Green Tip of the Week 4/21/2010: “Signify our Significant Trees.”

Interview of Charlene Wallace on April 16, 2010.

Charlene is  Secretary for Religious Studies, Philosophy, Honors, and Asian Studies.  She coordinates the recycling program in Donnarumma, and has maintained a desktop worm composter for the last 3+ years.

Q:  What do you think is Fairfield’s most important green accomplishment so far?

Charlene:  I feel we have a tremendously long way to go, and I couldn’t select one particular thing.  I’ve been involved with the recycling efforts, but for every step forward, it’s three steps backward.  The students graduate, new faculty come in, and I don’t have the time or resources to keep re-educating people. I’m always pulling bottles and cans out of pails and putting them where they are supposed to go.  I don’t feel a sense of progression.

This year, though, Dr. David Downie has worked with our students for them to coordinate all the Earth Week activities.  This is exciting and wonderful.  On the down side, I feel a sense of fracture, with so much going on. I feel like I want to do more, but I often don’t hear about environmental projects and such until they are over with.

Q:  What further efforts do you think Fairfield should be making?

Charlene:  I have many ideas.  Several years ago my husband spent a summer up at Connecticut College in New London on an NEH Fellowship.  One thing that impressed him mightily was that the whole campus was heavily wooded.  It’s like an arboretum. Everywhere you go, there are plaques pointing out trees and habitats.  Instead of manicuring everything like we do on this campus, they leave edges and meadows, to foster a sense of a living habitat.  He saw bunnies, dragonflies, and meadowbirds, for example, because they left their environment alone.

I wish we could see less cutting and less lawns here.  It would be exciting if our scientists worked with students to make plaques, starting with our centennial or champion oaks (many of which were cut down for the new parking lot), and signify them.  Then students, visitors, and audiences for the Quick Center could read the plaque and say, “Oh!  A 200-year-old tree!” Or a star magnolia, or a Kwanzan cherry.  Then these trees wouldn’t just blend into the background.  They’d being signified—singled out—as special.  People’s awareness would be increased, and they would value Fairfield’s traditions more.

I’d also like to see a natural history written of the land where Fairfield University stands – going back to colonial time, the Indians, even the glaciers.  Built in the 1920s, Bellarmine Hall was one of the estate buildings on this property.  Its owners surely imported trees from China and Australia, as was the fashion back then, and they collected specimen plantings in their own special garden.  Of course, they had a team of gardeners to maintain all of that.  But why can’t we continue that tradition?  Instead of planting a little dogwood somewhere, we might plant specimen trees.  Those who want to do something for the university might donate to our planting program—an ironwood tree, for example.  We could site these trees in prominent places and plaque them.

We could also, for example, plaque the pond, describing what kind of wildlife thrives there, and what kind of ecosystem it is.

Q:  That would increase awareness and be educational.

Charlene:  And beautiful, too, don’t you think?  This campus has so much potential, yet nobody has really talked about its natural history.  That intrigues me.  Every day I leave the university by way of that little pond over there, Bellarmine Pond.  If you’re aware and you’re seeing, which my husband has taught me to do, you’ll see when the scaups come back, and when the mallard ducks come to rest there. As the summer goes on you’ll see wading birds, like herons, and redwing blackbirds, and different insects.  Why not make a plaque at the pond?

There’s a wildlife preserve in Ohio on Lake Erie, where we visit my sister-in-law.  It’s a large tract of undeveloped land west of Cleveland. They have plaques about three feet square, describing the wildlife you might expect to see there.  These plaques add value–not in the advertising sense, but in the sense of making people aware of what’s worth preserving.  If they pause for ten seconds, read the plaque, and realize they might be able to identify a bird the next time they walk by, they become more sensitive to place.  They’re less likely just to drive by at 50 mph in the car.

Q:  It sounds like recognizing and honoring and remembering.

Charlene:  Yes.  And valuing.

Q:  No one else I’ve interviewed yet has presented this idea.  It’s a remarkable idea.

Charlene.  The other idea—this is my husband’s idea—is to install wooden benches around special trees.  What he likes to call the Hopkins Oak, that gigantic 200-year-old oak down by Hopkins Pond, could have a wooden bench placed around its trunk.  It should be made of natural materials, as they do in England, instead of plastic.  Maybe our guys on campus could make it.  They could have it fit together in sections, so that the bench could expand as the tree continues to grow.  That would encourage people to linger, to sit underneath the tree and watch the seasons change.  There would be sunlight and deep shade in the summer, yellow leaves in the fall—this could be beautiful.

Q:  That’s the kind of attention paid to natural sites in the Audubon Society, or in other forests I’ve visited like the Muir Woods in San Francisco.  It lends sacredness to the trees.

Charlene:  That would make it a lot harder to do what they’ve just done, if people across campus were objecting, “What are you doing that for?  We love this tree.  We love this pond.  We love these birds.”

Q: What else is on your thoughtful wish list?

Charlene: I’d like to see more exotic and unusual tree plantings.  Classes often want to donate something to the university, like that clock beside the library path below us.  If an arboreal garden were started here, then each class might donate an exotic tree to that place.  The plaque could include the year of the donating class.

Q:  I’ll bet classes would like that.  They’re always looking for ideas.

Charlene:  Wouldn’t that be an interesting, long-lasting gift?  I’d also like to see the main entrance improved.  It’s a severe disappointment, with all the big trees cut down to make that straightaway which is now a raceway.  You can’t even cross it safely on foot.  I’d like to see some giant trees there, with all kinds of beautiful underplantings.

Q: What kind of trees or plantings would you like to see near the entrance?

Charlene:  Something that’s big, grows fast, throws a lot of shade—something that doesn’t look like an entrance to a shopping mall, with some little spindly trees here and there and a few foot-high shrubs. Our main entrance is anything but welcoming now, and we should do better than what’s currently there.

Q: What other suggestions do you have?

Charlene:  It’s time we had an environmental coordinator.  We are at the point where we desperately need someone to bring all our disparate environmental elements together.  Right now we’re like a shooting star, with many good ideas, many wonderful students and scientists, and yet we’re all doing our thing in our own little corner.

This year, for the first time, the coordination and efforts for Earth Week are all student-driven, which is wonderful.  But how can we get more people involved?  I’d like to see more opportunity for staff to be involved, because there are so many environmentally conscious people on the staff who would do more if opportunities were put out there.  So far the only stated opportunities are recycling and campus cleanup–which will be next Thursday on Earth Day.  But if we had even a part-time coordinator, that someone could be attentive to campus environmental issues with more promotion, more coordination, and more centralization.  We need a presence, a go-to person, a person archiving the history of all these groups.  Anyone with an idea could go to that person, that coordinator, and they’d be informed, “Oh, you can go here,” or “This student on campus is working on that project,” or “Did you know we have a grant for that?” or “I just heard about a grant for that.”

Q:  Do you see this person as reaching out to segments of the university, rather than just cataloguing?  So that it won’t be fractured?

Charlene:  Oh, that’s essential.  We need to promote more—and not just in the way that they’re always promoting the Co-Gen plant.  Yes, it’s great, they won awards for it, it was forward-thinking, it works well, and it saves energy.  But it would be great to promote some of the little things, the grassroots things, the everyday actions it takes to live a more sustainable life.  If everybody on campus were jazzed about the way we live here, people would care more.  We need a coordinator full of ideas and creativity and energy and excitement, somebody who can bridge generations—that would be wonderful.

Q:  Somebody who is a public presence.

Charlene: Yes.

Q:  There is a Campus Sustainability Committee, and Dave Frassinelli chairs it as Director of Facilities Management, so in a way he is coordinating environmental advances.  It meets about three times a year.  What would your suggestion add to that?

Charlene:  I went to a couple of those meetings, but they weren’t particularly satisfying to me.  They were information-heavy, but I did not feel that driving energy that asks what we can do next, who we can pull in.  Maybe we could have, if not a quarterly project, a semester project.  I want to see energy; I want to see excitement.

Q:  It sounds you would like, rather than top-down information, the action  of pulling other people in, and making them excited about the environment.

Charlene:  Yes.  Make people who participate in grassroots environmentalism feel like they’re not a lone voice crying in the wilderness.  At Conn College, I was so impressed. They had one building that was the environmental house, and 8 or 10 women lived there.  Everything they did was mindful of what they were consuming, what they were eating, what they were buying or not buying, where their studies were going to take them, how they could live and practice what they were learning.  The energy was so inspiring.  In the dining hall they had no paper napkins and no disposables.  We’re catching up now to where they were five years ago.  Instead of trays, each person had a small china dinner plate, with refills possible.  There were cloth napkins, if you wanted one.  People bussed their own tables.  People just lived that way.  I would like to see that same heightened awareness at every level, here.  This would be my ultimate wish—that we don’t think of ourselves as unusual, or tree-huggers, or wackos who wear only hemp clothes and non-leather shoes.  Instead, sustainability would be just the way we live at Fairfield.

Q:  The new student environmental living-learning community, which will be in the refurbished Jesuit residence—would that fit with what you have in mind?  They’re going to have a garden.

Charlene:  I think it’s a great idea.  But then again, those efforts always require sustainability.  It’s the nature of our institution that students roll out when they graduate every year.  Who’s going to pick it up and keep the thing going? Who’s going to water and weed the garden after everyone leaves in May?   That’s the biggest challenge. I do think that there’s tremendous room for improvement there.  I just want to see a sense of vitality about all this.  I want to see people who are on fire with what I’m on fire with.  I want us all to be on fire!

Q:  That’s great.

Green Tip of the Week 4/14/10: “We Can Make the Big Companies Change.”

Interview with Zach Gross ’12, Head of the Student Environmental Association, March 30, 2010

Q:  Which of Fairfield University’s green accomplishments do you like best?

Zach:  The biggest accomplishment is a greater sense of awareness on campus, and establishing the Program on the Environment is a big part of that.  Students who come to Fairfield interested in the environment can take classes there, and students who aren’t so interested can become interested.  It’s interdisciplinary.  And you can do most of your core through the Program on the Environment.

Q:  Really!

Zach:  Yes, I completed by third English core with American Literature in the Environment.  You can get your Applied Ethics core done there, and your Politics done. It’s a great way to satisfy the core and learn about relevant issues.

Q:  Do you know a lot of people in the Program?

Zach:  I do know a bunch of people who are environment minors.  I also know students taking a class that happens to satisfy the environment core for the minor, but they’re not environment minors yet.  Hopefully they will be.  I know Dr. Downie would welcome more people in the minor.

Q:  Do you think the awareness on campus stems from the Program?

Zach:  That’s a good base, but definitely a huge part of the awareness is from students. SEA and GCI this year have gotten more people aware of food issues.  We showed Food Inc. And we’ve screened Coal Country. By continuing to educate people, through movie screenings and in general, we hope to be a constant presence on campus.  The faculty is a great resource, and some students are making other students aware.  It’s a twofold awareness campaign.  It’s exciting to see the environmental movement grow each year.

As a sophomore, I’ve had one year already. I came to Fairfield knowing that I wanted to be involved in the environment.  I did a senior high school project on educating people about global warming and what steps they could take to help, which was an education campaign in my community and at my school.  Then last year at Fairfield was the first year GCI existed.  And it was the first year that SEA had a substantial membership.  There was a regular schedule of events.  This year we have more students than last year in our clubs, and more that aren’t necessarily “environmentalists.”

Q:  What do you think brought them in?  Did they come to an event, talk to one of your members . . . ?

Zach:  They realize that everyone has an impact on the environment, and that collectively the little things will add up.  So they don’t necessarily have to be devoted in every aspect of life.  We make all our events and awareness programs inclusive, for everybody.  And I think that word of mouth definitely helps.  Even if they just have friend that will recycle and call their friend out, who doesn’t recycle. It’s definitely a grassroots movement, where people will lead by example.  They won’t necessarily say anything or preach anything, but they will make someone have a change of heart.

Q:   How big is your membership?

Zach:  Not as large as I would like it, but at the activities fair we got over 100 people to sign up for our email list.

Q:  That’s amazing.

Zach:  Yes.  And there’s a core group of about 15 who regularly attend our meetings and help out at events.  Other people on the email list know what’s gong on and show up here and there.  We do have a good core group who are really passionate.

Q:  You spoke about awareness among students.  What is the most important aspect they should be aware of?

Zach:   Recycling is the biggest first step you can take.  If you don’t recycle, there’s a disconnect – you can’t really believe in climate change and not recycle.  I think recycling is a manifestation of the greater belief that every little action will add up and reduce our impact on the environment.

Q:  Some of my more cynical friends say it doesn’t matter what we do individually.  They say we just have to wait for the big companies to change.  Do you get that objection?  What’s the answer to that?

Zach:  I do hear that a lot.  I have a friend who believes in climate change but doesn’t think there’s anything we can do to stop it.  It’s defeating to hear that. I’m convinced that if we change our mindset, we can influence the companies to change.  We have to come from the bottom and move up.  An example from Food Inc. is one of the farmers who produce subsidized corn for high fructose corn syrup with bad additives.  It’s chemically dense and terrible for the environment.  This farmer says at the end of the movie, “We’ll grow whatever the American people want.  We’ll produce, we promise.”  So we have a responsibility as consumers to make the right choices.  We tell the big companies what we want, whenever we buy something or support a company.

Q:  So if we stop choosing items with high fructose corn syrup, companies would have to change.  When trans fats were exposed as unhealthy, most vanished from the shelves.

Zach:  Right.

Q:  Do you feel many students, like you, come from high schools that help students learn about environmentalism?

Zach:  Not the majority, and yet I know that environmental science is being taught more in high schools.  It’s a trend. Unfortunately, many don’t always internalize what they’ve learned.

Q:  I’ve heard that some students have objections to being part of an environmental movement.

Zach:  My response to that is:  We all live on the earth.  I think that you should learn about your home and how to protect it.  It’s a fundamental thing that we should all learn.

Q:  It’s reality.

Zach:  Right.  It is reality.  You can’t deny it.  I mean, you might not be interested in it, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t learn about it.

Q:  What further green improvements do you see in Fairfield’s future?

Zach:  One of our biggest long-range goals is single-stream recycling, This would make it easier for us to recycle, and lessen the confusion.  Also, in the immediate future, I’d like to make our Number Five recycling program [#5 plastics, like yogurt containers and Brita filters] more effective.  Because it is a new program it sometimes falls behind our other awareness campaigns.  There hasn’t been a core group of students to carry it out.

Q:  So single-stream recycling directs food-contaminated trash to one place and everything else recyclable to another place?

Zach:  Yes. Everything accepted by the state for recycling can go into single-stream.  So all paper, including corrugated cardboard and newspapers and magazines, can go in with aluminum cans and plastic bottles and glass.  Anything that is food-contaminated will just be trash, not recycled

Q:  What will happen to Fairfield’s recyclables in single-stream?

Zach:  ADS, American Disposal Services, will take them to a recycling plant.  I don’t know where that is, but it’s not in Fairfield.  I have faith that once it’s put into a recycling bin, it’s disposed of properly, because there have been training programs with Fairfield’s custodial staff.

Q:  I hear that the town of Fairfield incinerates its garbage.

Zach:  That’s at the power plant in Bridgeport.  Incineration of garbage is an ingenious way to produce energy, but it can also encourage people to buy more things because they say to themselves, “Oh, it’s going to produce more energy for us.”  And the goal of anything that we do as environmentalists is not to encourage more waste or more consumption.  Also, it’s necessary to filter out the chemicals released when garbage is incinerated, and dispose of those chemicals in a certain way.  It’s not coal, but there is still carbon release.

Q:  What else do you see in the future that can make Fairfield greener?

Zach:  Next year we’re going to merge SEA and GCI to make it one environmental group.  That will lessen the confusion about which group does what, and who people should go to with an environmental concern.  It’s great that GCI was founded, and that SEA has been around for so many years with its goal of awareness, whereas GCI’s goal was getting student projects done.  I think the merger will help get more accomplished on campus.  We’re hoping to have a director of marketing who will advertise all of our events.  Then there will be a director of recycling, who will have a team to run Number Five recycling.  There will also be a projects director to oversee all projects, and a subset of that will be the Garden Team, who will manage the garden and recruit students and faculty to help with the crops.  It will be a very positive change.

Q:  Would the Garden Team work year-round?

Zach:  Yes.  One of their tasks will be to evaluate what was grown the season before, and then determine what they want to grow the next year, and maybe experiment with other crops.  We will work with Chris Bosze of Sodexho to get more local food right from our campus.  Another part of the Garden Team will be labor: winterizing the garden, then picking out the dead crops in the spring when we’re ready to plant again.  They’ll be busy, but it won’t necessarily be a huge burden, if there are enough people involved.

Q:  Will students get work-study credit?

Zach:  That’s a possibility. I guess it’s fairly easy, if a professor wants a student to help with the garden, to sign up for a work-study student.  Also, with the environmental living-learning community, that may be one of their programs.

Q:  So as a group they’ll kind of take charge.

Zach:  Right.  So I don’t think there will be a shortage of labor, at all.  Or students interested.  I mean, it will be a relatively small garden.  And one person can get a lot done in a garden.

Q:  That sounds inspiring.

Zach:  Yes, I’m really excited.  It’s a visible symbol of what we support as a student body

Q:  There are so many community gardens these days.

Zach:  It’s really encouraging.to see people thinking about where their food comes from and connecting with the earth in the most basic way.

Q:  What else would you like to say, perhaps about your own future? .

Zach:  I would like to see people just making it a part of their lives to be more conscious of the earth.  It could be lifestyle that everyone lives, instead of just a select few.  Education is a big part of that, and education is an overarching goal of any environmentalist group.

As for my own future . . . I went on a service trip to Mexico a few summers ago, and we built houses for people who lived in the Oaxaca city garbage dump.  What I saw there was a huge infrastructure problem, where all of the city’s trash was literally brought to a dump.  There was a pile of trash with all the recyclables and no institutionalized system.  The people living in the dump made their living off of the bottles and cans that they dug for in the pile.  A truck would go around and give them maybe $3 for a giant bag they had spent all day collecting. I’m going back to Oaxaca this summer for seven weeks, and we’ll be distributing resources to villages in the jungles of Oaxaca.  We’ve finished the garbage dump house-building project, and we’re moving to another resource distribution project. I would like to do something to solve some of those infrastructure problems in impoverished regions of the world—specifically, the Spanish-speaking world, because I’m a Spanish major.  That would be the ideal job for me, to help people in regions where they don’t have the resources to help themselves.

Q:  You could combine fighting poverty with environmental awareness.

Zach:  Right.  And it would be the perfect fusion of my passions—the Spanish language and environmental activism.

Green Tip of the Week 3/31/2010: RE-USE at etsy.com and craigslist.com

Interview with Alex Roem, March 19, 2010

Q:  Which of Fairfield’s green accomplishments do you like best?

Alex:  The most admirable thing about Fairfield is its strong group of environmentally-minded students.  Even the smaller projects, like removing trays in the cafeteria or plastic bags in the bookstore or the Stag, are direct actions that affect students.  It’s putting environmental awareness right at their fingertips.  We struggle with the idea of student apathy, as when people don’t show up for a film screening.  But this year has been very awareness-based.  Last year the start of the Green Campus Initiative was a powerhouse, with a huge interest.  Unfortunately, this year a lot of those people have graduated.  But GCI organized another trip to New Orleans for sustainable service, led by me and Chris Staysniak, and 22 other students came.  The administration collaborated in renting cars and airline travel, and Chris and I planned the rest. That’s a very empowering job, and I’m really proud of it.

Now we’re coming into the environment’s biggest week, with Earth Week and Earth Day.  It might be corny, but I say:  “Every Day is Earth Day, Every Week is Earth Week.”  Getting the spotlight that week is the most important step in making people aware, and once people are asking questions, you’re on your platform, and you can let people know what they can do.  Too often people think, “Oh, you’re a tree-hugger; you’re just a crazy environmentalist.”  But people can make small changes in their everyday actions.  Don’t just throw out your water bottle.  Do you know where your water bottle goes?  Do you know where your water bottle comes from?  I think people would be shocked to see where their food comes from, how it’s processed, what’s actually in it.  People lack awareness, and this year the mission of GCI and SEA has been to get people actively thinking, and then actively questioning, and then acting.

Question: Once they’re aware, do they act?  Or do you get pushback from students who say, “I don’t want to be a part of all that?”

Alex:  I even have friends who laugh at my “antics” and think my environmentalism is just one facet of me.  But I have to be completely honest.  Over the past two years, this has really become the person I am, and the person I will be.  I don’t buy new clothes.  I only buy either handmade clothes – there are many great resources on the Internet – or go to thrift stores.  Every piece of consumer material you buy has a story behind it.  In our consumer society people aren’t really aware of where their products are coming from.  That’s a huge educational opportunity.  We try to make people aware.  We showed the film Food Inc., which was required by a couple of professors, so we had a pretty good turnout.  But people came to it thinking, “Oh, this is another event for us to just sit here and get graded on a paper we have to hand in.”  But a lot of people were shocked, and their eyes were really opened at the secrets our food industry has.  Those are the events that make me really excited, when we reach people.

There are some difficult paths, and speed bumps, and setbacks, but the goal is to make people aware, and let them know the power is in their hands, and they have to ask questions.  We students are all so involved in our daily activities and classes, that students often think you have to be in GCI or in SEA or in the Program on the Environment to care about this stuff.  But when we had our silent protest and demonstration for the Quick Center Lot and the deforestation, there were many students from Social Justice and Project Peg.  These campus activists had word-of-mouth experiences about what we’re doing, and they joined us in solidarity because it’s an issue that affects students.  They want to make more students aware, and it has been a struggle to reach people that don’t want to be reached.  But hopefully, down the road, something that one of us says or an event that we put on will click, and change a little bit of behavior.  But students are still forming the people they are, so they’re not always too keen on joining an environmental club or standing in a protest, because how are they going to look in front of their friends?

As a senior, I am really excited that I have found this is my passion, and this is the direction I want to go in, in my life. I only hope that for other students.

Q:  When you refer to “speed bumps,” are you letting the interested students sort themselves out from those that aren’t interested?  You’re not chasing after anybody?

Alex:  Right.  We have even hit some speed bumps with the Quick Center lot deforestation.  People have said to us, “Oh, you guys, you didn’t get to stop the deforestation.”  And we knew from the get-go that it wasn’t going to stop, because it is part of a 60 million dollar building plan, and there’s a strict timeline the university has to keep, to make sure students are in the new dorms by August of 2010 for the 2010-2011 academic year.  We knew we weren’t going to stop the building of the parking lot, which was very unfortunate.  It’s been on the docket for over two years now.  So it’s been frustrating, because people will come up to me and say, “Oh, you guys didn’t stop the forest from coming down, they cut down all those trees . . .

Q:  As in, “Why didn’t you stop it?”

Alex:  Right.  It becomes difficult to explain to people.  Sometimes people will pass by and say, “Oh, hey, how are you?”  And do people really want the answer?  Do they want to hear what we’re actually doing, or are they just asking a superficial question?  So it’s difficult trying to explain that this [deforestation] has been on the docket for a long time, and it wasn’t going to be stopped by us as students. I was talking to some people in my Environmental Economics class who said, “Oh my God, I would totally love to go and chain myself to a tree.”  So it’s just that activist thing, very cliché, and I didn’t ever think of chaining myself to a tree.  But I absolutely would have done it  . . . it’s a symbol of belief in something bigger than yourself.

That’s something students really need to find in their four years of college.  That’s my hope, that whether you’re a student for social justice marching in Washington, or you’re looking at international trade agreements and labor rights, if you find something that you’re passionate about, you will find people that are passionate about that same thing.  Collaboration and networking and resourcing are wonderful tools.  It’s about not getting cynical and remembering there’s a goal at the end larger than yourself.  If you work at it and keep the real mission in mind, you’ll go far.

Q:  There are people out there who will join you.

Alex;  Absolutely.

Q:  What do you see in the future for Fairfield?  What more can Fairfield do to be green?

Alex:  If you look at Yale and Harvard and Brown – they have offices of sustainability.  I think an Office of Sustainability, a place for environmental meetings, is necessary to the advancement and continued support of environmental endeavors on a college campus. Often when we have a Campus Sustainability Committee meeting, things get delegated, but not to the right person, or that person isn’t there, so things have to wait another month and a half, and then things don’t get updated.  The meeting basically becomes a report on projected projects and little things.  Some sort of office that coordinates all things environmental is necessary for organization.  For instance:  “Where did that 2007 document go that had our carbon footprint?  I have it in these files.”  As opposed to chasing it through facilities management, or campus ops, or administrative affairs. This kind of frustrating disorganization makes a meeting into a dog and pony show.  But I do think that Fairfield has made great strides.  The SEA has been around for quite some time.  GCI has come onto the map and made its mark in less than two years.

SEA and GCI hope to merge at the end of this year.  Last year GCI was more project-based and SEA was more awareness-based. Zach Gross and I have been working very closely with Dana August and Gina Caldwell, who are both abroad this semester, and we’ve all found that we are working toward the same goal:  awareness of students and implementation of sustainable projects for the betterment of the university community.  What we’ve planned to do is to merge the two groups and have more delegated ways of working.  We’ll have separate branches for marketing, fundraising projects, and the New Orleans trip—or a trip somewhere else.  There will be more cohesion.  That will be a pinnacle of sustainability.

Q:  What are you planning for next year, now that you’ve found your passion?

Alex:  I’m still deciding.  I’ve applied to Jesuit Volunteer Corps Northwest, for a year of service in the Northwest region of the United States.  I’m really hoping for that.  I haven’t heard yet, because some of my recommendations are still going through.  But I’ve always known that I want to work in service after I graduate.  I worked for an environmental non-profit this summer, the Connecticut Fund for the Environment.  And I loved what I did. But I’m definitely more of a hands-on people person.  I’ve always worked with children.  I’ve been to New Orleans – this past January was my fifth trip to New Orleans, post-Hurricane Katrina, so I’ve found a sense of myself down there. I can see myself in New Orleans doing non-profit work.  I’m hoping for JVC Northwest, but if not, I’d like to try on a bunch of different hats.  Try some organic farming, go and work for a non-profit for social justice, something like that.  I have a great sense of adventure, and I’m always looking for the next big thing.

Q:  Terrific.

Alex:  When I’m in a great situation, I feel I’m ready for my next big thing.  Then people say,  “But you have a great situation right now!” and I reply, “Well, I’m ready for a new challenge.”  By contrast, ever since my sister was in first grade she wanted to be a first grade teacher, and now she is.  My brother always wanted to write, and now he’s an English major at school.  I’ve always been the one that be-bops around.  I studied abroad in Paris last year, and being able to travel was wonderful, but environmentalism will always be at the core of me.  I am thankful for the classes that I’ve gotten, the professors and mentors I’ve had, and the projects I’ve been able to work on.  GCI and the whole environmental movement have defined my last few college years for me, and I’m grateful.  It’s going to be sad to leave, but I can only hope and pray that GCI will be a sustainable organization and continue to fuel itself.  I have faith and trust in the students that are coming in, wanting to know what sustainable initiatives we have and what classes we have on the environment.  That’s very exciting.

Q:  It sounds like that you’re advising consolidation both for the university sustainability committee and for the student committee.  I was intrigued by your saying that you don’t buy new clothes, that you shop the internet instead.  If you want to give out any websites, I’ll put them in your interview.

Alex:  Absolutely.  I decided not to buy any new clothes for the past couple of months.  We all have too many clothes.  We’re a consumer society, and we can all look into our closets and see things we haven’t worn in six months.  When I grew up, we got rid of our clothes every season by putting them in big bags on our front porch.  Collection agencies would come and take them to veterans’ groups, or a homeless shelter, or another organization.  So that’s been ingrained in me.  The website called www.etsy.com offers all handmade materials, like handmade jewelry, and housewares, and lighting fixtures out of Mason jars, wonderful quirky little things, and all handmade clothes. I’m looking at it because senior week’s coming up and I’ve been looking into buying a couple of dresses there.  I have a couple of friends that design clothes in the city.  I also like finding a good thrift store in the area.  I don’t shop for things that are unnecessary to me.  Obviously I buy food, but even then I try to be . . . I think people think that if you eat organic you’re a little bit  . . . there’s kind of a stigma attached to eating organic.

Q:  Really!

Alex:  More important than eating organic is eating locally.  There’s a great farmer’s market, which I noticed Alex Gross mentioned on your blog.  I believe in considering what you buy before you buy it.  Do you really need a new iPod?  Where is your old iPod going?  Apple has recycling programs.  You can return your old iPod and they’ll upcycle it.  I just bought a new MacBook Pro because my old computer completely died over spring break.  So I’m selling it on Craigslist because people can use the screen, or the keyboard, and it’s not just being thrown out.

It comes back to the idea of baby steps.  You don’t have to change your whole lifestyle overnight.  It’s about making wiser and more calculated decisions, and thinking about the ramifications of your decisions.  Consider all the people that are involved in your buying that T-shirt.  Where did the T-shirt come from?  What is it made of?  How far was it shipped to get to you?  How are these costs included in the price you’re paying?

Q:  Some people tell me that every purchase is a vote.

Alex:  Absolutely.  That’s something that Michael Pollan says in Food Inc.  Every time you put a piece of food past the scanner, you’re voting.  You’re putting a vote in for organic, for local, for processed . . .

Q:  For workers.

Alex.  Right.  The recurring theme is awareness.  It’s inspiring to see people coming together, both environmental and non-environmental students, people that care about this world that they’re living in, people who have an invested voice in this world that is quickly becoming ours.  I’m going to be 22 in less than 2 months, and 22 is old, I feel!  So I have a definite say in what happens in my society.  That power is phenomenal.  We need to realize truly what power we have and channel that power to the right sources.  If we believe in something we can get it done.

Q:  Make change happen.

Alex:  Absolutely.

Green Tip of the Week 3/24/2010: “You Can Vote for the Apple.”

Margaret O’Donnell ’11 — Interview 3/4/10

Q:  What are your favorite green accomplishments at Fairfield University?

Maggie:  The Green Campus Initiative has done a lot in the past year.  I started last spring.  I went up to Galen Vinter and asked if he had any projects for me.  I wanted a big project, because I’d been doing little things, I’d been part of SEA, and I wanted something that was my own.  Galen had an idea for a Food Project.  He wanted to work with our catering company and make our food local, more green, more organic.

So another sophomore, Gabby Arens, and I began talking to Jim Fitzpatrick, in Student Affairs.  He set us up with Sodexho and helped us build that relationship.  For the past year we’ve been working with Chris Bosze from Sodhexo, and he’s been awesome.  Jim gave us his full support, and encouraged Chris to have meetings with us.  Chris is very, very passionate about these issues.  Every idea we have, he writes it down and gets all excited.  When he does something new, he likes to say,  “Today we put up this poster, we had this color food, everyone loved it, and it went by so quickly.”   To me, it’s really important to do bigger things.  I could be doing little things too, like using recyclable water bottles, but I also have the ability to go big with it.

Q:  What kind of foods have you and Chris worked on?

Maggie:  There is a list of foods that Sodhexo makes sure to get local:  apples are always local, then there’s tofu, hummus, and sometimes pickles.  They buy packaged bread from a bakery in Philadelphia.  Then baked bread or baked goods, or the French toast bread, comes from a bakery right down the road.  Dairy products come from Guida’s in Connecticut.  So a lot of their food already is local.  Chris worked last year to eliminate all disposable things in the cafeteria—cream cheese packets, frozen yogurt containers.  He got ceramic frozen yogurt containers.  He got rid of plastic spoons and anything else that’s individually packed.  Packets of sugar, all that’s gone.  And we’re working on getting the ceramic coffee mugs back, because people stole them.

Q:  That’s great to get rid of individual packaging.  Was that hard?

Maggie:  No, that’s actually something Chris did on his own, and we didn’t even suggest it.  He just figured, well, we’re going green and we shouldn’t be having these things loading up the garbage cans in the cafeteria.

Q:  Where do you all get your suggestions?

Maggie:  Last summer, Sodexho came up with a 14-point commitment that focuses on getting sustainable meat, local produce, cage-free eggs, and so forth.  It also focuses on energy efficiency in the kitchen.  The staff makes sure they don’t turn on the ovens until they’re needed.  Chris has taken ideas from this 14-point commitment.  He also started this initiative called light-less lunches.   He turns off the lights during lunch, because it’s bright, and the windows are wide open.  I’ve heard people asking, “Why are the lights off? Why is it so dark in here?”  But Chris thought it was a great idea.  You don’t need lights in the morning or the afternoon.

Interviewer’s note:  Here are the items in Sodexho’s 14-pont commitment:
(1) We will reduce our carbon intensity across all our operations and clients’ sites.
(2) We will reduce our water intensity across all our operations and clients’ sites.
(3) We will develop and promote health and wellness solutions for our employees, clients, and customers.
(4) We will provide and promote varied and balanced food options.
(5) We will source local, seasonal or sustainable grown and raised products.
(6) We will promote choices with reduced sugar, salt and fats.
(7) We will increase the purchase of products sourced from fairly and responsibly certified sources.
(8) We will source sustainable fish and seafood.
(9) We will source and promote sustainable equipment and supplies.
(10) We will reduce organic waste generated at our sites and in our operations.
(11) We will reduce non-organic waste generated at our sites and in our operations.
(12) We will ensure compliance with a Global Sustainable Supply Chain Code of Conduct
(13) We will support local community development.
(14) We will fight hunger and malnutrition by engaging the entire Sodexho community including employees, customers, clients, and suppliers.

Maggie:  I’ve also done research at other universities.  Yale’s website is helpful, and Fordham University, also a Jesuit university, uses Sodexho too.  I’ve been watching what they’re doing.  I’ll go over there during spring break to talk to people in the cafeteria, to see if they have anything that we can take and use in our program here.

Q: How do the students react to these changes?

Maggie:  Since Chris has made the effort to do a lot of these things, my focus right now is to get more money and more support.   I’m working to get more students aware of these changes in Sodexho.  Students often don’t know why the lights are off, and they don’t know that their apples are coming from Connecticut and not from across the country.  On each of the cafeteria tables they used to put flyers every week, so now Chris has ordered for us a plastic stand-up holder for every table.  We have a pile of bright-colored recycled paper posters that we tore down from around the building, and we’re going to write down all the relevant facts and put them on the tables.

For example, when they re-did the whole cafeteria, everything they used was sustainable.  The tables are made out of bamboo.  We’re going to write down all these facts, write down where the food comes from . . . like bananas.  They come from Costa Rica, in Central America, and they travel so far.  Instead, you could have an apple, with the same kind of nutrients, which comes from around the corner.  Also, there are little stickers on the local food, just as there are little cards on top of all the foods in the cafeteria.  I’ve been writing “L” on the green stickers, and Chris has been putting them on local foods.

Q:  Do students welcome this added awareness, or do they care?

Maggie:  Well, some students don’t care.  I can tell them, “You’re eating a local apple,” and they say, “All right.  I don’t know what that means.”  But maybe it’s not all that important that they know what it means.  I think it’s best to make environmental initiatives part of daily life, and not some big, green, tree-hugger thing, because I’m not like that.  I don’t want to preach, and I don’t want to be holier than thou. I think it’s important just to be normal and go about life.

But some people actually are opposed to being aware, or changing.  They’d say, “I don’t care that it’s local, I want to do what I want with my life.”  We’re trying to do something called Meatless Mondays, after Lent.  That’s because on Fridays there’s no meat during Lent in the cafeteria at all.  So we were talking about having Meatless Mondays, because producing meat creates a lot of carbon emissions.  Some people are opposed to that.  They don’t want to be part of it.  They say, “Well, I eat meat, and I don’t care about what you’re doing, I don’t care about the environment, the world’s going to end anyway.”  They’re skeptics.

Q:  So will you have protests on your hands for Meatless Mondays?

Maggie:  I hope so.

Q:  You hope so?

Maggie:  I hope so.  Let somebody protest something.  I don’t care what they’re protesting.  If they’re protesting what I’m doing, as long as they have a reason for it, that’s fine with me.  I’d actually somebody would rather be against what I’m doing than be apathetic to it.

Q:  So you want some interest, one way or the other.

Maggie:  Exactly.  I want somebody to debate with about this issue, so that I can tell them what I know, because I’ve been learning about this stuff for the past three years.  I think I know what’s going on at this point.

Q:  How did you get started?  Is this the kind of home you grew up in?

Maggie:  Not at all.  My parents . . . we’ve always recycled.  I was talking to a friend yesterday, and she thought it was so funny that some people didn’t grow up recycling.  That was the one thing that we always did, but I was never passionate about it.  Then second semester of freshman year I had to take a science class, so I decided to take Environmental Science.  That just opened my eyes to everything – the fact that things were happening, that it was our fault, and that I could change it.  I’m now part of the Program on the Environment, taking Environmental Economics. I’ve worked it into my major, and . . . now it’s kind of everything I do.

Q:  It was like an illumination.

Maggie:  Yeah.  Exactly.  Kind of built up.

Q:  What would you like to say to people, by way of non-preachy advice?

Maggie:  I guess to be aware of what you’re eating.  Be aware of where it comes from.  Every time we eat something, we’re voting.  Every time you buy something, you’re voting that that’s what you want.  Say you’re in the cafeteria and there’s an apple and a banana.  If you pick that apple, you’re telling Sodexho that you care.  Even if you’re not worried about it, somehow they realize that you care about that.

Q:  How can you find out where what you’re eating comes from?

Maggie: Well, in the supermarket, often there are signs that say exactly where they come from.  Apples, Connecticut, USA.  Bananas, Chile.  If you’re shopping, look at the signs.  If you’re here [at the cafeteria], ask someone.  People are willing to help.  There are administrators and staff members, who happen to know a lot about it and are really interested.  They’re working at a college for a reason.

Q:  So ask staff members, or administrators, or somebody with SEA or GCI.

Maggie:  Right.

Q:  It’s interesting that Galen Vinter pointed you in this direction this last year.  He’s very passionate about these issues, too.

Maggie:  I like it when other people are passionate about stuff, because when I get excited about something like this, I get really excited.  He was definitely a good person to work with.

Q:  Well, we welcome your energy.  It sounds like your commitment takes some work, but the work is fun.

Maggie:  Yeah.  It’s really fun.  I enjoy my meetings.

Q:  Do you want to say anything about the new garden, by Dolan?  Will any foods there make their way into Sodexho?

Maggie:  Yes, that’s what I’m hoping for.  I’m trying to collaborate with Zach Gross on the garden project, because I think we could use some of those fruits and vegetables in the cafeteria.  I’m hoping maybe we can have community-sustained agriculture, where students can pay a small fee and get a box of vegetables a week.  We’ve also been talking about jarring salsa and tomato sauce from the garden and using them up in the cafeteria, for example with tacos.

Q:  Wonderful!

Maggie:  Yeah, people like it when it’s fresh.  People notice.  It makes perfect sense.

Green Tip of the Week 3/17/10: Take the Path Less Traveled

Interview with Alexandra Gross on March 2, 2010:

Q:  How have Fairfield University students changed their position toward environmentalism, in the last few years?

Alex: The biggest change I’ve seen, from the time I was a freshman until now, is that there is way more activism and outreach today.   There’s a high success rate of students being active and following through in the environmentalism on campus.  That’s really encouraging.  When I was there, only a handful of kids seemed to care.  Now there’s a ton of students involved.  That’s amazing.  That’s putting Fairfield in the right direction.

Q:  What do you think has caused that?

Alex:  Maybe it’s the whole Green Movement becoming more relevant or prevalent in daily life.  Or maybe it’s cyclical, as when the 1960s and 70s saw various movements, and this is just our time.  I have the good fortune of having my younger brother go to Fairfield, so I learn through him what’s going on.  He says there are kids coming from different high schools who are interested in the environment.  They’ve had these interests in the past, and at Fairfield they want to practice what they preach.

Q:  Do you think high schools are teaching more environmentalism?

Alex:  It’s one of those things where you can’t go anywhere without hearing the word Green.  It can’t really be ignored, whether you choose to believe in some of the causes or not.  I was fortunate to get my foot in the right door with the right professors, who encouraged me to do what I could and get the word out through journalism, to spark interest in the environmental movement on campus.  There are lots of different forums for students to have their voices heard.

Q:  Would you suggest that students seek out certain professors?

Alex:  Yes.  The biggest thing for me personally . . . I was discouraged by how apathetic the student body was in my first two years at Fairfield.  I was seriously considering transferring.  Then a few of my professors whom I was close to led me to Dina Franceschi.  She encouraged me to go with my journalistic gut and follow my student activism inclinations, and that kept me at Fairfield.  With her support, I shifted my focuses to making a difference on campus. Dr. Franceschi told me about the “Program on the Environment” minor – I think it was “Environmental Studies” when I enrolled.  By getting involved in that minor program, you meet a lot of cool professors.

When I was at Fairfield . . . not that the environmental groups on campus weren’t active, but it seemed like there was a lot of disconnect.  They were doing some activities, and maybe there wasn’t enough publicity, but I didn’t really even know about the Student Environmental Association until my sophomore year, when they were just getting their feet off the ground.  So I don’t know what happened, but environmentalism on campus has  bloomed since then.

Q:  Now the Student Environmental Association and the Green Campus Initiative are working together.

Alex:  Yeah.  For me at Fairfield it was difficult, because I wanted to report on the environmental movement on campus, but I wasn’t allowed to be a member of those groups.  That was a part of the Mirror ethics code. I was on the outside looking in. I was doing a lot of stuff on my own, and I tried to participate when I could, but I had to bite my tongue and just watch them go for it.

That was because it would be a conflict of interests for me to be an officer or member of a club, and also to report on it.  I could write a lot of commentary.  I felt like there was more authority on my side if I talked about the different initiatives by the campus groups, and faculty members, from an outside, objective perspective.

Q:  So you did journalism on the one hand, and talked with faculty and students on the other hand?

Alex:  Yeah.  I was invited to go to the Sustainability Committee meeting.  I was there as a press member.   I wanted to make sure that I met all the right people, and that I knew who to contact for articles.  I was active in the movement, but from a journalistic aspect.

Q:  You’ve done so much environmental writing. How much time do you spend these days writing about the environment?

Alex:  I work now for E -The Environmental Magazine.  That was the internship I had my second semester senior year, and then they offered me a job.  I continue writing for them.  Since it’s a bi-monthly publication, I’m always working on a piece.  Right now, I’m working on two pieces.  It’s not a regular 9 to 5 job, but I have occasional interviews, and I’m doing research pretty much every day.   Then there’s my blog. That’s my space to editorialize and offer research for people who are interested in food and the local environmental movement. I try to post every day on that.

Q:  That’s amazing.

Alex:  It’s something I’m really passionate about.  As a freelance writer, I have more time to post.

Q:  For those students active in the environmental movement, who want to transition to an environmental field after they graduate, what would you recommend?

Alex:  Dr. Simon always taught us to “take the path less traveled.”   He meant that in terms of trying to find a perspective when you write.  But it’s also a good piece of advice for a job search.

When I graduated, it was the worst job market a Fairfield class has ever seen.  I expected not to have a job, so I had a back-up job working as a farm intern.  So the biggest piece of advice I have is this:  Try to find something you’re passionate about, not necessarily specific to your major.

Look locally for work.  I know some people want to have an internship or something with a major company, or move into the city right away—yet sometimes that’s not always in your best interests.  Because I work for E-The Environmental Magazine, my articles have gotten picked up by big environmental websites, and I’ve been cited in a lot of research papers, and I’ve met a lot of good people.  Meanwhile, I love my job at the farm.  So I’m able to do two things at once.  I didn’t go to school for farming, obviously, but I wasn’t afraid to branch out of my comfort zone and try something new.

Q:  It sounds like farming feeds your writing.  It’s a kind of synergy.

Alex:  Oh, yes, definitely.  I can’t imagine doing one without the other.  Initially I didn’t think those two were ever going to be related.  But I’ve found a balance of how to farm and learn about the local food movement, as well as finding out what’s right to editorialize and report on – organic food, and food movements that environmentalists use.

Q:  How would you recommend that students start looking locally for environmental work opportunities they really care about?

Alex:  The biggest thing is, do a lot of cold-calling.  Not in the traditional sense that you just call people up, but . . . go to a lot of town events they are always publicizing on the Fairfield Campus, in and around town.  It’s good to access the farmers’ markets on the weekends.  Go there and walk around to local businesses near the farmers’ markets.  You can meet a lot of interesting people, and there are often job prospects.

Q:  That’s a great idea.  What particular places?

Alex:  Right at the Fairfield Theatre Company (70 Sanford Street, Fairfield) there’s a farmers’ market on Saturdays, I believe – well, right now it’s the indoor farmers market – from 10 to 2.  I think in the summer it switches over to Sunday, in that same location. If students are interested in finding farmers’ markets in Fairfield County, they can go to www.buyctgrown.com and search for farmers markets.  And  they can consult the Fairfield Green Food Guide: http://fairfieldgreenfoodguide.com/

Also, http://www.localharvests.org is a great site for students specifically interested in local food and local economy movements.  Contacting non-profit groups in Connecticut, going to activity fairs, just checking local websites or local newspapers, seeing when certain events are – all these are good places to look.

Q:  That’s so much good specific advice. What about long-term jobs or graduate schools?

Alex:  There are tons of grad schools now with different programs.  Environmentalism is a broad term.  You can get your Master’s or Ph.D in Sustainable Development.     I’m looking at grad schools right now for Food Systems and Food Studies, which is very specific, but it covers a broad range of topics.  At most leading universities, you’ll find some field related to environmentalism.

Q:  I find that very heartening.

Alex:  It’s one of these things where, regardless of your political ideals, it’s kind of bigger than us.

Q:  I really appreciate your giving so much good advice to students, because I know that many of them don’t know where to start.  You’ve started, and you’ve continued, and you’ve gotten a long way.  You’re saying it’s a kind of free-form search.  Try everything, and see who you meet.

Alex.  Yeah.  I think as a generation, we’re used to . . . I guess there’s a term, “helicopter parents,” or parents who watch over us and do everything for us.  We have to shift away from that mentality and branch out and do things that are unexpected.  Don’t take the traditional route, I’d say.  You’ll find the most success that way.

Q:  There are other ways to learn besides a teacher.

Alex:  Oh, yeah.  And especially a lot of schools, and even schools like Fairfield, depend on Career Planning and their advisors to find them internships.  Those are great resources, but they can’t be the end-all.

If anyone wants to contact me, in case I might be a resource, they can contact me.

Q:  Really?  Can I give them your email address? At alexandra.g.gross@gmail.com?

Alex:  Oh, yeah!

Q:  That’s great.  I will be glad to do that. I think you are the pioneer of the student movement.  You got there a year or two before anybody else.  You knew what was out there for students.  I think people will remember you for that.

Alex: Well, thanks.

Green Tip of the Week: “Ask for a New Bike!”

March 3, 2010

Interview with Vice President James Fitzpatrick on February 16, 2010:

James:  If a student’s parents ask them what they would like for their birthday or Christmas or a special occasion, think about giving them a bike.  We’re trying to focus on making Fairfield not just a pedestrian campus, but also a bike campus.  We’ve made some good inroads with our pilot program in Dolan Hall by purchasing five bikes, and having the Area Coordinator and the Head Resident coordinate student use.  It’s proved very, very successful.  So here’s the concept: “If you ask for a gift, ask for a bike.” The bicycle store in Fairfield is offering some specials for students.  I think we will slowly see the number of bikes on campus increase.  The positive effects are tremendous.  The spin-offs are tremendous.  There’s a health benefit.  There’s an environmental benefit.  There’s an easing-of-parking benefit.

Q:  That sounds like a good tip.  Have you seen those new electric bikes, with a little motor that helps you go uphill?

James:  I haven’t seen those.  You see Winston Tellis going around with his mo-ped all the time, and there’s an increase in the sales of mo-peds, and more mo-peds on campus.  I guess I’m a traditionalist. Give me a good – I was going to say, three-speed bike, but they don’t make that many three-speed bikes, they’re all five- and ten-speed.  But I think we can continue to foster a bike culture on campus.

Q:  That would be good.  The Daily Green is always talking about the newest electric bikes, which cost less than mo-peds.  Sometimes they cost $1000 or $1500, but that’s still a lot less than a car.

James:  Absolutely.  As we look out the window now and see it snowing, we realize there are two months when you can’t use a bike, January and February.  January’s a short month because of the holiday break.  So you’re talking about 6 or 7 weeks when you can’t use a bike.  But from the beginning of March, we should have good weather.  For students in Dolan or the townhouses, getting around campus on a bike is so convenient that you wonder why more people don’t do it.  I ride my bike maybe two or three times a week, when it’s nice in the fall or in the spring.  It’s easy.

Q:  I hear students say that off campus it’s dangerous to bike on some roads.  What do you think?

James:  There are some challenges.  Starting from campus and going over the Post Road is challenging. But once you get over the Post Road and go down toward the Beach Road, it’s a great place to bike.  Often during the summer, we’ll bike down to Penfield, or Reef Road, or Fairfield Beach Road.  Those are just great biking areas.  The town has looked into the possibility of expanding bike trails.  But one of the many downsides of the economic downturn has been that important projects like bike paths are seen as non-essential in contrast to the education budget and the town services budget.  Unfortunately, green initiatives may seem non-essential when they’re actually the exact opposite.  Look at what we could be saving in terms of biking.  Some may think that people in China are crazy for using bikes as much as they do, but that’s how they get around.  So to answer your question, that one strip of Post Road is a challenge, but once you get on either side of that, biking is pretty good.

Q:  What do you think is the best thing we’ve done at Fairfield to fight climate change?

James:  I think our best actions are restricting the sophomore cars and doing away with the campus shuttle.  I know those are inconveniences to people, but those actions have drastically reduced our carbon footprint.  We’ve eliminated 18 bus trips a day on campus.  And that bus was a diesel.   Taking away 400-plus cars has both decreased our carbon footprint and eased the parking situation—which used to be a real mess but is now tolerable.  Now people can find somewhere to park, even if it isn’t right in front of their building or residence hall.  So to me, reducing the number of cars and buses on campus has been our biggest change.

There’s another big accomplishment – we were way ahead of the curve with the co-generation plant.  Rick Taylor has a lot of the credit.  When he was Assistant VP for Operations, he was instrumental in coordinating the development of that facility.  It’s a major thing to be producing over 90% of our own energy rather than buying it all from United Illuminating.

Q:  Everything you’ve mentioned is about decreasing carbon emissions.  The world needs to get its carbon dioxide equivalents in the atmosphere down to 350 parts per million.

James:  Yes, there’s no option on that.  Eliminating trays in the dining hall was significant, too, in terms of food waste and utilities.  We used to have that dishwasher run constantly just to clean and scrape off and sanitize 800 to 1000 trays for every two and a half hour meal cycle.  So a 2000-tray daily cycle has been eliminated.  We were probably one of the first schools to do that.

Q:  Were you!

James:  I think that decision was a result of Earth Day four years ago.  One of the small Ivy League schools decided they would just do away with cafeteria trays, and it was like a light went off.  Everyone said, gee, why don’t we try that?  I was surprised that the students themselves were so positive about it.  With next year’s freshman class, none of our classes will have ever had trays.  That in itself is a milestone.

Q:  That’s fantastic.  I’ve read that it takes a lot of electricity to heat things, like water or clothes dryers.   I’ve heard that students at other colleges dry their laundry on racks in their rooms or laundry rooms.

James:  Right.  Definitely we’d like to look at that laundry area, and see if there’s anything we can do from an energy-saving and dollar-saving standpoint, for both students and the university.

Q:  What other colleges don’t have sophomore parking?  That must be a popular measure.

James:  In all honesty, I don’t know of others.  Yet in many other schools, students park their cars in the perimeter area, not close to the center of campus.  Our second landscape phase will come in during the next two or three years.  We’ll enhance the walkways and paths for members of the university community.  They can transport themselves over campus by foot or bike or mo-ped—or even scooter.  Whatever you want.

When we have the freshmen living in the main center of the campus, and not up in Dolan, you’ll definitely see more walking.  There won’t be the need for a bus or some other means of transportation.

Q:  That reminds me of Yale, with all the freshmen in the center and the older students further out.

James:  I think the current sophomore class still would like to see a shuttle.  They said, well, you took away our cars, now you’re taking away the shuttle, and I think there were some negative feelings about that.  We all would probably agree that these environmental decisions are not easy decisions.  The reality is that for every class day, we’re saving dollars and we’re saving the environment by not allowing those cars and buses.

In the future, I think, we’re looking at whether we can do something to encourage our contracted food service, Sodexho, to purchase food from an eight-state area, the New England States plus New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, to try to make it local, to save money that way.  These small decisions seem insignificant by themselves, but when you add them up, you realize just how much impact they make.

Our installation of the recycling stations, where each bottle and can has a value of a nickel . . . one of the greatest pieces of legislation enacted [reimbursement for bottles and cans] was originally for cleaning up litter from the sides of the roads.  But it works for recycling, and it works very, very well.  We were all encouraged when last October that the recycling-station system was expanded to include water bottles.  We’d all like to see that practice expanded even further, to include sports drinks and flavored waters.

Q:  How many bottle and can recycling machines are there on campus?

James:  We just have two, both up in the townhouses and both working.  They are very, very successful.  We’d like to expand that process in the coming years.

Q:  I heard the “Food Revolution” panel at the Barone Campus Center last week.  One student on the panel, Margaret O’Donnell, was working with Sodhexo and probably with you?

James.  Yes, students are working closely with Chris Bose in the food service.  They’ve developed a nice relationship, a good partnership.

Q:  Ms. O’Donnell said they had made some salads from organic vegetables, and all the students kept coming back and wanting more, because the salads were so good.

James:  Yes, there’s a myth that students like to eat junk and junk only.  And we all at times need our sugar fix.  But they really want better fruits, better vegetables, and healthy produce.  So they might be a different generation, but they’re not a crazy generation.  They realize that what you put into your body makes a difference.  Their eating habits aren’t as wacky as people might think.

Q:  Yes, students pay attention.  And they care.  I’ve heard that more and more frequently, students come from environmentally conscious households.

James:  Absolutely.  We’re not training them to be rabbits and eat just lettuce.  I think they’re starting to develop some of these eating habits probably in their schools and obviously in their homes.

Q:  What else would you like to say about other bright developments in our future?

James:  Our environmental initiatives are constantly changing.  The challenge is to realize that we’re only at the tip of the iceberg.  Unfortunately, there are political groups who think our current emphasis on the environment is just a bad dream, something that isn’t true.  If we’ve learned anything over the past couple of years, it’s that for this movement to have any credibility and any effect, it has to be an ongoing process.

We can’t just say, well, we’ve succeeded in getting water added to the bottle bill.  That’s not good enough, until we get the other drinks added as well.  We’ve done a good job in cutting down on water uses and chemical uses in our dishwasher.  But that’s not enough.  Can we save electricity in our use of lighting, or in our use of cooking fuel?  Are there ways to batch-cook and still produce enough food each day to feed the students?  If we’ve learned anything, it’s that our environmental commitment is never-ending.

We can only hope that when we hand on our commitment to that next generation of green Fairfield Stags, that next generation is already a couple of light years ahead of us.  You want them to look back at us and say, Gee, is that all they did?  Because we look back and say, Gee, that generation did nothing.

Q:  That’s a good “sound bite.”  You could also want them to look back and say, Gee, I’m glad they did all that. But you make a good point that there’s always more to be done.

James:  Yes, this book doesn’t have an ending.  The story is still being written by a lot of very, very well-intentioned and very, very dedicated people.  It’s a shame that the environmental issue has been short-changed in terms of the health care issue, politically.  And it’s been hurt by the financial crisis.  It’s easy to say, well, what difference does it make if I save a mammal in a tree area on campus, or if a few birds lose their birdhouse, or they lose some woods for their location?  It’s a constant battle to show that these things do make a difference.

Green Tip of the Week: Stalking Internships

February 24, 2010

Here is the complete interview with David Downie, Director of the Environmental Studies Program, on February 11, 2010.

Q:  What is the best thing Fairfield University has done for the environment?

David:  Several things.  One is the University’s attempt, uneven still, to include sustainability and the environment in creating campus infrastructure and new buildings. The built environment is incredibly important. The co-generation power plant and environmental feature of the new Jesuit resident are two examples. A second is revamping the Environmental Studies Program, which occurred before I arrived in September of 2008.  The university made a financial commitment to a new faculty position, and existing faculty spent a lot of time updating the program.

A third important area includes mundane but important things like seeking to reduce energy use and recycling, especially recycling that we don’t see.  The university now recycles stuff that comes out of the dorms at the end of the year—carpet, office furniture and materials—instead of just dumping them.  It’s in their financial interest to do it.  And recycling is much better environmentally. Eliminating trays in the dining hall has also made a difference.

Q:  It’s in their financial interest to recycle?

David:  Yes, because they pay reduced “tipping fees.”  They can pay someone less to take something recyclable away, or they can give something away, or even get paid for some items.   Effective and profitable recycling requires educating people, and it’s a top-to-bottom process. But that’s improved a lot.

[Banning] sophomore cars is a huge thing, because in five years, you won’t think about it.  Sophomores will spend half their time here without a car, and that changes attitudes.  It forces infrastructure changes on campus.

Q:  Would you like to give specifics about the new Environmental Studies Program?

David:  Yes.  It is continuing to develop.  Over time we need to develop more curriculum around specific skill sets for students to be even more employable in sustainability. Also, the University could seek to build more sustainability-focused classes into the Business School at the undergraduate and graduate level, and the Engineering School.  As sustainability and efficiency become watchwords, green business, marketing, and engineering become more important.  ,

Q:  What else should we do in the future?

Another important initiative would be to retrofit the existing building stock, which is terribly energy inefficient.  While it would cost money to fix the heating and cooling systems, to put in accurate thermostats, to put in light switches where the lights go off automatically, to better insulate the buildings—all that will significantly reduce our resource use and save us money in the long run.  Another broad priority would be to work with the town and with other organizations to cooperate on issues of mutual importance.  For example, biking in Fairfield is difficult.  There are some school districts in Fairfield, and most school districts in Westport, where kids are not allowed to ride bikes to school, because of no sidewalks.  So biking is prohibited.   Our students who live at the beach always talk about how dangerous the town is for riding bikes.  We need more systematic positive relationships with environmental groups, smart-growth groups, open-space groups, people searching for a town farm, those who are working on energy efficiency town government—that would help us solve common problems.

Q:  Work with the town?

David:  Right.  Another thing we could do is to cooperate with other universities on programs of common interest.  We have resources that other schools don’t have, and other schools might have resources that we don’t have. There’s going to be a new magnet school opening in Bridgeport, near The Discovery Museum, focused on math and science, including environmental science.  How can we get our students involved with that?  How can we get our students involved with the environmentally-oriented parts of the town government, with Bridgeport, with the state level?

Q;  Is there anything specific that a student could do, in terms of bike riding, or getting in touch with you, or working with the town?

David.  For students, one of the most important things they can do is to actively look for internships, with companies, and local governments and organizations that are related to sustainability.  There are more ideas out there that are good for the environment and good business, either for private businesses or for corporations, or for the town, than there are person hours.  An example of this is that the Town of Fairfield recently received a more than million-dollar grant from the federal government to do energy efficiency stuff.  It took a long time to get that, in part because they didn’t have the person hours down there to put together the grant forms.  There are people in town who want to create a town farm, want to improve the community gardens, want to clean up the beaches more systematically, want to work on bicycling.

Q:  Could these be internships through your program?  Who would the contact be?

David:  Yes and No.  I am contact by some groups off campus looking for interns. But what I want the students to do is search for these on their own.  They can go out and start calling these people and government agencies, and say, “I’m a student, I want to get involved.”

Q:  What faculty member do they follow up with?  Because internships have to be given through a particular department?

David:  Only ones for credit.  Students can do whatever they want with their off hours.  If they want credit, then they have to come talk to someone.  But they don’t have to wait.  What I’m saying is this:  Don’t wait for professors to tell you about internship possibilities related to sustainability. Almost any government agency, local or regional, and many small and large corporations, have more projects than they can do, and there are so many opportunities for green marketing, for energy efficiency, for working on policy at the local level, that if you just have an idea, or if you just are curious, just contact these people and say, “Look, you’re a small business, I see something for you.”  Go out and do it.  I mean, the problem is, everyone’s waiting for someone to come along and say, here’s an internship. Students have to get their ideas and reach out and be proactive and not wait.

Q:  What can individual students do on campus?

David:  Get involved with SEA or GCI.  The student organizations are active and working on important issues. Also, take individual action. In terms of the students’ own life, it’s simply . . . the problem with this [kind of advice] is, it’s like preaching.  It’s like saying, “Don’t drive your car so much, and recycle your cans.”  For the average student, it’s energy and transportation.  Think about what you buy and what goes in your bodies and where it comes from.  Most green options for eating are healthier and, over time, less expensive.  Think about your resource use, and what you do with your waste.  And while it seems easy just to grab something and throw it away, someone ends up paying for the disposal.  The fact that it’s not recycled increases waste disposal prices.  The fact that you’re eating food with nasty chemicals makes green alternatives seem more expensive, but the more people that eat organic stuff, the lower prices will be.

Reflect a little bit on your everyday activities.  If you’re paying your own utilities, turning off the light, lowering the thermostat, driving less, puts real money in your pocket.  If you eat healthier and greener, you end up feeling better.  In my climate class, one group of students are writing a paper that includes coming up with seven things that the actual college student could do to impact climate change, then coming up with statistics. I’m really curious about what students see from their perspective.

Q:   If you find a good student paper, tell me, and I’ll interview them.

David:  I will.

Green Tip of the Week: Join Up, Reach Out, Power Off

February 10, 2010

Here’s my interview of February 1, 2010 with Dr. Dina Franceschi, Economics professor and Chair of the Environmenal Steering Committee:

Q:  What do you think is the best thing Fairfield University has done environmentally?

Dina: Hands down, what has changed the most in the last 2-3 years at Fairfield is the engagement, initiative, and action of the students.  The administration responds to the needs of students who are environmentally aware.  Students are getting more environmental education in elementary and high school, and we give them opportunity to show that activism and show that awareness.  Before they come to college, students live in households that are pretty environmentally friendly.  So when they get to college, I see more students interested, and I see them engaged in more things.  And that’s change.  Faculty will come and go, and faculty voices get old.  But when there are a lot of students and a lot of voices, that’s really exciting.  If we can keep student interest and a student engine of activism, it will stay on the forefront.

Q:  What do you think has changed in the last two years that has made this happen?

Dina:  I think empowerment.  Sometimes students feel that their voices don’t matter, that their voices are not heard.  But now some faculty and administrators who care have gotten together and provided students venues for their voice, avenues for action.

Q:  For example?

Dina:  For example.  Somebody in a class has an idea about biofuels and does a ten-week project, and doesn’t know what else to do beyond that.  So a couple of faculty get together, and we connect that student with Joe Bouchard, for fire-hazard-safety concerns, and Jim Fitzpatrick, for further implementation.  Students don’t necessarily know how to navigate the bureaucracy of Fairfield.  We partner with students to move projects forward.  Students have the energy and the interest and the drive, and we can show them how to be proactive.  When you’re a four-year student, often it’s not until the end of your senior year that you figure out the bureaucracy.  These organizations that the students have formed, for seniors with good leadership partnered with faculty who know the navigation system, and then underclassmen who have the energy to learn the system—all this makes a continuum instead of just the hunt-and-peck that we saw before.  So I think that’s it.  Just empowerment.

Q:  What organizations come to mind?

Dina:  Well, the Student Environmental Association existed for a while, but it wasn’t a real player on campus.  But now it is a real player.  They have peer-supported interest that comes from the students as horizontally-integrated, along with a vertical integration of people who can make things happen, like Joe Bouchard.  If you don’t know who to talk to, how can you ever get things done?

Q:  So the students have the energy, and you show them the ropes.

Dina:  Not just me. There’s Joe Bouchard, Kraig Steffen, a whole litany of people and administrators. Jim Fitzpatrick does a ton in his building, and he works with students. The “grownups,” who have been around longer, make connectivity for students.  Faculty often provide the interface with the students.  We make connections with them and launch them forward.  The Green Campus Initiative, the other student environmental group, started this way.  We begin with what students are passionate about and move it forward.  There are so many things to do, environmentally.  We don’t need to limit it to one path or another.

Q:  Do you think that environmentalism is more popular in the general culture today?

Dina:  My home, when I was a kid, wasn’t particularly environmentally friendly, and we didn’t necessarily talk about these things.

Q:  It seems to me environmental awareness is ascending.

Dina:  We would hope it’s ascending. What I think is probably very true, though, is that specifically environmental education is more prominent, at least in elementary schools, than it ever was.  I don’t know when that happened.  But I think that the students who are arriving at Fairfield today are more environmentally aware.  I expect my children, who are in kindergarten and third grade, to have twelve years of environmental education, so they’ll certainly be more aware than I was.

Q:  What do you think is the next thing to do here at Fairfield to help the environment??

Dina:  I think living in a way that matters is important.  In the United States, our consumer culture is a concern, and so if you care, notice things.  Everybody’s marginal impact counts—turning out lights, shutting off faucets, all those little things.  You don’t think your “vote” matters, but individual actions cumulatively matter.  You may or may not get involved in a student group or the environmental academic program, but living environmentally as an individual matters.

For Fairfield, we’re at a point of stepping back and putting together a master plan.  We’ve done energy.  We’ve tried to advance recycling.  Everyone should keep moving forward with what they’re individually passionate about.  But what will the next big impact piece be?

This landscaping project that’s multifaceted over the years needs to be done very carefully—how we’re moving building projects forward, the ways in which we’re changing the landscape.  This campus is getting smaller and smaller, with all the expansion that we’re doing.  That’s a big-ticket item, as energy was a big-ticket item, but the next big item will probably come from a broad-based assessment, where we’re either failing or doing well.  We should target those points where we’re failing.

Q:  When you talk about landscape, do you mean trees and grass, do you mean building projects, do you mean water table?

Dina:  All of that.  Executive Vice President Billy Weitzer put together a five-year landscaping plan to change light fixtures and benches and sidewalks and shrubs and the topography of the quad, including pavements and permeable surfaces.  It’s sort of a campus-wide face-lift, in five-year phases.  That is going forward in coordination with new buildings, the brick-and-mortar projects.  Those two plans will have a tremendous impact on waterways, wildlife corridors, and forest stands on this campus.  If we’re not careful, those natural places will go away pretty quickly.

Q:  Is the coordination between those two projects an environmentally-aware coordination?

Dina:  That remains to be seen.  The landscaping plan, the trees and shrubs, that is done by an environmentally certified landscape design architectural firm.  One would presume that their plans would be in tune with the environment.  I saw those plans.  They got input from environmental faculty about the key spots on the sites.  But of course, plans and implementation are two different things, with two different sets of people making decisions.  We have a Campus Sustainability Committee that is supposed to provide for that interface, and we’ve put up a few mechanisms by which we should have a clear interface between academics and outdoor classrooms, outdoor research facilities, conservation for the town, for the university.  But when people get rushed and busy, they need to meet a deadline, they need to make a decision, sometimes those things fall by the wayside.  Which is really not OK.

Q:  When priorities tend to slip, that’s really not OK?

Dina:  Yeah.  That’s right.  We need constant student interaction, involvement, awareness, and faculty involvement and discussion and awareness, and administrators need to keep their ears open.

Q:  Talk to each other, talk to faculty, talk to students?

Dina:  Keep communicating, even though it might mean a slower process.  What it’s all about is environmental economics. Perhaps the right thing to do for the long term – the cost-savings thing to do – isn’t always the cost-savings thing to do immediately. Static costs and benefits need to be weighed carefully with costs and benefits in the longer term. Savings that we make today might be cost-saving today, but 5 to 10 years we might have saved a lot of money had we chosen a different path. I always think about the parking issue.  I still think that building parking up is better than building parking out. Why are we continuing to pave new parking lots, when we can just park over one another [as in a parking garage]?  I know it’s way more costly.  But we can’t get a forest back, we can’t get a pond back, we can’t get a tree stand back after we’ve paved over it.  You can break up the asphalt and put down topsoil, but it’s not going to be that same wild-growth tree stand.  If you have a parking lot, put up a couple of pillars and pave over it.

[A parking garage] is way more costly, but in order to reclaim a parking lot back to forest, it’s wildly more costly.  I think we really need to step back before blazing forward.  I’m in support of a lot of the building projects. Renovating existing building footprints is great.  Giving the old Ignatian House.a facelift, putting some students in there, is perfect. Getting Dolan house re-formatted in a more efficient way is awesome.  Putting up a new building is OK.  But are we going to put up a new building and a parking lot where there’s a parking lot right now?  And take away natural space to get a parking lot?  People should have asked about the value of that property, that natural space.  Apparently they asked the town but didn’t ask the university.  They didn’t ask the faculty and students who use that property for educational purposes.  What is the value of that property for them? Maybe the marginal student won’t come here and pay the tuition because the environmental science class here will not be quite as rich and as deep and as meaty as on another campus that has outdoor classroom space.  Maybe the administration needs to hear that.

Q:  So that’s asking how new projects will play out over time, too.

Dina:  Exactly.

Green Tip of the Week: Shrink That Foot

February 3, 2010

Here’s my interview from 1/28/10 with David Frassinelli, head of the Campus Sustainability Committee and Director of Facilities Management:

Q:  What do you think is the best thing we’ve done environmentally since you’ve been here?

David:  One of the best achievements on campus is getting up to speed and operating the COGEN facility.  That has single largest environmental impact, compared to buying our electricity off the grid.  Unlike United Illuminating, at Fairfield University we capture and re-use our waste heat.  We run our own turbine—4.6 megawatts turbine—and we use a good portion of the waste heat to heat and air condition our buildings.  Right now we’re looking into adding another 400-ton absorption chiller for air conditioning.  We could run it for free, using the extra waste heat that is now going up the stacks.   A lot of what we’ve done at Fairfield has been motivated by being efficient and saving money, but it has played itself out to be quite green technology.  Like COGEN.

Q:  You mean that when you save electricity, you save money, but you also save . . .

David:  Carbon.  As part of the President’s Climate Commitment, at Fairfield University we have, for the first time, measured our carbon footprint.  We did it for the period from 2005 to 2008.  During that period the numbers have basically remained flat, which is very good considering that we’ve added square footage, we’ve added faculty, and we’ve added full-time equivalents.  So to remain flat is a very positive thing.  We’ve just measured and I’m about to distribute our 2009 footprint, which for the fiscal year means July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2009 – and we have actually reduced our carbon significantly.

Q:  That’s wonderful.  Is that because of COGEN?

David:  Primarily.  Also, we’re running more buildings, and when we run buildings that are not on COGEN, we use natural gas as opposed to oil.  It has been a challenge in measuring our carbon footprint to capture air travel, which we’ve done for the first time in 2009.   If you look at our numbers, it appears that the total carbon has gone up – but it’s gone up compared to not tracking air travel.  So if we’ve gone up 4,000 tons, and the air travel accounts for 6,000 tons, we’ve actually had a net reduction of 2,000 tons.  That’s all very encouraging.

In fiscal year ’10, we’re going to make another significant improvement by eliminating 380 cars, not allowing parking for sophomores.  That rule is new just this year.  That ban will reduce our Scope 3 emissions significantly.  For sustainability, it’s very important to take action, but also you need to have a certain consciousness and awareness so that you don’t miss the opportunities for action as they present themselves.  Here’s a case in point.  We’ve data tested some shower heads in one of the Townhouse blocks, reducing the water volume from two and a half gallons per minute to one gallon per minute.  Now we’re going to look at the cost and the benefit and the payback. We hope to make this reduction a campus standard.

Q:  What do you think is the next step?  What can we do to get the carbon numbers down further?  The showerheads?

David:  Showerheads would be a good step for water conservation.  For reduction of the carbon footprint, being able to justify and install another 400-ton absorption chiller would allow us to take some of our other centrifugal, conventional electric chillers off line.  In the Central Utilities Facility we now have one 400-ton absorption chiller, plus three Carrier centrifuge chillers, which we run in order to air condition the buildings.  Installing nother absorption chiller would allow us to take a conventional chiller off line completely.

We’re still looking at the costs of another 400-ton absorption chiller. It’s a challenge to decide where to physically locate it.  In the ideal world, we’d put it at the Central Utilities Facility building, but that’s a little jam-packed.  When we expanded that building for COGEN, we gave the Town of Fairfield some significant conservation easements to get the approvals, so we would have a tough time fitting a new chiller at the CUF.  We’re looking at other locations that would be unobtrusive.  We don’t want to make the place look like an industrial plant.

Q:  Can you think of anything the university community can do to help Fairfield move forward?

David:  If we’re not careful, we could fall into a false sense of not having to conserve energy if we are too impressed by our COGEN plant.  Yes, it’s efficient – we produce electricity at 7 cents per kilowatt as compared to 22 cents per kilowatt if we buy it.  But let’s don’t imagine that we don’t have to worry about conserving energy. That would be a terrible fallacy, a trap to fall into.

One of the biggest power users are flat-screen TVs.  They’re huge power drains.  People can simply make sure to shut them off when they’re not in their rooms.  And if you go away for an extended period, unplug them – a prudent action to take anyway, in there are electrical spikes.  If you’re not going to be here, unplug them.  Unplug computers as well.  Just because TVs and computers are not on, that doesn’t mean they’re not drawing power.

I’ve also noticed some smaller issues, like the handicap paddles on the doors.  If you’re handicapped, absolutely, you should use them.  But if you’re not handicapped, you shouldn’t use them, for a couple of reasons.  First, it takes electricity to open these doors.  Second, the paddles open both doors at the same time, where there’s an airlock, and they stay open for a certain period to let people pass through.  A lot of heat and air conditioning will escape then. I just see people being very casual about using the handicap paddles.  Maybe we can put little stickers on the doors:  “If You’re Not Handicapped, Don’t Use It.”  We can also just remind people to turn lights off.

Q:  Teachers could turn lights off when they leave the classroom.

David:  Absolutely.  Also, we’re starting construction projects with these new dorms, and we’ll be installing building dashboards in the front lobby, so that when you walk in you can see how much electricity you’re using, how much hot water or thermal heat you’re using.  I’m hoping to get a dashboard installed in Kostka Hall this spring, because that will be the new living and learning community focused on the environment, and I’ll be advising that group.  With dashboards in the dorms, we could do some very creative things like having competitions.  Mostly we should just be aware of what we’re doing.  Just be aware that when we open our eyes each morning, we’re contributing carbon.

Q:  Like you were saying before, unless you look for the action to take, you can’t take the action.

David:  Yes.  So we should be aware of it, and capitalize on opportunities.  So many things are expensive to do after the fact. In other words, to put these dashboards in after the building is built, and re-wire the building – that’s expensive.  But if you’re going into construction, it’s a lot more cost-effective to wire the building for dashboards then.

Green Tip of the Week: Green Christmas

December 7, 2009

Question:  Are there any “green” holiday presents online?

Answer:  There are many.

There is a forest of green presents online this year.  Many are very inventive.

Many people want to avoid giving “stuff.”  As we know from The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard, when we purchase and give objects, they often add to the amount of non-biodegradable material on our planet.  They make their way to our landfills, where they slowly leach more toxic elements into the environment.  If they are put into coal-burning incinerators, they leave toxic coal ash, and we’re running out of ways to dispose of that.

What can we give, if not objects?  The Daily Green says we can give “outside the box”:

We can adopt an octopus or a rainforest acre or an apple tree in the giftee’s name

We can give, through the giftee, clean water to families in developing nations.

We can give an experience—a night at a “green” bed and breakfast, a year-long pass to all national parks, an organic   winery tour, a “green” spa treatment.

We can give time on an organic farm from WWOOF – World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms.

If we still need to give some object, The Daily Green offers “light-spirited gifts to nudge your loved ones down the GreenPath, as for example:

Skimpy underwear with a picture of the planet.

Reusable porcelain coffee cups (that look like Styrofoam but aren’t).

An Al Gore mouse pad.

A home recycling center (for $300 plus).

Several step-by-step  guides to green living (printed on paper!).

A biodegradable T-shirt.

A solar-powered golf cart (for the very rich).

Reusables from shopping bags to sporks (spoon-forks).

This final Daily Green web site  claims to have 100-plus green gift ideas.  Safe green toys, charitable gifts, solar-powered watches, gifts from recycled materials, artisanal food gifts.  Many of these are inexpensive, and they’re fun to look through.

More gifts for animal lovers:

The Ideal Bite offers “Gifts That Bite” in its daily tips for November 30.

Make a symbolic animal adoption in your giftee’s name.  Donations go to preserving habitats and keeping shelters open, for example.  See this Humane Society website.

Give a donation to Conservation International for a specific purpose.   The specifics will depend on your giftee.  For $20 you can save a lemur.  For $50 you can help save the Philippine eagle.

If you adopt a sea creature for your giftee, you can help preserve the world’s oceans through Oceana’s activism.   With this gift you receive a cookie cutter or a stuffed animal for the person gifted.

Happy Green Holidays.  Good luck on exams, everyone!