Good lord, I am just sick and tired of all of these articles and columns bemoaning the wastefulness of frat parties littered with the aluminum remnants of pong games. Everyone, whether they consider themselves "green" or not, seems to have their own solution for the problem. In fact, students sometimes turn this complaining into a grade in the ENGS 21 classroom, usually involving powerful magnets or other complicated collection systems. Oh, and the cups! Those rage-colored plastic cups infesting our trashcans and floors! Where is the end to it all? How can we keep our brains sufficiently dulled and our environmental consciences quiet?
The answer is simple. In fact, you have seen it so many times, you've forgotten about it. I remember growing up with the three R's of conservation: reduce, reuse and recycle. We do a decent job at the last two, but where are our efforts to reduce?
Now, I've heard the long and oft-quoted list of accomplishments from the administration and all of our environmental groups. I've read all about Dartmouth Dining Services' efforts to compost and buy food locally, and all of that is great! The costs get largely passed on to us, and we students feel like our campus is making a difference in the War on Global Warming (which should be declared sometime soon). We're rewarded with the awards and commendations for recycling that we receive from various watch groups, and we should feel proud for doing more than most of our peer institutions.
Sorry to ruin your day, but that's not enough. It's impossible to achieve 100 percent efficiency on anything you recycle; every piece of paper you put into that little blue bin of moral superiority in your room still wastes some resources. Luckily enough, trees continue to grow, but other resources are more difficult to come across. Batteries can't be harvested from the organic farm.
The only way to make our consumerist lifestyle viable is, well, not to be so consumerist. This is called "reducing." The College itself isn't very good at this. Just take a gander at Baker Tower and Dartmouth Hall at 10 p.m. tonight. In spite of the natural tendency for things to become dark at night, those two landmarks seem to be constantly illuminated by blinding spotlights worthy of a used-car lot. I suppose one could make the case that people read the time off of Baker Tower, but do we really need to make sure that everyone passing the Green can see Dartmouth Hall? It's almost as if we're trying to show off to ourselves.
It might seem easy enough for the College to turn off some lights, but it's even easier for you to make small changes to reduce the amount of resources you use. I'm sure you've seen and guiltily chuckled at the sign in FoCo, but really, how difficult is it to say "for here" when you intend to eat there? Sure it's convenient to walk down the stairs to your dorm's vending machine, but do you really need a bag of chips, or are you just trying to distract yourself from your papers?
Of course, making a series of infinitesimally small changes like that is not like a mathematical integral; ultimately, if we want to change the direction our environment is headed, some larger lifestyle changes are going to have to be made. The College should be willing to work with students on remodeling dormitories, because there's no reason for radiators to be right next to windows. Professors should be working with students to find alternatives to printing hundreds of pages of Blackboard assignments per term. Students should be willing to work with students on not using cars to traverse pointlessly short distances and on eliminating all of those nonsensical electric doohickeys we have in our dorms for the sake of decoration. I swear, if I had a nickel for every dorm I've seen with Christmas lights year-round -- well, I'd probably have a couple of bucks or something.
The culture of the recycling bin has made us believe that if we just change the color of the wastebasket into which we throw our garbage, environmental concerns will disappear. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that we are using far too many resources as it is, and Dartmouth students, along with the rest of the population, need to learn how to live within the means that Mother Earth has provided us.
