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News & Views

Oberlin College rated greenest
When I opened up the recent Sierra Club survey of the 10 Coolest Schools, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Three of the colleges at which I studied were in the top six, and Oberlin College (Ohio), my main institute of higher learning was Number One!

Duke University in Durham, N.C., where I got my master’s in education and romance languages, came in fifth, and Middlebury, (Vermont) where I did graduate work in Italian, was sixth. And while it took me a long time to be a tree hugger, I have learned to understand global warming through my beloved animals. The polar bears and the penguins will be the first to go if we don’t react and help the planet from burning up.

According to the Sierra Club, “Oberlin College's environmental accomplishments are music to a tree hugger's ears. A third of the food served in its dining halls is produced locally, the school hosts the first car-sharing program in Ohio, student activity fees subsidize public transportation, and half of its electricity comes from green sources. A real-time monitoring system tracks 17 dorms and displays how much juice all those laptops, blenders, and iPod chargers are burning at any moment. Last spring, Oberlin held its first ecofriendly commencement, with biodegradable utensils and programs printed on 100 percent recycled paper.”

Duke has mandated certification by the U.S. Green Building Council for all new construction, improved on-campus bike trails, collected 17 types of recyclables, and poured money into wind and small hydropower projects, according to the Sierra Club.

At Middlebury, the school that spawned the national Step It Up protests against global warming. students lobbied hard for the $11 million biomass plant now being built. This will help make Middlebury carbon neutral by 2016. They've also convinced residence halls to lower their thermostats two degrees in the winter; exchanged more than 2,000 incandescent light bulbs for energy-efficient ones; and worked with the college's ski facility, the Snow Bowl, to offset its carbon dioxide emissions. Wood used in on-campus construction comes from sustainable, local forestry operations, and a ten-kilowatt wind turbine provides power to Middlebury's recycling facility, which has helped divert more than 55 percent of the college's waste since 1994.

The other winners were Harvard University in Boston, Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, N.C. (3), University of California System in 10 locations, (4), Berea College, Kentucky; (7) Pennsylvania State, 24 locations (8), Tufts University, in Medford, Mass., (9) and Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh.

It’s interesting to note that North Carolina (Duke and Warren Wilson) and Pennsylvania, (Penn State and Carnegie Mellon), the state where my mother grew up and where my brother now lives, and Massachusetts,(Harvard and Tufts) each had two winners, followed by one each from Ohio, Vermont, California and Kentucky. Where was New York in this, or my adopted state of Florida, or the progressive eastern state of Connecticut? Yale, UConn, where art thou?

While those of us who studied at some of these schools may not have had an environmental consciousness, at Oberlin, at least, we were on the cutting edge of civil rights, international relations, social equality (no fraternities and no cars) women’s rights, and, a bit later, gay rights. I feel that the values that made me choose these colleges and the continued values that they gave me have led to all my advocacy, and to the one that consumes me today, the animal rights movement, the latest step in speaking out about justice for all.



Reindeer protest Sears forest destruction
What would Santa Claus do without reindeer?

At an orderly carol-singing protest in a Pennsylvania Sears store, some “reindeer” gave shoppers a glimpse of what would happen if commerce destroyed their habitats by continuing to print catalogues.

Animal activists wearing antlers pranced about protesting that Sears, Lands’ End and K-Mart print over 400 million catalogs a year on mostly unrecycled paper, destroying their forests. The demonstrators from The Voices for Animals of Western Pennsylvania noted that they represented caribou, the real name for reindeer.

They lamented that Sears was cutting down their forests to the tune of “Winter Wonderland,” claiming that over 425 million catalogs Sears mails are cut from endangered forests. These include the North American Boreal, home to hundreds of indigenous communities and critical habitat for half of North America’s species of migrating songbirds as well as caribou.