The SGA has been actively discussing making Colgate a more environmentally friendly campus, and luckily, we're far from the only ones. This past Friday, the seventh annual Green Summit brought students, faculty, administrators, and village residents together in the Parker Commons to work on making Colgate greener. Attendees were separated into approximately a dozen groups, each one tasked with creating solutions to different environmental challenges that our university faces. The topics of these discussions included implementation fair-trade products, decreasing use of bottled water, and reducing the carbon footprint of on-campus transportation. Each group spent the afternoon brainstorming practical solutions to the problems they were assigned area and then created plans of action to be implemented by April 22, 2008 Earth Day.
With over 100 participants, this year's Green Summit was considered by its organizers to be the largest and most successful since its creation seven years go. This year's working groups proposed included a 140-foot-tall weather balloon in the middle of campus to raise awareness about the NYRI power lines and a publicly available index of fair-trade product retailers in downtown Hamilton. Given only a few hours, each group managed to create practical and logical plans, many requiring very little funding. If all of these plans come to fruition by Earth Day, Colgate will become greener at a pace never seen before.
It is easy to be skeptical and fixate on the "if" in the prior sentence, but the Green Summit is perhaps the best example of a well-functioning grassroots coalition on campus. The Green Summit has brought about many significant changes around campus. The most recent and notable example is the Green Bikes program, which provides low-cost access to designated bicycles around campus that students can ride as often as they like. The initiatives created at the Green Summit are taken from first to last step by Green Summit attendees and their affiliate groups throughout the year.
The Green Summit is a great example of how getting involved around campus does not require much more than motivation. You don't have to be a club leader or president to get something done on campus that has an effect on the entire world. We may have hundreds of SGA-recognized organizations on campus that do wonderful things, but the great thing about Colgate is that you can always create your own. Take the initiative and take advantage of the opportunities Colgate provides for you to be able to capture your passion and get real results.
