Lula Burke, Editor-in-Chief—
Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking to my friend Sarah in the library. We had a wonderful conversation about her trip abroad, our summer research interests, and our weekend plans. Sarah is the same major as me, and inevitably, our conversation hit a sour note. I remember her saying, “The environment is so important to me. How do other people not feel that?”
Environmental science is a passion that I didn’t know I had. In a single two-hour oceanography class, my entire college career fell into place. This was what I had been missing in my political science classes. This was the “emptiness” I felt in philosophy. It was real; It was tangible.
This passion can sometimes be a horrible sickness. Every styrofoam cup and plastic fork makes me sick to my stomach. I have been brought to tears thinking about the exhaust from my car. When I can’t make coffee in my room, I torture myself with a RedBull solely because aluminum is infinitely recyclable. When I had a terrible case of food poisoning, I still made myself take the stairs up to my third-floor apartment.
The point of this is not that individual consumer actions are going to fix all of our environmental issues–We know that is not true. The point of this is that I am infuriated by a sense of carelessness on our campus. You hope to work on Wall Street, but asking for a greenie is “too much work”? You major in philosophy, but “who cares! Out of sight, out of mind.” Do you have this mindset when you’re reading Descartes or researching the housing crisis? God, I hope not.
To me, this carelessness represents something even more sinister: Environmentalism has turned into somewhat of a joke. Freshman year, one of my friends purposefully selected a new plastic cup every time he wanted water at dinner, solely because it made me mad. What is the purpose of that? It represents something deeper. To many, it seems that climate and waste issues are detached from everyday life. Does this detachment affect your other interests?
I hope that these individuals are prospering in their respective studies. During my time at Denison, I’ve seen a loss of passion. Maybe I’ve just grown older, and my classmates have grown more tired and more ready to move onto the next stage of life. I hope that students feel sick to their stomachs about investigative journalism and biochemistry. Making the world a better place is the work of politicians, artists, scientists, philosophers and individuals. However, our environment is at the heart of it all. You cannot be progressive without acknowledging the importance of our environment in every facet of our lives.
How will you possibly succeed in life if the smallest of personal tasks is too much Work?
Who are you, if you don’t care?