Photo Credit: Jonathan Rausseo
So, I raved and ranted just a tiny bit in the last blog, but to be honest, I was incredibly frustrated with the way the 101 Week turned out, with regards to recycling and general respect for the milieu.
Socially, the week was a tremendous success, despite the offensively hideous weather. I believe that the reason why our 101 Week was less successful in regards to campus sustainability is the fact that the guides were not put in a position where they cared enough to act accordingly themselves, let alone influence the 101ers positively. This negative attitude began with guide training, where the individuals training the incoming guides flipped through all the slides concerning campus sustainability as though they were entirely irrelevant to the rest of the presentation.
The fact is, they’re not. If the trainers don’t care, then we have no reason to. The chain of apathy continues, and voila! Now the 101ers don’t care either. Once you’ve already dismissed the topic, it becomes exponentially harder to motivate people to actually concern themselves with it. We’ve basically tied our legs together before the race has begun.
Okay, so that’s out of my system. The fact of the matter is that we’ve taken some pretty substantial steps on campus, like the banning of bottled water and plastic bags, but these amazing things are still under the radar. In any case, progress is slow, but it’s still progress!
-vedrana