News
Editor's Note: This is the second in a series of five articles about Dartmouth and the environment.
Environmental advocacy is more popular than the average student may suspect.
"There's a huge group of students involved in the environment at Dartmouth," said Oliver Bernstein '03, who was coordinator for the Tucker Foundation-affiliated Environmental Conservation Organization until last term.
These students have a diverse set of perspectives and backgrounds on the issue, from engineers who are looking at the more technical aspects of environmental problems to students who want to change consumption habits, according to Charlie White '02, who has been involved in many environmental organizations.
The range of student organizations that are involved with environmental issues reflects this.
They run the gamut from the Dartmouth-centered, well-funded and highly coordinated ECO to the highly political Dartmouth Greens to Dartmouth's organic farm just north of campus.
ECO hires up to 20 paid interns that receive their funding from the different departments where these interns try to encourage sustainability, according Michael Ricci, the ECO faculty advisor.
This can be anything from printing intern Jeff Kemnitz's '03 efforts to improve GreenPrint, which ECO helped develop, to ECO Coordinator Brent Reidy's '05 looking at ways to decrease the amount of junk mail coming to students' Hinman Boxes.
ECO is more focused on Dartmouth-specific issues than the other student-run organizations here, said Reidy.
For example, the Environmental Studies Division of the Dartmouth Outing Club focuses equally on global environmental issues and educating those around the Upper Valley about the outdoors, Bernstein said.
Other groups include the Dartmouth Vegetarian Alliance, which works to improve the quality of life of Dartmouth vegetarians and vegans and to educate people on the merits of those diets, and the Ivy League Environmental Council, which works with schools outside Dartmouth.
