Doing one’s part to save a warming planet.
It’s hard to pass a newsstand these days without spying a handful of magazine covers trumpeting a special “green” issue. Whether it’s Arnold Schwarzenegger on Outside, Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard (Fortune), a lonely penguin on a melting ice cap (Time), or the oh-so-Vanity Fair quartet of Julia Roberts, Al Gore, George Clooney, and RFK Jr., each cover has the perfect pitch person for its audience (I’m omitting the current issue of Washington Flyer, because I think it’s been a while since Leo DiCaprio flew commercial). In Amy Lynd Luers ’88, we have that perfect cover person, too.
Amy is the California climate manager for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit organization comprised of scientists and policy experts who are tackling some of the most pressing environmental issues of our time. She recently coauthored a report—Our Changing Climate: Assessing the Risks to California—that has led to some of the toughest global warming legislation enacted in the United States. This much I knew when I asked Brian Eule, a San Francisco-based writer and frequent Magazine contributor, to sit down and chat with Amy. What I didn’t know (and what Brian illuminated) was that Amy came to Midd planning on majoring in physics, ended up concentrating on philosophy, and spent a number of years working in Nicaragua before earning advanced degrees in international policy studies and environmental science.
We had found our cover subject.
Of course, other Midd folks are having similar impacts on our planet, and we tell a number of their stories in our ten-page “green” feature package. We’ve also included a couple of pieces that have more of a reader service component. Ben Jervey ’01, the author of The Big Green Apple: Your Guide to Eco-Friendly Living in New York City, offers 12 steps to living a greener life; and Jack Byrne, the College’s campus sustainability coordinator, crafted a quiz that will help give you a sense of how eco-savvy you are.
Before testing your green IQ, I’d encourage you to visit the website www.myfootprint.org to determine what your ecological footprint is. I took the quiz and learned that my ecological footprint is 24 acres, which happened to be the average ecological footprint for a U.S. resident. Not bad, I thought. Then I saw that the planet contains 4.5 biologically productive acres per person and that if everyone lived like me, we’d need 5.3 planets to support this lifestyle. Oops. Chagrined, I asked our art director, who I consider to be significantly more eco-conscious than I, to take the quiz. Her eco-footprint is 21 acres. Better than I (as I expected), but not by much. We—and I mean this in the most collective way possible—have a lot of work to do.
— Matt Jennings