. I found this to be very interesting because I work as an after school teacher so I am definitely going to use some of the lessons to teach my students about these issues.