February 2006
Volume 1, Issue 5
The Sustainable Campus
The Newsletter of the Berea College
Sustainability and Environmental Studies Program
the Eco-Cup, a campus-wide high profile,
month-long competition to decrease
energy and water consumption, a green
newsletter, fraternity/sorority recycling,
and a Green Pledge dinner, where
graduating seniors pledge to maintain
environmentally friendly lifestyles.
Waste-Not is a less formal
program that enables students to
participate short-term in single projects.
Waste-Not makes trips to local elementary
schools, teaching environmental education
and planting trees, and serves as a voice of
the green student body to the
administration of the University.
The Eco-House is a small dorm
whose residents actively work to live more
sustainably. Eco-House residents act as an
example to others by composting food,
working in their garden, and doing
outreach activities.
SERP (Students fo r an
Environmentally Responsible President)
focuses its efforts on political change.
Our goal is to provide every
member of our diverse student body with
an avenue for environmental activism that
meets their particular interests. For
example, the math major who volunteered
Necessary Discontent
By Mary Bruce Gray, Haley Merrill,
Dr. Sid Brown and Dr. Lucia Dale
Mention peak oil or global
warming, and most students will simply
sh ru g th ei r shoulders. In o ur
conversations with student leaders from
across the South, it is apparent that their
main concern is the apathy of their
student bodies.
With its origin in the Greek
apatheia – not suffering – apathy is the
inability or refusal to experience pain.
Faced with seemingly intractable problems
such as global climate change, destruction
of ecosystems, and depletion of fossil
fuels, it’s natural to want to ignore them,
to avoid feeling the pain, to surrender to
apathy.
However, eschewing apathy,
deciding to feel the pain of environmental
problems also means letting yourself feel
connected to the environment and other
humans working for it. As environmental
activists, we’re not just asking people to
feel the pain associated with the suffering
of the earth, we’re offering people the
opportunity of feeling connected to the
earth, to other people, and responding to
the warning signals all about us.
Discontent is a necessary precursor to
action, and action is the antidote to
despair.
At Sewanee University, we have
developed several programs that provide
opportunities and inspiration for action,
and have helped us to combat apathy:
An Environmental Resident in
each dorm works to raise environmental
awareness and promote recycling.
Environmental Resident projects include
to develop the math formulas for
determining the winner of the Eco-Cup
inter-dorm competition. (Although, it was
her dorm that won the ping-pong table, so
maybe we should have had someone
check that math...) Another student’s
strong point is writing, so she started the
Sewanee Lorax, a newsletter
on environmental concerns
at Sewanee. It costs money,
hundreds of dollars, but we
did not let that get in our
way or even be seen as an
obstacle. We knew we’d get
the money somehow, and
we did.
A s w e g iv e
students (and faculty, staff,
and administration; even
members of the Board of
Regents) a variety of ways to actively
address the environmental crisis, we
encourage a more meaningful engagement
in the world. After all, some kind of
meaning is as necessary to us as oxygen.
Feeling the pain of a planet and then
acting to heal it is powerful meaning-
making.
Repression of pain deadens us.
Apathy isn’t fun, it’s not enlivening, it’s
not bright and hard and engaged. To
surrender to apathy is to surrender to
psychic numbing, and to a life less full.
Our goal? One hundred percent
of st ude nts, facul ty, staf f, an d
administration alive, active and engaged in
creating our sustainable future.
Haley Merrill, Mary Bruce Gray,
Dr. Lucia K. Dale, and Dr. Sid Brown are the
co-chairs and advisors of the Environmental
Residents at Sewanee: The University of the South,
Sewanee, Tennessee.
Attendees of Sewanee’s 2005 Green Pledge dinner.
