MIRROR 2.13.20
MIRROR ASKS 2
CUPS, CANS AND COMPETITIONS 4-5
Q&AWITHCAITLIN HICKSPRIES 7 GRACE QU/THE DARTMOUTH STAFF
2// MIRR OR
Editors’ Note
Q&A
DIVYA KOPALLE/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF
The end of the world — we’ve all thought about it. Whether the image that pops into your mind consists of aliens descending on Earth or acres of land engulfed in flames, the concept of “doomsday” has been present in our society’s media, literature and entertainment for centuries. However, with the looming threat of climate change — that nightmare is becoming closer and closer to reality. Footage of California’s forest fires, earthquakes in Puerto Rico and flooding in Florida have been circulating throughout the internet, rightfully terrifying all who view it. For some, these natural disasters are motivators to become more active in the movement to stop climate change. For others, the devastation of these events and the seeming imminence of total destruction is overwhelming and makes them feel helpless. This week, Mirror explores issues related to climate change. We investigate how Greek spaces navigate recycling, speak to a biological sciences professor and ask our staff how they practice sustainability and mindfulness of the earth. Although climate change is a politically charged issue, preserving the planet is important. While we may not be the ones drafting environmental policies, we have power over our own decisions as individuals — whether that is reflected through the candidates we vote for, sustainable choices we make or being concious of our impact on the earth.
follow @thedmirror
2.13.20 VOL. CLXXVI NO. 135 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF DEBORA HYEMIN HAN PUBLISHER AIDAN SHEINBERG MIRROR EDITORS KYLEE SIBILIA NOVI ZHUKOVSKY COPY EDITOR JULIAN NATHAN ISSUE LAYOUT GRANT PINKSTON
By The Mirror Staff
How do you show appreciation for the earth? Arianna Khan ’22: I make environmentally conscious and sustainable choices in my everyday life whenever possible out of respect for the earth and the environment. Angelina Scarlotta ’23: One of my favorite things to do is participate in Green Up Day. It’s a Vermont “holiday” of sorts on the first Saturday in May where everyone goes out to pick up trash on the sides of roads and in public outdoor spaces. Caris White ’23: By spending time in nature and picking up trash when I see it lying around. Christina Baris ’22: I try to be as sustainable as possible, and I support politicians who advocate for the environment. What responsibility does each individual have to reduce climate change? AK: Each individual has a HUGE responsibility to do anything they can to reduce climate change. Climate change is a massive, existential problem that affects every one of us, and addressing it requires the participation of everyone, on both the national and individual scales. AS: I think everyone has to take some level of responsibility for this issue by implementing sustainable practices into their lives. They don’t have to be big things, either. Anything helps, and the more people who do little things to help the earth, the better off we will all be. CW: Everyone has a responsibility to be cognizant of their carbon footprint and try to reduce it within their means. Whether that’s eating less meat, walking or biking instead of driving, carpooling, etc. CB: Climate change is a global issue; it
cannot be reduced without everyone’s support. How do you practice sustainability on a daily basis? AK: I use my spork and a reusable coffee mug. AS: I recycle and compost, turn the lights off when I leave my dorm and use reusable water bottles and straws. CW: I recycle and carry reusable silverware and a reusable straw in my backpack. I also take short showers and try to turn off all the lights in my dorm when people are leaving. CB: I use a reusable water bottle, limit my use of single-use plastic and try to be conscious about the impact of my actions (however big or small). Do you recycle? AK: Yes! AS: I try to recycle as much as I can, though it is difficult sometimes. For example, with the plastic smoothie cups from Collis, I don’t always have an opportunity to wash them out, and I have to throw them away so that the rest of the recycling doesn’t get contaminated. CW: Yes. CB: As much as I can! How does the looming threat of climate change affect you? AK: It creates uncertainty; I don’t know what my future will look like. It’s also extremely anxiety-inducing to know that the window that we have as humankind to meaningfully address climate change before it is too late is dwindling, and we’re not doing enough. AS: It’s something that’s always in the back of my mind. As a college freshman, I’m supposed to feel as though I have a long, bright future ahead of me. But with the worsening
state of our planet, I often feel unsure of what my future will actually turn out to be or how much of it I will get to have. CW: It makes me think about where I should live my adult life, and it also makes me worried about the future for the generations to come. CB: To be honest, it’s not something I think about everyday (mostly because it’s kind of terrifying to think about). It’s really scary to consider how devastating the impacts of climate change will be, especially for the generations after us. How have you experienced climate change? AK: I’m from Florida and, growing up, hurricanes were extremely rare and terrifying events for me. Now, they’re hitting or nearing the state regularly, multiple times a year, and I’ve become almost used to them. AS: I have experienced climate change primarily through how mild the past few winters have been in Vermont. This winter, for example, it rained on New Year’s and for the whole week after. The only time I can remember it being above-freezing that late in December was the Christmas of my freshman year of high school, when it was 70 degrees. CW: The drought in California (my home state) was one of the worst on record, and the fires have been way worse than usual for the past few years. My best friend’s house could go underwater if sea levels rise as predicted in the future. CB: Winters — both here and back home in New York — are getting significantly warmer. Also, I used to go to Florida every summer, and the red tide agal blooms keep getting worse, which has devastating impacts for marine wildlife.
Learning from Greta DRAWING
By Lila Hovey
MIRR OR //3
Cups, Cans and Competitions: Greek Life and Sustainability 4// MIRR OR
STORY
By Caris White
LORRAINE LIU/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF
There’s a reason many Dartmouth go away — so where does all this students have trash go in the a pair of morning? designated “frat "We used to have T h e s h o e s . ” T h e about 700 tons of numbers are mixture of stale staggering: recycling each year, beer, empty cans According to and pong cups and now we are at Dartmouth that covers the about 360 [tons]." sustainability floors of Greek office intern house basements S o p h i a will ruin a pair -SUSAN WEIDER, Greszczuk ’22, of shoes in the average FACILITIES OPERATIONS m i n u t e s . Fo r Greek house at most partygoers, AND MANAGEMENT Dartmouth goes leaving behind CONTRACTS PROCESS through 11,400 the night’s messy pong cups and detritus is as easy COORDINATOR 2,200 cans of as taking off our Keystone a week. shoes. But those cans don’t just Over one term, that adds up to
114,000 cups and 22,000 beer cans. “It’s not like we’re doing something technically wrong, but it’s a lot of plastic, and it’s a lot of cheap plastic,” said Chi Delta sorority sustainability chair Kristina Strommer ’22. Recycling cups and cans might seem straightforward, but because of strict contamination requirements and a lack of demand for materials, recycling isn’t as easy as shovelling the basement floor’s contents into a bag. According to facilities operations and management contracts process coordinator Susan Weider, Dartmouth contracts Casella Waste Management to handle its trash and recycling, and the recyclables Casella
picks up on campus are sorted locally become significantly harder. before being shipped to China for “We used to have about 700 tons processing. Weider said that Casella of recycling each year, and now we recently switched to a zero-sort are at about 360 [tons] because system in which of that,” Weider all recyclables “There’s a lot of said. are lumped A d d i t i o n a l l y, together. This potential to make a big r e c y c l i n g i s makes recycling difference because of expensive: s i m p l e r, b u t We i d e r s a i d all the waste [Greek more prone to that it costs contamination houses] create." Dartmouth $25 — and Weider more to recycle a said that along ton of waste then w i t h C h i n a ’s -SOPHIA GRESZCZUK '22 it does to put it reduction of its in a landfill, and contamination the plastic used in threshold to 0.5 percent in 2018, pong cups isn’t profitable to recycle. getting Dartmouth’s recyclable While this does not mean materials actually recycled has Greek houses cannot be sustainable,
MIRR OR //5
NAINA BHALLA/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF
The average Greek house goes through 11,400 plastic cups per week with very few getting recycled.
Lindsey Reitinger ’20, another sustainability office intern, said that Greek houses currently are not organized in a way that puts sustainability first. “ I f yo u ’re t h e o n e wh o ’s responsible, you’re thinking about risks; and if you’re in the social space, you’re thinking about having fun,” Reitinger said. To a d d re s s t h i s d i l e m m a , Greszczuk and other students at the sustainability office started a recycling competition between Greek houses, complete with cash prizes for the winners. There will be a prize for the house that produces the largest total number of uncontaminated recycling bags and a prize for the house that improves its waste diversion the
most, which ensures that smaller c o n t a m i n a t i o n houses or houses that host events “I think if we can infrequently still have the tackle something like opportunity to composting, it will win. Facilities make Chi Delt and operations and m a n a g e m e n t wherever else more will be in charge sustainable as a whole. of over seeing collection of the We’re looking into bags, according composting, and we to Greszczuk. would love for that to Greszczuk said that some be a collaboration with h o u s e s h a v e other houses.” already changed the way they do cleans in order -KRISTINA STROMMER '22 to decrease
within their recycling. She said that there will also be two mid-ter m updates on the competition, meant to inspire friendly competition between houses in the name of s u s t a i n a b i l i t y, before the competition ends this term. While the competition may not resolve the issue of sustainability at
Greek houses, Greszczuk said that an improvement within spaces that so many students are affiliated with will make a big impact on campus sustainability. “There’s a lot of potential to make a big difference because of all the waste [Greek houses] create, and if there’s any less that goes in a landfill or to Casella, we’ll be really happy about it,” Greszczuk said. The recycling competition isn’t a long-term solution: sorting and counting each house’s recycling is still expensive and time consuming, and the competition will only last for this term. But sustainability isn’t limited to recycling, either. Strommer had some suggestions for how Greek houses can continue to mediate
their environmental impact. “I think if we can tackle something like composting, it will make Chi Delt and wherever else more sustainable as a whole,” Strommer said. “We’re looking into composting, and we would love for that to be a collaboration with other houses.” Whether it’s as involved as starting a collaborative composting program or as simple as sorting cups from cans before recycling them, there are feasible ways to make Greek life at Dartmouth more sustainable — but as Reitinger said, the process is challenging. “The critical mass of people you would need to have actively caring about it to make a difference is really, really high,” Reitinger said.
6 // MIRR OR
MIRR OR //7
Q&A with Biological Sciences Professor Caitlin Hicks Pries Q&A
By Christina Baris
The impacts of climate change are omnipresent. On Feb. 6, the temperature recorded on Antarctica climbed to 64.9 degrees F. according to one estimate — the highest temperature ever recorded on the continent. In the face of imminent danger from climate change, researchers try to find ways to mitigate the effects of global warming. One such researcher is biological sciences professor Caitlin Hicks Pries. Pries studies deep soil organic carbon and its implications in climate change. The Dartmouth sat down with Pries to learn more about her research and its impact on the environment. What inspired you to start researching the carbon cycle, and when did you start? CP: For my masters, I became really interested in how ecosystems could store carbon. I was thinking that I would get a masters in this and then we would have a carbon economy. I thought I would be working in the private sector helping companies get carbon credits — if we actually had a cap-and-trade system on the amount of CO2 that was being put into the atmosphere. This was back in 2005, when it really seemed like this carbon economy was just around the corner. Needless to say, now it’s 2020, and we don’t really have a carbon economy. We’re not really trading carbon; it exists, but it’s not the big thing that I was hoping it would be. So, that was the original reason that I got into it. Then, while doing my masters, I was looking at how carbon can be stored in mangrove and seagrass ecosystems. You could restore wetlands, and that would have a whole host of benefits for ecosystems and water quality. It would also store carbon, and you could use that as a type of climate-change mitigation. And then, I got really interested in what’s happening in Alaska with thawing permafrost. With thawing permafrost, you have a lot of carbon that’s being put into the atmosphere.
It’s a large positive feedback to climate change, whereby as the per mafrost thaws because it’s getting warmer, microbes are now degrading the organic carbon stored in the permafrost and releasing it as CO2, which then causes more warming. Now, here I am at Dartmouth; I’m still interested in what’s happening in the Arctic. We have a really strong history of doing Arctic research here, and I’ve done some research in Greenland on the carbon stored in soils in Greenland and what’s happening to that with warming. Most of this research on permafrostcarbon-climate change feedback has been in really moist or wet Arctic ecosystems, and a lot less has been done in these dry ecosystems, which is what Greenland is. My lab is trying to figure out what is making the carbon be released from these Greenland soils. Could you speak a bit more about what your hopes were for the carbon economy? CP: The idea is that we’d do a capand-trade. We’d cap the amount of CO2 emissions, and if a company wanted to emit more CO2, they would have to find a way to make that up by funding a program or some type of mitigation strategy that would take carbon out of the atmosphere and store it somewhere else. One of the most obvious ways to do that would be planting trees; what I focus on is soil carbon. It’s a step removed from the trees; you have carbon that’s coming from the plants, and that goes into the soil and gets stored for a longer time than it would if it was just in a tree. An offshoot of that is that we were going to have companies put money into these ways of taking carbon out of the atmosphere, which would have a lot of other benefits for the environment, whether it’s creating wetlands or planting and protecting forests. That was my hope for it. There are still voluntary programs where this is happening, but not on
the scale that it would be if we had actually taken some political action to solve the climate change problem. Your research pertains to deep Arctic soil. Can you explain how the release of carbon from this type of soil specifically impacts climate change? CP: The amount of carbon in the atmosphere is 800 petagrams — that’s 10^15, so 15 zeros after 800 — but the amount stored in soils is three-to-four times that amount, and half of the carbon stored in soils is found in permafrost. In these really cold environments, the soil has been frozen by definition for more than two years, but in actuality, for thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. As permafrost shifts from being frozen to unfrozen, there’s this huge increase in microbial activity, which starts eating that carbon and respiring it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is the main gas responsible for global warming. That’s why it’s such a concern; because there’s carbon in soils everywhere, but the only thing protecting this carbon in the Arctic is the fact that it’s frozen. What is one finding within your research that you think everyone should know? CP: Soils can hurt us, or they can help us when it comes to climate change. If we continue to degrade soils through intensive agriculture, plowing, cutting down forests and not addressing the root causes of climate change, soils will continue to lose carbon, and that will be a problem because it will make climate change worse. But we can work with soils. By improving the way we take care of land, planting deep-rooted plants, and having more forests and less lawns, we can help soils store more carbon, which can help mitigate climate change by taking carbon out of the atmosphere. Soils can be our friend in terms of climate change if we treat them well, but if we don’t, they’re our foe.
COURTESY OF CAITLIN HICKS PRIES
What are some things that Dartmouth does to reduce its carbon footprint? What are some things Dartmouth can do to reduce the impact of climate change? CP: We can divest. I think divestment definitely would send a really strong message that Dartmouth cares about this issue. I think that the biomass plant, although there were some issues with it — it needs more research — showed that Dartmouth is trying to get away from heating oil as their main heating system. Divesting and looking at using more renewable forms of energy for the energy we use on campus would both be hugely helpful. What do you think are the most drastic impacts of climate change, and which effects will be most severe in the near
future? CP: It really depends on where you are, so I’m going to focus on our region. For us, the most drastic thing that is going to happen is the loss of winter. It’s such an important part of our identity here in northern New England, and I think that the cultural impacts of losing winter will change the whole culture of the region, and I think that’s really sad. It will also impact ski industries and maple syrup production — these are things that are so important to what northern New England is as a landscape. The other really big impact is that it’s getting wetter here. Over the past 25 years, it’s gotten a lot wetter, and that is predicted to keep on increasing. That has a lot of implications for how we build our roads and flooding. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
8// MIRR OR
What We Could Lose PHOTO
By Naina Bhalla