MCLA Beacon Online

By Ed Damon

Staff Writer

A group of students taking the Green Living Seminar and Workshop this semester have formed a new environmental group on campus.Called the Environuts, the club was formed by senior Chelsy Baker and freshmen Jason Brown and Becky Geraci. Part of the course required students to perform a service learning piece. “We figured we have the Green Team on campus, but a lot of students don’t know about it. We also wanted to do something to get more students involved,” Brown said.

Many students didn’t know that this was MCLA’s Year of Awareness, he said, or about the College’s promise to reduce its carbon footprint by 20 percent by 2012.Baker said there is a big difference between the Green Team and the Environuts. The Green Team is the nickname the Sustainability Committee coined for himself, she said, and was created and is run by faculty and staff. “Student representatives from SGA attend their meetings, but may not have official say in the Committees,” Baker said.

The students wrote a constitution and chose environmental studies professor Dan Shustack as the club advisor. The Environuts’ constitution was passed by SGA fittingly the week of Earth Day. The club’s e-Board consists of Brown as president, Geraci as vice-president, Nashua Rosa as treasurer, and Korinna Denehey as secretary. Baker turned down a position because she’s graduating.The Environuts took part in the Berkshire All College Relay for life on Friday, which Brown said was technically the club’s first event. “We teamed up with the Biology Club,” he said.

“With about 10 members, the team raised about $1,150.”The Environuts have been trying to reach out to the campus in creative ways. “We didn’t want to put up a lot of fliers,” Geraci said. “We made a banner advertising the club out of recycled newspapers.”Students can expect to see a club meeting before the end of the semester, Brown said. Also, the group is planning events and other activities for the fall.“First of all, we want people to know who we are,” Brown said. “We’ll probably start off with a movie night. We’re also thinking about doing a raffle to fundraise.”“My biggest project is reducing water bottle usage on campus,” Geraci said.

“We’d like to see more recycling units in campus buildings and maybe in the Academic Quad.” Geraci said more units are needed in buildings because they aren’t always in ideal locations, and a lot of plastic bottles are thrown away in the quad because there are no recycling units there. The group is also looking into getting larger aluminum water bottles students could reuse. “Ideally, we’d like every freshmen to get a water bottle when they come here in the fall,” Brown said.Students in the seminar will be discussing their projects today in Murdock 218 at 5 p.m.

The other projects to be presented are on the expansion and support of campus gardens, a bike sharing program, a food waste and to-go container composting program, and research on “green” building strategies for existing school buildings and the new science center.

By Jessie Wright

Overseas Correspondent

I go back to the states in a month. I don’t yet know how to feel about that. Happy? Depressed? Anxious? I’m not ready to say my goodbyes to this beautiful country. There’s still too much exploring left to be done, after I’m done with my last two sanity-shattering essays.I fear change and always have. Yet studying in Scotland, perhaps the single biggest change in my life, was something I utterly craved. And now I fear the change back to America.

Don’t get me wrong, there are things from the states that I miss. Things like screened windows, Italian sausage, a decent cup of coffee, and faucets that don’t suck. I miss friends and family too, but I think the fact that my boyfriend Sean has been studying here with me the entire time made the transition much, much easier for me. Poor Sean.

I haven’t mentioned him in these articles at all.I think if it was possible, I could disappear into Britain and be perfectly happy.I’ve carved out a little niche for myself here. Most of my social life has revolved around the Stirling Uni Drama Society. From the first meeting, I felt instantly welcome. I even got to be a co-director for the sketch festival they put on every semester.

And I’ve done some voice acting for my friend Rob’s radio show.I’ve gotten a fair amount of flack for being a “colonial,” as my friends, who are mostly males from England, call me. They don’t like Americans much, but somehow put up with me. Sometimes, there are disputes on pronunciations of words. Tuh-MAH-toe, Toh-MAY-toe, for instance. And in those instances, one of them, usually James from Liverpool, will turn to me and the conversation goes somewhere along the lines of: “Jessie, what’s the language called?” “…English.” “Exactly. And don’t forget that.”I’ll miss it here. I’ll miss £ coins. I’ll miss the prevalence of Cadbury chocolate. I’ll miss Irn Bru, a.k.a the Coke of Scotland. I’ll miss waking up to the beautiful, not-quite mountainous view outside my window.

I’ll miss nights at the campus pub. I’ll miss watching drunken antics involving Her Majesty’s swans. I’ll miss haggis. I’ll miss British pork sausage. I’ll miss passing dozens of rabbits and swans on my trek across campus. I’ll miss that dusty toy shop in town with every Star Wars collectible you could ever want. I’ll miss the U.K’s lax attitude towards alcohol. I’ll miss castles. I’ll miss fish n chips shops.

I’ll miss Scottish mushrooms and Scottish cheese. I’ll miss not having classes on Wednesdays. I’ll miss being able to skip classes for the entire day in order to sit in the sun with a beer, a Frisbee, and some friends, with little to no repercussions. I’ll miss being surrounded by British accents. To be honest? I’m even going to miss getting made fun of for being American.I’ve changed. My pronunciations and sentence structures have changed. My drinking habits have changed. My sense of humor has changed. The way I view the world has changed.

The way I view my relationship with Sean has changed. I have done what both my parents have failed to do, I have gone abroad. I have seen bits of the world I had only dreamed of years before. And I am not the girl who was last seen back in February.Cheers, for the final time, from Scotland!