I’ve been doing that every year now for ten years in one of the parks or in my own back lot.”
For School of Art & Design junior Megan Touhey, the conflict of interests rings especially true while watching the Fishbowl printers spit out the hundreds of sheets of paper making up her class course packs, syllabuses and additional reading.
To keep her paper use to a minimum, Touhey said she tries to read all course materials online. But she finds that her computer’s glaring screen strains her eyes and its association with time-wasting activities leads her to distraction.
“The problem that reading online presents is the other stimulations that the brain associates with the computer, like Facebook and e-mail,” Touhey said. “It’s a lot harder to be distracted when you have a hard copy that you’re taking notes on.”
Foufopoulos, the SNRE professor, has also found that education and environmentalism conflict. But he said the awareness his students gain in class will have a more lasting impact on the environment than a few hundred course pack pages.
“If you are in the classroom, you are somewhat limited in the amount of green you can be,” Foufopoulos said. “You have to do what you have to do. We do what we can do, but what is more important is what we discuss and that we address these issues in class.”
But even the most traditional professors are realizing that their paper wasting ways can’t go on forever. At the beginning of the semester, the English department sent out an e-mail asking lecturers to curb their printing after the department used 1.1 million pieces of standard white paper in the 2008 fiscal year.
“To make this amount of paper, English has consumed 85 trees, 35,000 gallons of water, and 20 barrels of oil,” the e-mail said.
The list of suggestions included in the e-mail — reducing margins and font size, printing double-sided and reusing sheets — have been making their way into the classes of professors in every field even without a departmental mandate.
“I really get overwhelmed by the amount of paper that is wasted at this university,” said Olga Lopez-Cotin, a Spanish lecturer in the Residential College. “When my students have to print, I ask them to print on papers that people have already used.”
Lopez-Cotin also encourages students to purchase used and outdated editions of texts.
Many professors encourage students to read material online by making their course packs available only online rather than sending them to local printers.
“I try to move away from paper, and although we do use a text book, we used to have a course pack and now we put it on Course Tools so people can download it and view it onscreen,” Foufopoulos said. “If need be, they can print it out, but we’re not going to print it out for them.”
Foufopoulos decided to put course materials online after students pressured him to print less.
“When I suggest that we present information in a digital format instead of a printing out a course syllabus, I’ve done this because I think this is important and because I’ve gotten pressure from the students to do this,” he said.
Lopez-Cotin goes even further, making a point to encourage students to be more environmentally responsible in their own lives. Meeting mostly with freshmen for lunch and Spanish tutoring, she said she likes to make students think about the ecological implications of their daily decisions.
“A couple times a week I have lunch with students and we talk about how much they waste and why they eat in such large portions,” Lopez said.
Sara Adlerstein-Gonzalez, a lecturer in the School of Natural Resources and Environment, said she tries to reach out to students in disciplines that don’t involve environmental education.
“I love to teach Engineering students who wouldn’t normally know about the environment,” she said.
Since one of Adlerstein-Gonzalez’s passions is art, she has taken it upon herself to help art students become more environmentally conscious and thoughtful.
“I teach a class at the art school called Art Eco and the point of the class was to inspire students who would normally do art without considering the environment to get inspired with various artwork, to not only change themselves but to also change the people who look at their work,” Adlerstein-Gonzalez said. “It’s double teaching.”
But regardless of what professors teach in class, the University can’t fully take up the environmentalism banner until expectations of students are drastically altered. Until the English department can limit its printing to less than 1 million sheets, campus’s sustainable Dana Building won’t be more than a superficial showcase.