Sustainability and Social Justice Dinner

Tonight I attended the Sustainability and Social Justice Dinner. The dinner was delicious and the speakers all had diverse perspectives on combining sustainability and social justice. Stephanie Crocker was one of the guest speakers and she described her work with Dartmouth Humanitarian Engineering. She has been working in Tanzania to spread the use of cookstoves rather than the traditional three stone stoves. The benefits of these cookstoves the DHE has developed are twofold. Not only do they replace the inefficient wood-burning traditional stoves which emit large quantities of black soot but they also help reduce indoor air pollution and the related respiratory ailments common in Tanzania. However, she warns against some problems with the spread of cookstoves. Many of the current designs are complicated and could easily break, but would be difficult to fix. This means after a few years the broken stoves would be abandoned and people would revert to traditional methods. She stressed the need to use local resources such as clay to build the stoves, and mentioned one town that had 700 unusable cookstoves because they were all missing a required metal plate. Stephanie did a great job with the talk and I was very impressed with her work and public speaking skills. Other speakers mentioned the problems faced by Alaskan Natives who are losing their homes due to melting permafrost and the need to combine sustainability with religious faith.

After the speakers finished we started discussions at our tables about what we could do about sustainability on campus. Much of our discussion focused on the lack of knowledge common on campus. It's not that people don't care about the environment they don't know what they can do, and we make it too easy to make the wrong choices. Everyday heaps of recyclable or compostable items are thrown in the trash or students buy bottled water rather than filling up a reusable water bottle at the fountain. One student mentioned the impact we could have simply by replacing Keystone cans with kegs at the frats, or at the very least remembering to recycle the bottles instead of throwing them in the trash. While these changes aren't enough to fix all our problems, they could be a start. It would be cool if everybody at Dartmouth whether an economics or environmental studies left with a concern for the environment. We could be doing a lot more without making much of a sacrifice.  Well that's all for tonight.

Davey