As a rule, I am generally all about beating cultural trends into the ground. I still wear one of those silly Livestrong bracelets and love spelling wordz with the letter “z.” The recent obsession with “going green,” however, is more than even my out-of-touch self can take. Even more irksome is that our universities, which ostensibly uphold the ideals of the Enlightenment, have lowered themselves to the level of the “green” in an effort to appear cooler to the kidz.
The ultimate sign that “going green” has jumped the shark is that the Princeton Review added The Green Rating Honor Roll to its famed school rankings this year. The UW System’s exclusion from the list was not due to a lack of effort. UW-Stout announced last month it will now make its graduation gowns out of recycled plastic bottles. UW-Eau Claire has started a composting program in its dining halls. Here in Madison we have a forthcoming LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design)-certified south campus union and at the football games we even “Think Green, Wear Red.”
I would be remiss if I did not state that yes kidz, our generation is going to have to solve many environmental challenges. Parts of the world are already facing water shortages, deforestation and overcrowding. Overexploitation of resources will only worsen as the world population explodes to nine billion people by mid-century.
Universities would better fulfill their intellectual missions by avoiding the small thinking of the “go green” movement. I am 110 percent in favor of universities acting like the conformist liberal indoctrination centers they are frequently accused of being. Implementing a dorm composting program, however, is indoctrination into a small-thinking, girlie-man form of environmentalism.
If UW-Madison really wants to make the Green Rating Honor Roll for 2011, we could start teaching students a form of “subversive environmentalism” that challenges students to question the do-little status quo we are currently experiencing. Our campus has a history of being on the cutting edge of meaningful activism. What better place to start a new environmental movement than UW?
Students at UW came of age during a fairly prosperous period in American history, and for most of us environmentalism was embodied by the “50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth” mentality. We learned we could bask in economic prosperity and save the environment at the same time, without having to make any big sacrifices.
This easy environmentalism brought conservation into the mainstream, but it also led to environmental complacency. Subversive environmentalism would first challenge the notion that major environmental issues can be solved by individuals acting alone. Personal practices, such as turning the water off while you are brushing your teeth, are good. But they are not going to solve worldwide water shortages. Challenging these long-held beliefs will help students see that protecting a collective entity such as the environment requires mass-scale collective actions that are much more difficult and painful than individual choices.
Collective actions that protect the environment in the United States are often best implemented via political processes. Yet students’ political coming-of-age has occurred during a time of great cynicism. So inspiring students to use an often ineffective system to make positive changes would be a truly subversive act. But examples such as the Federal Clean Water Act and Wisconsin’s National Resources Administrative Codes show the government can be a source of successful environmental protection measures.
But as we have seen with the clustermess of cap-and-trade, the will of the vested interests in the status quo is usually much greater than those seeking change, making the aforementioned cynicism deeply ingrained. College graduates educated in the ways of subversive environmentalism would recognize the good that can come from government action and would give America more of a fighting chance to overcome the defeatist attitude we currently bring to these important legislative fights.
It is nice that going green is the new pink for Wisconsin’s universities. However, small gestures of environmentalism just reinforce the belief that complex environmental problems can be solved by simple actions. If universities are going to fulfill their missions of liberal indoct… errr… promoting the ideals of the Enlightenment, they would better serve our future by teaching students a subversive environmentalism that challenges the status quo.
Zachary Schuster ([email protected]) is a graduate student studying water resources engineering and water resources management. He would like to thank professor Pete Nowak for the idea of the ‘subversive environmentalist.’
