A: I’m involved on a variety of different levels. On a personal level I’m a vegan, which is a sort of lifestyle. Also, the school I go to supports environmental sustainability with the dining hall buying locally as much as possible and then buying free trade when they cannot buy locally. They also provide heating through wood pellet burning systems In my school community I’m also involved in the student government. I actually just passed a policy banning bottled water on campus and am now drafting one to regulating packaging of individual goods. This way we can make sure students can use necessary things like condoms, but not so much individual bags of potato chips and those sorts of things. I’m also involved on semi-national level. I was involved in the Obama campaign and am involved with Sierra Club 350.org. I’m currently about to go to the New York City CSD 18- UN conference, the commission on sustainable development. These conferences happen every year alternating between policy and planning sessions. This year is a planning year, where we are focusing on transport, chemical waste management, and the 10 yr framework that started in the Johannesburg negotiations.

A: I'm a first year student at College of the Atlantic and as a first year student you have to take an introduction to human ecology, which is their “nebulous major” and in that class they explore the core concepts of ecology more in depth. This year in their core course the focus was on water, where each class took a slightly different approach to looking at the subject. Some classes focused on culture aspects, scientifically and her class looked at it in relation to policy. In her class they looked at water in the sense of waste created in the bottling and transportation of it. But more so, we looked at the more integral issue that there is a limited supply of water in the world, where some places are water rich like Maine and some places don’t have a lot of water. And so we bottle water, which is a free resource- nobody really owns water and then we send it all over the world and people can make a profit off it. The way the system works in Maine is pretty archaic, not many other places use it other than Texas, and policy states that if you own land, you own all of the water underneath it. This completely ignores the fact that water flows and is connected so if you drain you aquifer you’re also going to effect rivers and many other things. Anyways the point in my talking about all of that is we have a lot of bottling plants in Maine including Nestle and Poland Springs who come in buy off a small portion of land and drain all of the aquifers in small towns and are able to make a huge profit by trading the bottled water. So there are a lot of issues as to how someone can commodity a resource that is essential to life. The policy that I pushed through our school government system related to those issues as a whole and was started in my core class, but finished on my own afterwards.

A: We generally define human ecology as the way humans interact with their environment, but that is really broad. It can be your physical environment, your political environment, your artistic environment, so everyone here defines it in a little bit of a different way. They approach it a slightly different way, but the thread that holds it all together is looking at everything through one lens where everything is connected. So, instead of thinking about things like math and art being completely separate and unrelated subjects, they look at how the two subjects intercept and then how they can be used to understand each other. Because ultimately problems in the world are dynamic and are not just going to have one mathematical solution or one artistic solution, it’s going to be a combination. So, we are trying to look at the world in that way, which is what human ecology means. I’m someone who is interested in perusing environmental policy and law and so human ecology major is great for me. It allows me to look at law and policy in relation to scientific backgrounds that are pertinent to the major as well as other things such as political science and economics. These issues are multi-faceted so it is great to be able to look at them in that way.

A: I don’t know, I can’t think of anything I do that sets me apart from anyone else. I suppose here are little things I try to do on a more personal level- I’m a vegan, I bring my own bags when I go grocery shopping, I use a reusable water bottle. But, you know it’s not like I don’t use electricity or anything like that.

A: I’m not entirely sure yet and it’s still my first year so I suppose I have a little bit of time. I guess I can see two sort of paths. I like to work with policies so I could for an NGO or a government agency drafting and pushing policies through or just advocating for them. But, I’m also really in love with the legal system and could see going into environmental law, which could be really cool as well.

A: We had a huge Earth Day fair at my school, which happens every year. And although I wasn’t involved in the planning of the festival there were a lot of booths with food, crafts, information and other stuff like that. We had baby goats come, there was music performances, people who had gone to the Copenhagen negotiations presented and many other different people talked. There was a book sale, cricket playing- just a lot of different things. We also held a holy ceremony, which is a Hindu festival to celebrate spring where basically you have these dishes of colored pigment and you throw them at each other. So there are some pretty wild pictures of me covered in purple, pink and orange- it was really fun.

A: I’ve been a vegetarian since I was four- the mom that I live with has been a vegetarian my whole life and she didn’t make me become one. But, after hearing her rationale it made sense to me, so that was a decision I made a long time ago. In terms of going vegan, originally I had thought, ‘well we’re not killing the animals so it’s not a problem.’ But, as I started to learn more about the factory farming process I realized that although we may not be killing animals it is extremely inhumane and cruel. And, I really didn’t want to be a part of that process, I didn’t feel good about supporting that. Environmentally it’s also way less sustainable- you could save more water in a year by not eating one hamburger than by not showering for the entire year. So, an entire year’s worth of showers is the same amount of water that goes into producing one hamburger. Hopefully that puts it into prospective a little bit. But more-so in terms of the amount of resources consumed. There are problems with veganism also, like where does soy come from- people deal with that by buying locally. So there are a bunch of different approaches and I don’t think that veganism is the only one, but it’s the choice that feels the best to me.

A: I think that it is all related for me, I wasn’t involved in the campaign specifically for environmental issues, but I supported Obama as a candidate in part because of his stance. His stance is definitely not as strong as I would like on many environmental issues, but something I’ve loved about him from the beginning is that he is very receptive to the issues. I can remember back in 2007 or 2008 he had a stance on ‘clean coal’ and how he thought it was such a good thing, which made sense as a senator from Illinois. But, he got a lot of pressure from the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, which led him to change his position on that. So, that is a really great example on his receptiveness. Those things had an impact on my decision to campaign for him.

A: Yeah, that is a really big issue right now that a lot of us are struggling with. One element you brought up is it has become somewhat fashionable to be green now, which is great in one sense because it means people who normally wouldn’t be willing are doing things. But it also means that everything gets boiled down to a very basic level, where you lose a lot of the complexity, which is what makes these issues so important. So I think that finding a way to communicate the issues in a way that makes them understandable but not pointless is a really useful thing. This kind of ties into the idea of framing and right now a lot of people are focusing of global warming. I’m doing a lot of work with it right now because it’s where organizations and conferences are at and what people are talking about. And, it is a very important issue but, there are also other issues that are a little less cool now because they’re not the hot topic issues right now, but they’re still important. Deforestation is still important, even though people are over it. So, it’s important to focus on those. But also when you are talking about climate change, we I think framed it really badly from the beginning. We started talking about global warming in really strong terms, almost apocalyptic terms and that scares a lot of people off. It think it also leaves us open to critique people, like the temperature actually went down so the globe isn’t warming up. But, when you use the term climate change nobody can deny the climate is changing- it’s always changing, it’s been changing from the beginning. So with the way we have framed this we’ve opened the discussion up to a sort of true-false debate rather than focusing on the fact that things are changing, how are they changing and what are we going to do to ensure survival. It’s not a ‘we want to save the koala bears’ sort of thing. So in terms of the way we talk about and communicate these issues is going to impact how people engage in it.

A: On a more realistic level I would like to see these next UN negotiations come up with some useful policies. The Copenhagen agreement is nothing, it doesn’t do anything. I would to see the US pass useful climate legislation, energy legislation. Things that can get us moving, because without that national support we can’t pass meaning international legislation. So, I would love to see more policies regarding resource use and a paradigm shift in the way we look at the land. From the beginning we’ve had this idea starting with the western front that we own it and we can just keep expanding, but especially with the population of the world right now we are approaching the limitations of space and resources. We need change the way we think about things and instead of thinking we have unlimited amounts of everything, we need to start considering how much do I really need. There’s this idea that by consuming more we will become prosperous and happier, so changing our definition of prosperity and happiness is key. It’s not going to happen overnight, but I’d love to be a part of that shift.

A: I think these issues are complex and when we boil them down to a free trade is good or bad situation it becomes really ridiculous. There are valuable assets related to free trade, but I think it should always be coupled with fair trade and we need to bear in mind the complexity of these issues and tailor our policies to that rather than developing policies that are cumbersome and not useful.

A: Speaking to the importance of the environment, we can quantify that in some ways in terms of human survival and the resources we need. But, most of the people I’ve talked to about this who are working on environmental issues agree there’s a sort of spiritual level to it as well- not to sound spacey. There are things that are beautiful and valuable because they’re beautiful and unique. A lot of what we fight to preserve fits into that. Sure, we can survive in a world with less trees, but do we really want to live in a world with less trees? And so I think people get boxed into this frame of mind that’s all about quantification and what can this do for me. So I think we lose sight of things, we take for granted that we are also working to destroy. When people get fed up and think it doesn’t matter go and take a walk in the woods, go outside and just remember what it’s all about.