Cornell on Fire Weekly 5/29
Dear Cornell on Fire,
In honor of Cornell’s 156th Commencement, we held a banner drop announcing a critical moment for climate accountability. Landmark hearings on the US Congressional Report on Big Oil’s denial, disinformation, and doublespeak offered a striking revelation: Cornell echoes that doublespeak point by point. Our new investigative report outlines how and calls for a course correction. Check out the press coverage here.
This moment of reckoning for Cornell involves climate hypocrisy on multiple fronts. The hottest front now is artificial turf. At this very moment, Cornell’s plans to construct a massive Meinig Field House and artificial turf fields* are under consideration by the Ithaca Town and City Planning Boards. It’s a snapshot into the larger phenomenon of Big Red’s climate doublespeak: while pledging to reduce emissions, go “beyond waste,” and demonstrate climate leadership, Cornell pursues a devastatingly wasteful plan for fossil-fueled new construction.
Last week we decried Cornell the Corporation’s submission of a strikingly inept “summary of research” on the health and ecological impacts of artificial turf fields to Ithaca’s Town and City Planning Boards. If there were ever a lawn sign in front of Day Hall that read, “In this house we believe science is real…” it would bury itself in shame.
But there’s more at stake with the Meinig Field House proposal. Namely, common sense.
You don’t need to read a single scientific article to appreciate these five big picture concerns:
Artificial turf is a petroleum-based product that comes from fossil fuels. To state the obvious: fossil fuels are imperiling life on this planet. We are working at epic scales at epic pace to reduce fossil fuel use before it is too late. Why would Cornell knowingly give millions of dollars to the fossil fuel industry to pump more fossil fuels out of the ground, transform them into plastics through highly toxic manufacturing plants, and truck them to Ithaca using yet more fossil fuels? …All when they have beautiful grass fields already, which have supported Big Red athletic victories and good health for decades?
Artificial turf is plastic. Humanity is fighting plastics. Earth Day 2024 was globally declared Planet vs. Plastics. New York State is working hard to eliminate plastics by banning plastic bags and reducing plastic packaging.** Right now, Cornell has a “Beyond Waste” campaign to reduce plastics on campus. If all of us are working so hard to reduce plastic, then why would Cornell convert several grass fields by smothering them with…plastic?
Artificial turf is a source of hazardous carbon emissions. Organic grass turf is alive: it absorbs CO2 and releases oxygen, making it a carbon sink. Artificial turf is dead fossil fuels: it releases methane and CO2 while trapping heat, and then ends up in a landfill generating more climate-change causing emissions for decades to come. Why would Cornell exacerbate their carbon emissions with artificial turf, rather than nurturing carbon sinks with organic grass lawns? Would they account for artificial turf emissions in their campus Baseline Inventory and climate action plan?
The artificial turf industry concedes that their turfs shed a huge volume of material into the environment. Each field releases 1-5 tons of infill waste into the environment – every year – leading to an average of 20 tons over the 8-year lifespan of each field (32:11). Haley & Aldrich consultants claim it’s no big deal because the heavy metals and toxins present in those materials “won’t leach into the environment at hazardous levels.” That claim is misleading. But even if it were accurate – even if the toxins were not bioavailable and stayed forever in the materials where they “belong” – since when is it okay to dump many tons of plastic and rubber waste into the environment?
We get fined if we throw one plastic water bottle along the side of the road. But Big Oil is allowed to release countless tons of plastic and infill materials every year into Ithaca’s soil and water, and it’s no problem? I don’t want little bits of artificial turf and tire rubber crumb in our drinking water, no matter how “safe” the industry claims it is. Do you?
We are in the midst of a climate emergency. While international leaders sound the alarm that we must take radical action to reduce emissions and reckon with climate breakdown, Cornell’s leaders are cheerfully fixated on an expensive and toxic new collection of sporting fields that will be made of…fossil-fueled plastic. While peer institutions like Princeton and Smith College are disturbing acreage to install geothermal well fields to accelerate the energy transition, Cornell is disturbing acreage to install toxic turf fields and a field house heated by fossil fuels.
Get involved and help Cornell realize its highest purpose:
Sign and share the petition against Cornell’s plan to install artificial turf at the proposed Meinig Athletic Field House. Zero Waste Ithaca needs 1000 signatures!
Join concerned citizens and scientists in commenting (in writing or in person) at Town and City Planning Board meetings over the course of this summer. Next up? Town Planning Board meeting on Tuesday, June 18, at 6:30pm, and City Planning Board meeting on 6/25 at 6 p.m.
Join Cornell on Fire’s presentation to the Tompkins County Climate Protection Initiative this Friday, May 31, starting at 9:00am. Zoom link here.
Join our meeting and social on Saturday, June 1, 4-6pm downtown. (No Thursday night meeting this week!)
Sign up for a summer research project to help us hold Cornell accountable to its sustainability goals (can be done from anywhere).
Thank you for being part of our circle!
With advance thanks,
Cornell on Fire
*By way of background: Cornell the Corporation’s newest construction project intends to plaster the earth with multiple petroleum-based artificial turf fields at a sprawling new Meinig Field House complex and beyond, at Game Farm Road. The Corporation’s dream entails a $55 million, 90,000+ square foot athletic facility on Tower Road, right under the beloved Big Red hawks’ nesting poles, with more turf fields on Game Farm Road. The Meinig Field House would disturb 7 acres of land (much of it currently real, live grass) to install a field house carpeted indoors and out with controversial toxic synthetic turf. (It is ironically sited across the road from the under-construction Atkinson Center, which aims to "reduce climate risk" and "accelerate the energy transition.")
**As Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator, puts it: “As long as the legislature fails to act, plastic polluters will continue harming our health, climate, and environment on the backs of the everyday taxpayers demanding progress.”
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Anonymous reports can be submitted to Cornell on Fire through our whistlelink channel.
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Plurivocality: CoF Weeklies are written by a revolving team of writers. Our movement is diverse, so are our thoughts, and so will be our Weeklies. If you receive a CoF Weekly that you think this is wrong headed, can we still walk together? (We, like you, sometimes write things we later laugh at!)
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