Over the last few years, this campus financially, academically, and aesthetically has made great strides. It is in the black unlike many institutions today, has many great professors, and is beautiful with new buildings and manicured grounds. Students, faculty, administration, and most importantly the leadership, past and present, deserve admiration. Yet we must not rest on our laurels. If we are not advancing, then we are retreating.

So what else is there to be done? Besides of course, more improvements in each of the above, we need to be concerned with the biggest problem facing our world today: global climate change. Each generation has a crisis. An hundred and fifty years ago it was slavery, seventy years ago it was fascism, and fifty years ago it was the threat of nuclear war. In comparison to all of those crises, this is the most difficult to confront. It involves the habits of over six billion people and their governments and businesses, spanning the entire world, from methane expending bovine in Iowa and the Central Valley, to highly inefficient coal stoves in the Sub-Saharan Africa, to the energy gulping Sky-Scrapers of Shanghai and New York, and yes, to the campus of University of the Pacific.

The consequences of global climate change will be serious. We do not yet know precisely what will happen, but scientists do agree that they will be grave. Certainly it will result in the flooding of low-lying lands and islands, where many of the poorest of the poor live. And it will cause more extremes in weather, making it harder on agriculture, especially for producers lacking western industrial age-technology. The picture is becoming more and more one where the rich west will be able to get by although we are not even sure of this but where the poor in Asia, South America, and Africa will be hit hard.

Our goal should then be to stop this from happening, being necessary from the perspective of both sympathy and prudence, as we indeed do not fully know what our habits will bring and it is always better to be safe than sorry. Our little campus does have its little habits that must be brought to bear under scrutiny. I have gone to the UC for two years now, usually once a day, and have been bothered day in and day out by something. The signs on the salad bar and on the website for the campus say that the UC is an environmentally friendly building but at the same time the building has at least ten TV’s on around nine hours every day of the week. How much energy do they consume? A lot, I suspect.

Since this is sustainability month and Michael Pollan and Bill McKibbin have been brought to us, speaking about what must be done to save the planet, I think it time to make this small change. Let’s shut off the TV’s. Not only are they bad on environmental grounds, but aesthetic and intellectual ones too. Consider what’s on them everyday: rap videos. This is a university, for goodness sake. Think Socrates, Shakespeare, and Newton, not Usher, 50 Cent, and Kesha.

In addition, I have been told by several professors that the WPC does not recycle. Now if we are having a sustainability month, and we are not doing what every residential household is doing, then the hypocrisy of this dog and pony show is nauseating, too nauseating to let slide even right before the summer. I ask every student to send an email or a letter to the President, telling her that we are better than this and do not need sedatives in the form of the TV, that we can talk instead, and that we will not be fooled into thinking that the administration cares about making a “green” campus when these easy steps of turning the TV’s off and recycling are not made.

Published in : Perspectives, Volume 101: Issue 31