Thursday, May 29, 2008

Miles to go before WE sleep...

I just got back from a week visiting some friends out at Stanford in California and, while I'm mighty glad I'm at Sewanee for all of it's small-school beautifulness, we sure have a lot of catching up to do regarding campus wide sustainability. We need to stop talking about it and actually start making things happen (the last few years have been a great start, but we could certainly do a better job):
  1. Further the student-led rage for sustainability (w/the ERs at the helm). While we still rock, we could certainly work next year to really revolutionize campus. These guys are doing fairly good job. Remember the 70's  when students burned down buildings and chained themselves to executive offices at colleges across the country? Let's try for that level of dedication to a cause (well maybe without the destruction of buildings...).
  2. Improve McClurg.  Aramark is actually doing a pretty good job at Sewanee, it just doesn't always seem to be very organized. Stanford's equivalent has a decent website outlining what they do. Above the salad bar they have a sheet that states how many miles each veggie traveled.  Also, they have an EatGreen program that is pretty good too. Meanwhile, students across the country at Middlebury convinced their dining facility to go trayless... they just did it, they didn't mess around with getting it approved or anything. 
  3. Let's get ResLife on board...so we can do stuff like this.
  4. Campaign for faculty positions dedicated to environmental studies...so that we can have a sweet Center for Environmental Science and Policy.
  5. There's too many lightbulbs on campus that are still incandescent, mainly personal lamps that students or professors bring... and some people have five or six bulbs in these things. crazy. I'm (again) advocating for people in yellow jumpsuits to go around campus exchanging the bulbs. Yellow jumpsuits and crazy antics are necessary. 
  6. There's been a good push towards the motion sensing lights at Sewanee, but for some reason they seem to only go off after 15 minutes. Why not set these to go off after 2 minutes? Additionally, for the regular lights/electronics around campus, let's get some "turn me off" stickers (similar to what a few ERs did with the stickers on the paper towels dispensers) to place on each light switch.
  7. Challenge the university to find a real vision... a strategic plan, if you will. We raise all this money... but what do we do with it? Currently, there is little top-down vision or guidance and so us teenagers are left to do the pushing and the shoving, edging the university towards what we think is better. We shouldn't have to do all that - there should be a vision for the future that is established by the university (w/student input, obviously). Quite frankly, I don't trust myself or my peers to know what is best for us, but the administration doesn't step up and help us here at all. We're slipping in the college rankings - and that's not going to stop with current administrative approaches. I realize this is over the top, but here's another (extreme) example from Stanford.
  8. We need more rational discourse. It's a cool thing...the fundamental basis for democracy, actually. But it just doesn't happen at sewanee very often. Thus, I propose something along the lines of SPU.
  9. Can we get greek life, Pub, Stirlings & the Globe to switch away from traditional plastic containers to biodegradable material and initiate campus-wide composting? This requires a lot of coordination, but is certainly possible. 
  10. Better online presence for our environmental activities. Incoming students will look at the website ... we need to be there to attract them. Good examples are St. Lawrence (simple but effective) and (yet again...sorry) Stanford. Sewanee is doing a ton of fantastic environmental initiatives, but none of the students know about them except the ERs, and what good is that if we aren't education the students about how they can live their lives once they graduate?
  11. Freshmen... I was reading a book about college by some professor at harvard, and he found that the biggest impact on students (& the most memories of college) are formed in the first three weeks of freshmen year. Thus, orientation is HUGE!!! Let's make a concerted effort to try to make the environment a major focus this year. Composting, biodegradable plastics, sustainability 101, dance parties... Get people excited about our planet & our community. Greenhouse needs to be involved in orientation somehow. Let's make sure we get ourselves on the actual orientation schedule. Potluck? Jam?
Greenhouse/community related stuff
  1. Stanford has a class to teach sustainable agriculture in their organic garden. We should try to get this going next spring, which requires planning early next fall. Professor Haskell seems like the logical person. Also, the rest of their community garden website is pretty interesting. They were busy building a new mud oven when I visited last week... they are building little "wings" on the side of it for benches. 
  2. Synergy House at Stanford seems to be pretty sweet. We've one-upped them on avoiding the drug culture, but they sure do have some cool parties...
And finally, go tricycles! I was at the Phoenix airport yesterday and found this lady tricycling her way across the tarmac in a sea of airplanes & trucks. She's cool. What a rebel. Note the orange flag on the back for extra safety. Even cooler.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey, Paul, I really like your ideas for Sewanee and I definitely like what Stanford has done with sustainability on their campus. As far as a group like SPU, we have Abre. It's a platform for anything really. The club's focus is to burst the Sewanee bubble, and I think we could definitely bring up some environmental issues.
I definitely think a website is in order. Even a simple one. I like that idea.
And I think the yellow jumpsuit/light bulb exchange idea is great!
You brought up a lot of good points that I hope we keep looking into, and I think we should keep setting our goals high. I like this.
Also, as far as college sustainability websites go, Bowdoin's is really cool..
http://www.swarthmore.edu/x17.xml
They limit the amount of parking permits (to 110-115) which I think is a great idea. And they have a lot of classes that relate to the environment.

Anonymous said...

paul-- I think these ideas are great too. And I'd wear a yellow jumpsuit and exchange lightbulbs. When you did the lightbulb exchange last halloween, where did you get the bulbs and the money for them? One of my concerns about fluorescents is the crazy amount of packaging that they usually come in and how we would recycle them when they are used up. I think that if we do a lightbulb exchange, we'd have to have a system in place for recycling bulbs, which could be difficult in Sewanee. This website: www.thebulb.com has bulbs that come in recycleable packaging, and it appears that the company will take back used bulbs and recycle them.

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