The Unity Project and the University are working together this week to encourage community members to sign a sustainability pledge. Photo by Scott Miles
The University’s second annual Earth Week began yesterday, as students, faculty and administrators seek to promote awareness of steps that can be taken to protect the environment.
“Earth Week got started in recognition of the breadth of sustainability efforts being led among units and faculty across Grounds,” said Ida Lee Wootten, director of Community Relations.
In addition to Earth Week events, some of the most notable sustainability efforts on Grounds include the creation of an interdisciplinary Global Sustainability minor in February and the launch of Sustainability Partners, a volunteer network of employees interested in promoting environmentally friendly workplace practices.
The celebration of Earth Week was started last year by the Unity Project, a student led initiative, University Sustainability Outreach Coordinator Nina Morris said. Her department teamed up with the Unity Project to raise awareness about Earth Week.
“The main goal is really just to bring people together around sustainability and have a good time,” Morris said.
Another important goal involves recruiting students to sign the sustainability pledge, Wootten said. The effort, which asks students to consider the “social, economic, and environmental impacts of [their] habits,” aims to gain about 140 more pledge takers by Earth Day Friday to meet a goal of 1,000 pledges.
Various events promoting sustainability efforts are scheduled throughout the week, including an art exhibition based on sustainable materials and a “farm to fork” luncheon with food made from 100 percent local products, said Kendall Ann Singleton, sustainability coordinator for University Dining Services.
“By way of the events we are trying to raise awareness,” Singleton said, “From the dining perspective, we are excited to be involved with U.Va. sustainability as a whole.”
Other activities include a Green Career Fair Wednesday and a panel discussion titled, “Lessons from the Lost Glaciers: Technology, Capitalism, and Nature,” Thursday featuring author Janisse Ray. The No Impact concert, a concert without light or amplified sound, will take place Friday, marking the end of the week of events.
What a joke.
UVA students are, by and large, among the most consuming and consumerist people around here. And that includes energy. They use far more electricity than students did just 20 years ago, with all their electronic gadgets (most have at least 5). They fly to Florida beaches or New Orleans for Spring Break, and Europe for the summer. They consume clothes, boots, handbags, and jewelry like it’s the air they breathe. They drink coffee – imported en masse from other continents – by the gallon every week.
Their university regularly tears down perfectly good buildings and replaces them. Or renovates them for – what? How many millions?
Events like this really show just how clueless people can be around here. UVA has been consuming more and more energy for year after year now. Far more than in days past. This is all just a silly, politically motivated charade.
If the sky is indeed falling from consumerist consumption of electricity and fossil fuels, well then the sky is indeed going to fall. Nobody around here will be handing in their iPhones or being caught dead with a purse that is over 6 months old. There is nothing in any of these proposals that would even begin to counteract the energy consumed by the internet. Nevermind all the other things that nobody will around here will be changing.
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Sean, what do you do with yourself when the Cav Daily is out of print? Better get some new hobbies.
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10 or 15 minutes minutes every other day or so doesn’t put too much of a dent in my schedule. It is worthwhile to show some folks a mirror now and then, and point out to them some canyon sized flaws in what they are being force fed at UVA. I enjoy it, for sure. But the lack of any substantive retort or counter debate to my points surely gives some pause to consider why it is they are being fed such one sided and incomplete an education regarding so many important issues.
Can YOU, oh sad one, offer up anything to counter my point that internet usage alone has made the idea of using less energy than we did 20 years ago a pipe dream? Are YOU ready to forgo all air travel, electronic gadgets, and your night to save the planet from immenent destruction? Are YOU going to rise and fall with the sun, and grow your own food like people used to? My point is that the UVA lifestyle is a great example of people pretending to care about an issue – and even say it may destroy us all – until such time as they might have to dramatically change THEIR lifestyle. It has not, and will not, happen.
Or is this just the latest installment of the Ivy Tower trying to scare everyone into thinking the sky is falling – and that the only way to save the planet is to………vote the way they want you to?
I’ve seen this movie before. A nuclear freeze was the only way out of world armageddon. Then the stock market crash in 1987 was going to be the end of free market life as we knew it. El Salvador was going to ignite World War 3. And so on.
Do you really even think that these academics are going to stop jetting all over the world during their 4 months off a year? If indeed they are right that carbon is going to kill us all, then they will be taking part in the bloodbath. I refer you to Al Gore’s $30,000 utility bill the year he qon the Nobel Prize.
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I think Sean is right, more abortions are probably the only way to reduce energy use.
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You could just kill yourself, and your “carbon footprint” would vanish altogether.
If you are indeed the “best and brightest” that you call yourselves, how come you can’t debate or defend your positions on topics you find so important? How come it is so easy to point out the gaping holes in your philosophy, and point out such obvious hypocrises?
Why is this so easy?
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I’m not the best and brightest of anything. I’m just a douchebag non-student who likes to make stupid comments here. That’s OK isn’t it? I mean the first comment hasn’t been removed, so it must be…
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See what I mean?
They can’t even begin to explain how they might envision a world where they would actually counter the energy they consume on, say, facebook alone!
All they can do is call people schoolyard names and beg the sensors to bail them out. Talk about pathetic..
(Reminder: I could walk right into UVA any time I so pleased with my two degrees and my GP via the Guaranteed Admission Agreement. I choose not to.)
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