Greening the curriculum

As this year’s community relations intern for the sustainability committee, I attended Bioneers Conference hoping to pick up tips on how to “green” our operations at Vassar. This year, the sustainability committee has several initiatives in the making, including perfecting and expanding the Retreat composting program, launching a campaign to encourage students to drink from the tap and use reusable water bottles, and implementing programs to reduce energy consumption in academic buildings as well as decrease waste in student-organized events.

But I was curious to know what the experts thought. What changes really need to be made in our colleges and how can we approach them?

In that spirit, I attended an afternoon session titled “Transforming Higher Education for the Age of Climate Change”. The speakers stressed that higher education can play a key role in the green movement because it is responsible for shaping our senators, journalists, CEO’s, basically the LEADERS of our society. Higher education has produced the people who have led us down the wrong path and it has the potential to turn out a generation of climate champions to set things right. Also, it is a large economic engine. In the US, colleges and universities manage 2.8% of GDP which means they can create important markets for green jobs and services.

Interestingly, the speakers seemed to agree that there was a trend: while there has been a significant move on the part of higher education institutions to transform their operations, there have hardly been any efforts to transform their curricula. So far, colleges have failed at fundamentally “greening” the education of all their students. Generally, environmental education is limited to students majoring in the field, an average of 5% of graduates.

At Vassar, we have geothermal heating in Davison and photovoltaic panels on the roof of Main. We now have pre- as well as post-consumer composting systems at ACDC and the Retreat. These are important initiatives and we need many more. But we also need to address the “learning” aspect of our institution of higher learning. How can Vassar begin to turn out environmentally conscious graduates – potential agents for change?

We need to make sure that all students understand the Earth’s basic functions. We need to offer and take classes that expose the largely invisible connections between human activity and environmental outcomes. Academics should challenge the idea that nature is there to serve us and teach us how to live off nature’s income, not its capital!

A “sustainability requirement”, anyone? I think it’s something we should consider.

Bioneers is over. Time for backpacking around San Francisco!

So Bioneers is over, technically. The point is that, in our heads, it isn´t. We have to carry the message on and live it and spread it and change the world.
On Sunday night, we had a last communal dinner, all five of us. We boiled a rich soup with lentils and potatoes and lots of kale. We cleaned up and we packed. The next morning, Danielle, Nadine, Charlene and I got on the ferry to the city. Vanessa didn´t come with us; she decided to stay at her sister´s house for a few more days. Charlene, on the other hand, continued on towards Berkeley. So suddenly it was me, Nadine and Danielle, the three of us in San Francisco, trying to figure out the public transportation system. Three girls with backpacks alone in this great West Coast city for three days.
We decided to stay at the cheapest hostel in town and to walk around and explore the parks and the museums and the streets.
We’ve begun to see everything from an environmentalist perspective. The first thing that we took a picture of in San Fran was a compost bin.
They have compost bins here! We had to do serious work to install a couple of those in the Retreat at Vassar, and it was a big deal, whereas here people compost everything possible, everywhere. Also, the transportation system. It works! You can get anywhere in SF by means of a trolley bus that says zero emissions vehicle on the side. Some of those also display ‘save nature’ messages in English and Spanish. An ad on the outside of one bus encouraged people to only do laundry when they have a full load.
Anyway, Nadine and Danielle and I took our meager luggage and got on a bus and traveled from the corporate part of town, through the hip part of town, all the way to an overlooked Latin neighborhood. We entered the dubious El Capitan hostel, allegedly an old 1906 theater building. It costs about 17 bucks a night, and looks dingy and worn-down. It’s just what we wanted - a place to crash for non-pretentious gals like us. Plus, there are good, cheap Mexican restaurants and thrift stores in the area.
We left our stuff in the room and we decided to walk. San Francisco is such a walkable city. Palms line the streets and, since it´s very hilly, you get great vistas of the parks and the architecture below and above you. On every corner, there are tiny cafes and grocery stores that sell things like freshly blended cranberry-pear juice. A McDonald´s is harder to find than local, organic produce. People here know how to live. One special place that lights up the entire city is the Castro - a neighborhood famous as the center of LGBT culture. Rainbow flags line the streets there, and the people look fabulous.
It´s fascinating how much and how good street art there is in this city. We saw a huge mural of funky flying houses – a dream city where you can slide down along a pipe to your friends’ place. We were also fascinated by a women´s center whose entire exterior walls were covered in flourishing images of diverse women and girls embracing each other, and of suns, and flowers…
It seems that, in San Fran, civil society – that wonderful concept many of the speakers at Bioneers talked about - is happening. People here talk to each other while they wait for the bus; they unite with their neighbors and paint images of a better world on their walls, and they compost, and they want to progress together. As we learned at Bioneers, to live better, we have to work together. It´s all about grassroots political engagement. Ah, this is the kind of city I want to live in. A sunny, bright city of mural artists and community organizers and hipsters who sell organic fruit smoothies during the day and gather to campaign against ocean pollution in the evening. You may say I’m a dreamer, but, man, I’m not the only one. Here, in San Francisco, you can feel some of that 60s vibe down the block.

What we're watching at Bioneers

Food, Inc.

(P.S. - Vassar Greens will be showing this film at Vassar in collaboration with Vassar Animal Rights Coalition and ViCE film league later this fall)

Genre: Documentary
Cast: Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser 
Director: Robert Kenner
Writer: Robert Kenner
Studio: Magnolia Pictures 

Plot:
An unflattering look inside America's corporate controlled food industry.

The Story of Stuff

(P.S. - The Vassar Greens showed this last year during Earth Month :)

Dirt! The Movie!

Official Site: www.dirtthemovie.org - directed and produced by Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow, DIRT takes you inside the wonders of the soil. It tells the story of Earth's most valuable and underappreciated source of fertility--from its miraculous beginning to its crippling degradation.

Earth Days

It is now all the rage in the Age of Al Gore and Obama, but can you remember when everyone in America was not Going Green? Visually stunning, vastly entertaining and awe-inspiring, Earth Days looks back to the dawn and development of the modern environmental movement—from its post-war rustlings in the 1950s and the 1962 publication of Rachel Carsons incendiary bestseller Silent Spring, to the first wildly successful 1970 Earth Day celebration and the subsequent firestorm of political action.

Earth Days secret weapon is a one-two punch of personal testimony and rare archival media. The extraordinary stories of the eras pioneers—among them Former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall; biologist/Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich; Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand; Apollo Nine astronaut Rusty Schweickart; and renewable energy pioneer Hunter Lovins—are beautifully illustrated with an incredible array of footage from candy-colored Eisenhower-era tableaux to classic tear-jerking 1970s anti-litterbug PSAs. Directed by acclaimed documentarian Robert Stone (Oswald's Ghost, Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst) Earth Days is both a poetic meditation on humanity's complex relationship with nature and an engaging history of the revolutionary achievements—and missed opportunities—of groundbreaking eco-activism.

For more information and to find out where to see the film visit http://www.earthdaysmovie.com

Farmer's Market: The Back to the Land Movement

We walked out of a plenary session earlier today and sneaked out to a farmers’ market that was happening close to the conference. There were bouncy castles and many kids, and hip tattooed farmers selling Italian and French bread. There were chairs hand-painted in flower patterns for sale, and a treasure trove of earrings, and cheese samplings, and grapes, and California berries, and ice-cream. Michael Pollan’s dream of local food networks, of the people, by the people, for the people, was happening right here. What a beautiful and flavorful way to take a shortcut around the corporations and share some nourishing food with your neighbors. It adds some value to the food that could never be translated into a barcode or a calorie count (“Beyond the Barcode” is the name of a talk Pollan once gave).

We got kale and tomatoes and potatoes for a stew tonight. We tried some fabulous cheese with herbs. We also couldn’t resist some pita stuffed with spinach paste and lentils, and a yogurt dip spiced with garlic and spearmint. I never knew garlic and mint went together so well. We ate our hearts out. Also, we felt connected. We were part of a gentle revolution happening on the land and in people’s kitchens.

The movie that we saw yesterday night, Earth Days, featured some 60s footage of naked hippie people tilling a strip of land, picking squash, and dancing. The voiceover commentary explained that the “back to the land” part of the environmental movement had not been too successful; nobody from those upper-middle class, college-educated people actually knew how to sustain him- or herself on the land. Anyone who tried had to give up in a couple of years.

Today, however, the “back to the land” movement is alive and well. In fact, it might be a few of the things we are doing better than back in the 60s and 70s. There are progressive hippie farmers out there, but they know what they are doing and many of them start successful businesses. Organic Valley, one of Bioneers’ sponsors, is the largest farmer-owned union of organic farms, and they are doing a great job. (Nobody is paying me to mention this. For the first time in my life, I actually feel like praising a business and supporting a brand, because I feel like they are worth it.)
When I came to Vassar a year ago, I was surprised by the fact that many people wanted to become farmers when they get out of college. I met a girl who just stayed on the Vassar Farm after she graduated. I recently met a guy named Andrew who wants to move to Latin America and establish an organic farm there. I know two other guys who participated in the Volunteers on Organic Farms program. Also, a family friend back in Bulgaria, my home country, recently dropped out of university to start an earthworm farm that would produce compost. What is going on? Having grown up in a city, I never even knew that was an option. It seemed retrograde to me to leave academia and go milk cows. Now I realize how wrong I was.

Getting involved with sustainable agriculture is a very progressive thing to do. It involves lots of critical thinking, initiative, and willpower. Also, it is moral and modern. Pollan said it: we need millions more farmers so that we can establish a new localized, diverse, intelligent food system. Local farms and farmers’ markets are today the bright vision of the future that skyscrapers were in the beginning of the 20th century. A folksy scene of bouncy castles and locally made pastries is the way I envision utopia.

Eater of Death

Each morning, between the plenary speeches and activists, there are talented performers that reinforce the message of saving the planet through their art. Saturday morning’s performance was the spoken word artist Shailja Patel who told the story of a woman in Afghanistan who lost her husband and six children at breakfast one morning to a US air strike. Her poem, “Eater of Death”, shook me and truly left me speechless.

She gave unbelievable descriptions of this poor mother who, after her family was ripped away from her, had to stay in an area set up by US troops for the survivors of the bombing. She was given packages that, like the bombs that had destroyed her family and her life earlier that week, were yellow and stamped with an American flag. She was forced to eat the food from those packages, as Patel described, to eat her children; the children that had grown inside of her, that she had named. The deaths of these children would not be recognized. They would not be remembered in the paper and no memorial would be constructed in their honor. Why? Because they were not American.

My description does not do her performance justice. As I listened to her words I felt the pain of that Afghani mother and the frustration of knowing that, in a world where economic power and bombs determine status, her children were seen as a disposable casualty in a greater war for democracy. Her children were less important than the American children. Patel exclaimed, through the mother’s mouth, “Have you no mothers, no children in America?”. Her words opened my eyes and made me ashamed to be associated with those that had dropped the bombs and destroyed so many lives. I wondered how people in America can wave their flags and exclaim their patriotism. How can they be proud to be American when it is associated with so much violence and destruction?

What I’ve realized is that we cannot focus only on the terrible things that have happened. Rather, we must join together to end the unjust destruction of Afghanistan and other countries and create a global community. Community has been a major motif of this conference because the environmental movement will not be successful unless it is a global effort. Climate change is going to affect every single living thing on this planet and it is largely the fault of major industrial nations, like the United States, that we have reached this pivotal point in the history of our planet. So the question remains, will we put aside our differences and forget the hatred or will we continue to drop bombs, destroying families and all chances at a global movement toward sustainable living?

Read Shailja Patel’s full poem here: http://shailja.com/work/eaterofdeath.html

Your health depends on the earth's health; Your health depends on your emotional health

“We need to debate health care, not health insurance!” Applause infects the audience as Dr. Andrew Weil begins to command the stage. “We don’t have a health care system, we have a disease management system.”

As a pre-med student aspiring to work as a doctor, these are sobering words, and yet they make so much sense. These days, we are trained to treat everything with pharmaceuticals. Not just doctors, who are rarely instructed in non-pharmaceutical treatments, but as consumers, we are constantly bombarded with the drug life style. The term Medicine itself, which as the good doctor Weil instructed us, used to mean “thoughtful action to establish order”, has now become synonymous with drugs. Today, ten times more drugs are used than were in the 1950s, and we are as much responsible as the companies.

So what does this have to do with the environment? Well, dependence on pharmaceuticals and expensive, unnecessary machinery isn’t the only thing driving up health care. As I learned from Dr. Russel Jaff at an afternoon session on “Integrative Medicine, Environmental health, and the Transformation of Health Care”, an absolutely astounding 92% (NINETY-TWO PERCENT!!!!) of ill health can be traced to life-style, while only 8% is genetic. This life style can be dissected in any number of ways, but ultimately has to do with our disconnection from the earth.

We suffer from poor nutrition as we practice damaging agricultural systems that destroy the earth and produce fewer healthy foods. Even the fruits and vegetables we grow today are less nutritious than those we grew a century ago. We are also suffering from our sedentary lifestyle, brought about by the wave of industry that allowed us to drive cars, take elevators, and work in offices instead of on the land. We also suffer tremendously from the chemicals we pump into the environment, and which we then breathe, and drink, and eat. "Carcinogens cause cancer" Annie Leonard reminded us. There is probably NO "safe" level for these chemicals.

Despite this overwhelming figure (92%... REALLY), we only spend 2-10% of research money on issues of lifestyle, and in finding solutions to evoke natural healing responses.

So back to the “medicine.” We have adopted a reductionist view of the human body as an imperfect machine that inevitably breaks down, and so needs fixing. We need to readopt an integrative view that acknowledges that our body is already perfect, and we need only protect it and maintain the miraculous system it already is.

According to Dr. Weil, health is an inner state of balance and resilience that we are born with. When we are healthy, we can fall and our body will repair the skin, we can interact with bacteria and not get infected, we can be exposed to viruses and not get sick. Our body can do this already, all we need to do is provide it with an environment conducive to good health. The power of nature to restore the body and calm the mind, has been proven for millennia, and is even now being proven using scientific techniques.

Your mental health is often ignored when looking at your physical health, but consider this study: A group of Harvard students was exposed to a strain of the common flu. Now, we can expect that these students already lead very stressful lives, and so their immune systems are already down and statistically, they should get sick. Half of the group that was exposed to the strain was told to just go out and live their lives, and as a no brainer, they got the cold. Duh. But the other half of the group was shown an inspiring film about Mother Teresa and the power of human compassion. And guess what? Students in this group were significantly less likely to contract the cold. Further studies showed that simply feeling compassion is enough to rev your immune system for hours, and to elevate your immune system’s response for weeks.

Perhaps if we had more faith and hope in humanity, and allowed ourselves more love and rejoice in the earth, we could finally allow ourselves to heal ourselves. We could create a system of caring for our health, instead of having to insure it.

The Mountain View

Last night, after watching "Earth Days" by Robert Stone at the tail end of a long, invigorating day full of big ideas and seemingly impossible projects, I became so confused and depressed and concerned for the sake of the world, that I actually wanted to give up. I told myself: just give up, drop our of school, live on a farm, forget about the world's larger problems. But I knew that I could never forget, and I could never escape my personal anguishing and yearning to make a difference. So in the growing darkness, I climbed to the top of the hill where we had all traveled as a group that morning when dawn was just breaking. And I wrote. The reflection was necessary, and this morning I awoke with a renewed passion to make change.

Here is a bit of what ran through my mind on that hill in the night:


For millennia, humans have been heading to the mountains in search of wisdom. Perhaps that's simply because mountains give you the best vantage point. Sitting at the precipice of the world, you can examine a scene in which all the details bled together to give you one whole image- one single manifestation of the question. And from that oneness, we seek the truth.

As I write this, I sit on top of a hill in the Marin headlands. I’ve come here because my mind is full of questions, full of doubts, full of the re-realization of the magnitude of the environmental issues I am meant to solve.

Before me, I see our mother nature’s luscious peaks curving down to the sacred valley from which point springs forth the ocean. Out to the horizon stretches the Pacific, obscured only by fog, rolling gently up the bank, and winding up the slopes to feed the hills’ verdant offspring.

Behind me stretches the Golden Gate bridge: a feat of man-made brilliance, and dazzling in the night as its lights extend across the water. The vision of the bridge connecting to the equally well-lit city of San Francisco enlivens the senses, as the sight of stars and moonlight on the water must have long ago.

But as one of these vistas expands, gorging itself on the wastes and excesses of ill-conceived human ingenuity, the other pales. The rolling fog spreading up the hills is smog, and trash washes up on mother’s naked shores. And all things we can’t see, greenhouse-gas-intangibles, waft around us; mustard gas that slowly asphyxiates us even if we ignore its presence.

In the 1960s, we already knew this. We could already see the effects of unchecked growth and a human-centric relationship with the earth. In the 1960s, we already had the solutions. We had electric cars, we had solar panels, we had wind turbines. In the 1960s, we had social will. We had people returning to the earth, people demanding responsible action, people seeking change. And in the 1960s we had political will. We had clean air acts, clean water acts, clean energy acts, and in 1970, we had Earth Day. And by 1980, we had nothing. Nothing except political rhetoric, empty of all the words used to mean to a generation.

A movement that developed over 30 years collapsed as another portion of Americans fought back to maintain our way of life in the face of a movement that seemed to drain this life of all that was familiar. “Why should we destroy all that we care about America!” people cried out from both sides. “Why should we compromise one American vista, the Golden Gate bridge, a symbol of our way of life,” some shouted. “Why should we destroy the natural world around us that we depend on for our very lives,” others pleaded in return.

From here on the hill, I hear the hooting of the owls, the fog-horns of ships, the chirping of crickets, and the distant rumbling of cars. And together they form what my brain knows as the sounds of life. These sounds are equal parts of the land in which I was raised. But which sounds do I value more, and which sounds are more deserving of protection? And how can that possibly be done.

The problem with seeking wisdom on mountains, is that the view from the top is too expansive. The problem is too huge, the forces at work too plentiful and powerful, to possibly be changed. Staring at the magnitude of the issue is overwhelming, over burdening, and ultimately debilitating. It traps you out on the mountain’s edge, unable to climb back down, but unable to leap; unable to go forth and solve the problems you cared for so deeply to begin with.
But if you never ventured to that mountain at all, how would you know the vastness of what is at stake?

Today, at the Bioneers Conference, I was first stimulated by the beauty of nature, then inspired by the work of humans to protect that beauty, then frustrated by the complexities of the seemingly simple solutions, and then utterly depressed by the knowledge that we’ve been here before. They tell me that the next ten years will be crucial, and that we have to mobilize within that time or face near-certain loss of our existence- no just our way of life. And while it is at some level invigorating- The Time is Now! We are Ready! We Have the Solutions! –it is at the same instance terrifyingly, paralyzingly daunting.

But we must have hope. The country was mobilized before. And we must have hope that we’ve learned since then. We can move forward when we stop dwelling on our failures and our insecurities. As Joanna Macy reminded us today, we need to awaken to the gifts of uncertainty. “When you recognize that hopefulness and hopelessness are just feelings,” you stop putting so much weight on them, she tells us. “You don’t stop David on his way to battling Goliath and ask him ‘Are you hopeful?’”

They say our generation is one of idealists without hope. We must retain that piece of naïve idealism if we are going to maintain our hope and energy for change. Never underestimate the power of your motivation. Without that drive, we have nothing to intend, and so we have nothing. Listen to the ache, to the all-consuming drive that sits in the folds of your body and cries- what can I do. And never fall to the world’s desire to pathologize your pain, because it is that pain that will drive your strength.

We must descend from the mountains, and learn to find truth in the small details of the universe, with the uncertain faith that they add up to the big picture we know instinctively.

But we must still continue to climb! We cannot look only at the details, as it gives us the distorted sense that we can pick and choose the solutions that are comfortable or convenient for us. We must climb the mountains and see the world as it is, and appreciate the size and the weight of our efforts.

Every small-scale solution that I’ve heard of this weekend sounds fantastic, sounds perfect, sounds like the answer to all our problems. We need to reform agriculture, we need to stop the proliferation of chemicals, we need biomimicry technology, we need to preserve wilderness, we need to abolish a culture based on consumption, and we need to embrace not only biodiversity, but our own diversity and human community. But do I have the power as only one person to support it all? If we don’t embrace all the solutions together under one agenda, there are simply too many to hold up on our own.

But again, we must reawaken our hope! Annie Leonard taught us today that 70% of Americans are sympathetic with environmental issues. That is a higher percentage that supporters of abolition, or women’s rights, or other movements of equality and justice. Here we can find our new optimism. We need only invigorate this 70% to become active, in any one of the possible pillars of environmental action we will need to lift ourselves from our descent.

We have so much to do. But as I sit here on the hill, I know that the solutions must start with the understanding that this landscape has thrived without the Golden Gate bridge, and will thrive again without it, but that this great bridge, and all the human ingenuity and history that went into it, could never have been without the mountains and the valleys and the birthing water stretching to the dawn.