This summer, the crew will strive to inspire individual and community-level change for a more sustainable future, member Katie Gougelet '14 said. The Big Green Bus's annual tour was initiated in 2005 and grows each year from crew members' ideas.
Previous groups concentrated more on educating various community members about more sustainable lifestyle choices, such as water and energy conservation.
During the tour, crew members and adult community members will share stories related to environmental issues during "Telling My Story" events. Along with sustainability documentary film screenings and local community service projects, "Telling My Story" will replace teaching sessions that dominated past bus tours.
"We have some knowledge about sustainability issues because about a half of us are engineering majors and another half are environmental studies majors," Gougelet said. "But as university students, we are really still in a position to learn."
Hoffman agreed that the shift from educating to being educated is a key change.
"It's a little problematic for 12 college students to visit a town they are not from and tell the people there how to live their lives," he said.
The structural changes originate from meetings held last fall that critically assessed the "education philosophy" of previous years.
"We sat down at the beginning of the year and discussed what it meant to take this bus around the country with corporate sponsor money," Gougelet said. "And whether that was really doing the good that we wanted to do."
Crew members initially contemplated restricting the Big Green Bus's destinations to one or two locations in order to acquire a deeper understanding of the area's environmental issues, Gougelet said.
"The bus in the past just kind of went everywhere," member Jordan Kastrinsky '16 said. "This year, we want to focus our energy and pinpoint places that we think are of critical environmental need or importance."
The Big Green Bus used to stop at each destination for a day or two, but this year's crew will stay at select destinations for three to five days. These include the San Francisco Bay Area, which functions as a large sustainability innovation hub, and West Virginia's coal mining region, which has suffered from the damaging effects of mountaintop removal mining in recent years.
The crew will return to Hanover a week earlier to compile a video of the national trip.
The group plans to show this video to Dartmouth students and will host similar storytelling events in the Upper Valley.
