Photo by Olivia Irvin.

Along with its permanent rooftop sculpture exhibit and other modern art pieces, the Museum of Art and History (MAH) at the McPherson Center is currently offering a space for UC Santa Cruz students to display their work in an upcoming presentation by the Digital Arts and New Media Master of Fine Arts degree program (DANM MFA). 

DANM will present the work of 10 graduate students in a two-part exhibition. The first part, called “interACTIVE,” runs through June 24, while the second, called “interACTIVATE,” will open May 29.

“We were lucky to be invited to show the work of our DANM graduates at the MAH,” said Felicia Rice, media representative for the DANM project. “This is our fourth graduating cohort, and we have previously shown at the Digital Media Factory on the Westside and … a huge digital arts festival in downtown San Jose.”

The pieces are created with digital and new media technologies, creating new sights for museum visitors not familiar with art media.

Nada Miljkovic, who is completing her final quarter in the two-year DANM master’s program, will have work showing in both parts of the interactive exhibition. For interACTIVE, she will be presenting a Balkan folk song about the emotion and pain of arranged marriages in the style of sevdah, a traditional Bosnian musical form.

“Coming from the Balkans, my own family is full of forced marriages,” said Miljkovic, who was born in the former Yugoslavia. “I chose to do this piece in hopes that through the experience of the endurance piece some liberation may occur both for myself and the participating audience.”

For interACTIVATE, Miljkovic produced a short film on forced marriage — “Eva on Marriage” — that she also submitted to the Santa Cruz Film Festival at the Del Mar Theatre.

“It’s a real honor to bring this very specific music tradition, that some may categorize as folk music, into a institution of high art,” Miljkovic said. “My aim is to educate and entertain.”

Providing UCSC and Cabrillo artists a venue to display their work has allowed the MAH to promote art in the community. The museum currently holds the one-of-a-kind artwork of various regional, local and college artists from Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, as well as the greater Bay Area. 

One of the current exhibits is showcasing the work of Bay Area artist Jerry Ross Barrish, whose medium of choice is reconfigured and recycled plastic sculptures.

The MAH is doing well despite financial troubles statewide. Membership fees and donations by visitors fund exhibits and new attractions, which in turn draw more total visitors.

“We’re aware that people are struggling in the community,” said Theresa Myers, the public relations and marketing manager of MAH.

Myers said that she does not anticipate an increase in the price of admission in the near future.

The MAH, which does not receive money from the state or county, receives funding solely from community-based grants. The majority of the museum’s funding comes from membership fees and the annual Stars fundraiser gala and auction. The auction, held every year in December at the museum, sells work donated by local artists. 

The MAH museum holds permanent and touring exhibits of regional artists, along with the rooftop sculpture exhibit. Many of the exhibits are composed of contemporary artworks and historical pieces owned by the museum. Throughout the museum’s three stories and rooftop, dresses constructed of Bubblicious gum wrappers are displayed next to old photographs of Santa Cruz residents at the wharf.

“By offering a place to hold the various artifacts,” Myers said, “the community is still able to interact.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at MAH: Undiscovered Haven for Arts

Photo by Alex Zamora and Isaac Miller.

Chinese medicine preaches it, and the Santa Cruz Farmers Market puts it on the table. 

Every Wednesday, booths line up downtown with the freshest locally-grown and organic produce of the season; strawberries, artichokes and lemons, just to name a few. And for those feeling the drain from sitting in class on sunny spring days, the farmers market also provides an array of Chinese herbs and medicinals meant to cure springtime sluggishness.

Chinese medicine revolves around “five-element theory,” in which five natural elements — wood, water, metal, earth and fire — are assigned to aspects of the human body and mind. 

According to Mariposa Bernstein — who holds a doctorate in acupuncture and oriental medicine and works at the local Five Branches Institute for acupuncture, energetics, dietetics, and Tuina massage — eating and buying both local and seasonal products, such as those at the farmers market, play a significant role in five-element theory.  

“With local foods come the local bacteria, both good and bad,” Bernstein said. “They do not cause a disruption because your body is used to the bacteria in the local environment versus food that comes from foreign places. It also supports the local economy, which helps build community.”

One of the best springtime Chinese remedies, according to Bernstein, is lemon balm, a leafy herb and combatant against sluggishness. In spring, Chinese medicine revolves specifically around the liver, associated with the wood element. A mild antidepressant, lemon balm can help detoxify the liver while rousing energy.

Jonathon Hoefs, a vendor for Green Planet Organics, an organic farm located in Soquel, can vouch for lemon balm’s positive effects. He reported a steady uplift in spirits from drinking tea made from lemon balm leaves, which he sells at the Green Planet Organics stand at the downtown farmers market each week. 

“I drank it for two weeks straight, and felt better,” he said.

Staying in tune with your emotions is crucial to well-being and a key part of traditional Chinese medicine as well, Bernstein explained. 

“If you’re not in alignment with your emotions, [which is] necessary for your liver to function properly, you can end up feeling tired and sluggish,” Bernstein said.

Kristal Zamora, a Crown third-year environmental  studies and legal studies double major, said that feelings of exhaustion or fatigue often make just getting to class feel like a chore, especially during spring quarter.

“It’s very difficult, actually,” she said. “But in some ways when there’s good weather, it’s motivation.”

The new season is a time to shrug off tired feelings. It is a season for staying active, whether it’s a walk on the beach or yoga at sunset to stay in tune with the motions of the blossoming Earth.

As Bernstein put it, “Spring is the vibrancy of taking action.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Spring Cleaning for the Soul

Illustration by Justin Martinez.

With a recent peak of interest in immigrant and labor issues spurred by the contract resolution of UC workers in early February, local May Day celebrations will ensure that this important day is not overlooked. Events planned for the week of May 1, which is known as International Workers’ Day, will serve as a testament to the social and economic achievements of the labor movement.

Locally, the May 1 festivities will be centered on marches and rallies for immigrant and worker rights, starting at UC Santa Cruz in the Quarry Plaza and ending at San Lorenzo Park. The marches have been a May Day and Labor Day tradition for 119 years and serve to inform the Santa Cruz community about the current labor issues.

Laura Barringer, a third-year feminist studies major from College Ten, is a member of the Movement for Immigrant Rights Alliance. Barringer has been involved in the labor movement since her senior year of high school. 

“The recent May Day marches have brought critical attention to the issues that immigrant communities and working communities are facing, and mass awareness is the first step to making change,” Barringer said.

Locally, Santa Cruz citizens and students participating in the rallies will be protesting the budget cuts to workers and students in underrepresented and marginalized communities, and protesting the deportations and foreclosures.

Also on May 1, the Reel Works Film Festival, which began in late April, will continue with a film screening at the Watsonville City Plaza of a work entitled “Golden Lands, Working Hands.” The film is a reflection on California’s history through the perspectives of working people, and has a focus on farm workers and teacher organization. 

The director of “Golden Lands, Working Hands,” Fred Glass, is a labor history instructor at San Francisco City College as well as a communications director for the California Federation of Teachers. Glass expressed that a film screening is a powerful way to recognize the labor movement’s influence and to educate people on the history of labor rights.

“I made [the film] because labor history is an underground and unknown history,” Glass said. “Working people are the overwhelming majority of the nation and the world.”

Reel Works will also feature UCSC alumni and student films throughout the ongoing festival, which ends May 4. The student films will encompass all different aspects of labor issues. 

The California Faculty Association and the Student California Teachers Association are sponsoring the Reel Works Film Festival for the second year in a row. These organizations are deeply rooted in the importance of educating the public about the labor movement.

“Both organizations feel strongly that we need more education about labor struggles in the United States and around the world,” said Jennifer Colby, Ph.D. lecturer for the liberal studies and service learning institutes at CSU Monterey Bay. “The Reel Works film festival provides an opportunity to see the most recent films that document these struggles.”

Colby feels that especially during the economic crisis universities are facing, teachers and students alike are experiencing labor issues firsthand.

“Teachers and professors are workers too,” Colby said. “We work for the state of California, so today we have very special needs in the face of budget cuts.”

In addition to those special needs, Barringer spoke of the broader issues that motivate her activism for the cause of labor rights.

“I am involved because I believe that we are a nation of immigrants and, in the end, we are living on stolen land,” Barringer said. “So how can we have a debate over which human beings are legal and which ones are not?”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at May Day Events Shine Spolight on Workers’ Rights

Experienced archer David Delaney readies his bow Saturday at the DeLaveaga Archery Range. Photo by Isaac Miller.

Armed with bows ranging from highly sophisticated design products to rudimentary sticks with nylon strings, the Santa Cruz Archers roam the hills of DeLaveaga Park, unbeknownst to the neighboring golf and disc-golf course visitors.

The club was founded in 1968 and pledges to “foster, expand and perpetuate the practice of field and target archery and the spirit of good fellowship among all archers.” By offering quick start-up lessons and lending out equipment in exchange for donations, all in good humor and with great generosity, this is exactly what happens during an archer’s afternoon on the range. 

Randy Redmond has been shooting for over 40 years, and if you head to DeLaveaga during public hours, chances are he’ll be the one taking care of you. 

He’ll get you started in about five minutes with the basics.

“Stand up straight, just like your mother taught you,” Redmond instructed. “The basics are what it’s all about. Now I want you to do that exact thing, forever.”

And don’t worry about not owning a bow and arrows.

“We won’t rent out the equipment,” said club president Henry Bertram, “but we’ll let you borrow some.” 

Five-year-old Daisy Delaney uses a compound bow, which makes the bow lighter and therefore easier for her to shoot. She never misses the target. 

Her father, David Delaney, said he was a member of the archery club “years and years ago. My whole family was.” And indeed, the main building is dedicated to a Delaney, David’s father, who helped build it. Although it’s been a while since David has visited the range regularly, he and Daisy are getting back into it.

Back inside the Delaney building, a handful of UC Santa Cruz students are learning how to shoot. 

“It’s a lot of fun,” fourth-year Erin Nolan said, “but definitely challenging. I want to come back and go out on the range, see how well I fare out there.”

This class, a quarterly event, is sponsored and organized by UCSC’s Office of Physical Education and Recreation (OPERS). 

The OPERS archery trips fill out fast, said Nolan, and she tried to get in for many quarters. “This was my last chance, and it was worth it. I really recommend it to anyone who wants to take a few hours out on their Saturday to learn to shoot.” 

Many of the club members will be going back with sore arms from carrying the bows, some even with bruises from where the taut string stuck their elbows.

Club president Bertram was teaching the class. 

“Come back and check out the range,” he said to the group. “It’s a nice walk, but it’s even nicer if you’re carrying a bow and arrow.” 

The club encourages donations, with a suggested amount of $3 if you come to learn and borrow.

Although a Santa Cruz park, the range is entirely built and maintained by club members. 

“In the last couple of years, we have had a fantastic group of people who come by and work hard to maintain the range,” Bertram said.

Inside the “animal shed” lays an array of tools and paint buckets alongside foam cougars, elk and other animals, the biggest an impressive gorilla. They will be used in the upcoming event “Stick Bow in the Woods,” where 28 foam animals will be scattered as targets amid the old oaks and redwoods.

“It’s all for fun,” Bertram said. “You want bias? This is the best range in the area, no question. Go around, fling a few arrows, don’t tell the wife, and that’s all there is to it.”

A close-up of a target at the range. A variety of arrows and bows are available to borrow from the Sant Cruz Archers. Photo by Isaac Miller.

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Local Archers Take Aim

A forklift moves the Louise Bourgeois sculpture “Crouching Spider.” The metal piece, which stood at the entrance of Pier 14 in San Francisco for 17 months, will be transported to its new home: a private collection in Houston, Texas. Photo by Sam Wilson.

A crowd gathered as the men tackled the creature, ripping off its legs one limb at a time. While the creature did not shriek with pain, its anguish was apparent in the expressions of those watching its destruction. Soon only a barbaric torso remained, with its legs broken apart and stacked neatly in a pile.

The beloved “Crouching Spider” sculpture no longer resides on the San Francisco Embarcadero. 

“Crouching Spider,” a notable piece in artist Louise Bourgeois’ “Spider” series, stood at the entrance of the Embarcadero at Pier 14 for the last 17 months. On leave from the artist’s galleries, Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco and Cheim & Read in New York, the sculpture was dismantled in order to be transported to its new home at a private collection in Houston, Texas. 

Bourgeois’ inspired work was one of her best, said Jill Manton, director of the San Francisco Arts Commission.

“The city was just so privileged to be able to publicly display artwork from someone of her caliber,” Manton said. “Especially something that became so beloved.”

 Bourgeois, 97, moved in 1938 from Paris to New York, where her career as an artist began. Her work has been shown at renowned galleries and museums such as the Guggenheim in New York City, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. 

Bourgeois’ “Crouching Spider” was an artwork close to her heart. It was modeled after the spirit of her mother, said Kate Patterson, project manager of the San Francisco Arts Commission. Bourgeois’ mother, a tapestry weaver, showed the same work ethic as a protective mother spider, spinning her own home and protecting her brood of children. 

“The immense scale of the spider sculptures corresponds to the monumental importance of the artist’s mother to her daughter,” Patterson said in a press release.

“Crouching Spider” was only supposed to be on lease to the city for eight months starting in November 2007, but its stay was extended for another nine months due to overwhelming “Everyone knows about this sculpture,” Manton said. “There are not that many artworks that have this impact. I’ve heard people speaking as they pass the dismantling as if the spider was part of their lives. They’re very protective.” 

As each leg left the spider and made its way into the waiting moving van, passersby on the street paused to watch, murmuring to each other about the sculpture that once stood at the plaza entry. Some, like Janet Schuer, waited and watched all day, documenting the dismantling with their cameras. 

“I’m just one of the many coming by. We’re all sorry to see it going. People of all ages enjoyed this spider and that’s what makes this so different,” Schuer said. “It’s not just museumgoers admiring it. I’m a fan of Louise’s work and I just hope they can replace the sculpture with something as good.”

Currently, there are no plans for what to replace the sculpture with, but Manton said that the Arts Commission is working on gathering funding and acquiring new works to place on public display. 

Another woman in the crowd, Nancy LaBash, expressed her sorrow over the absence of the sculpture.

“It was so absolutely alive,” LaBash said. “You [expected] the spider to come walking toward you, and now I will sincerely miss it.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at ‘Spider’ No Longer Lies in Wait at Pier 14 Entrance

Photo by Dylan Chapgier.

Always taking steps to sustain a healthy environment both locally and globally, the citizens of Santa Cruz appealed to City Council last week asking them to prioritize alternative modes of transportation in the city.

For the past 18 years People Power, one of the county’s advocacy groups for human-powered transportation, has been fighting for a redesign of King Street that will improve biker safety and promote alternative modes of transportation. 

After bikers and residents spoke on behalf of the project to turn the street into a bike boulevard at City Council’s special April 21 meeting, Micah Posner, head of People Power, said he felt the project is starting to look successful. 

“It’s really a fundamental change and I think that’s why there’s such a big struggle about it, because the question is, ‘Do you prioritize quality of life for residents and cyclists or do you prioritize more and more cars?,’”  Posner said.

King Street not only serves as an alternative route to Mission Street, which has seen two cyclist deaths in the last 18 months, but is also a route for local students to get to and from school at times when traffic is at its worst. 

A bike boulevard is a street designed to give the right-of-way to bicycle traffic, with cars allowed only in limited numbers. In the case of King Street, it will still be car-accessible. However, if cars attempt to drive straight through, they will be redirected onto Mission or Escalona.

At the end of the meeting, Vice Mayor Mike Rotkin made a motion to approve the Public Works department’s Capital Improvement Plan, but asked the department to go back and incorporate plans for King Street for the council to approve on a later date. 

Assistant director of public works Chris Schneiter explained that a plan outlining the cost, staff time and work logistics will be brought back to City Council in early June to be decided upon. 

Opponents of the project are afraid the new bike boulevard would put too much traffic onto Mission Street, where the city hopes to focus future development to accommodate growth on the Westside. 

The complexity of the project will also require a lot of staff time the current city budget is unable to provide. In addition, if King Street were to be made a priority, other public works projects would have to be overlooked as a result, Schneiter said.

Mission Hill High School is located on King Street. However, students from both Santa Cruz High School and Harbor High School were present at the meeting to express issues of safety they encounter when biking down King Street on their way to school.

“There are tons of people who currently drive their kids to Mission Hill because they’re too afraid for them to ride on King Street,” Posner said.

If King Street were designed for biker safety, many parents would allow their kids to ride their bikes to school, putting fewer cars on the street and emphasizing the overall change the world needs to see, Posner said.

“In concept, the bike boulevard is definitely the most popular way to help cyclists on King Street,” Posner said. “A lot of neighbors have been saying they like the concept but they want to see the plan.”

King Street resident Debbie Bulger, who spoke at the meeting, said she feels unsafe living on a street that lacks substantial bike access.

“Every morning at 7:30 when I walk out of my house, I have to look both ways because students are riding their bikes on the sidewalk,” Bulger said. “We need to create a safe passage for residents and children.”

People Power’s previous successes include getting bike lanes installed on Soquel Drive, which took some convincing, but after a few years was passed. 

“King Street is an important street, but it’s also an important allegory and turning point for the city,” Posner said. “It has to do with how [Santa Cruz] will get to being a gold-level city for cyclists and it has to do with what we are really going to do with global warming.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at King Street Bike Boulevard Project Proposed

Photo by Isaac Miller.

Craig Pearson hates plastic. 

It’s 9 a.m. on a brisk and windy morning at the Santa Cruz landfill, where a fence bordering an exposed mound of garbage is lined with Pearson’s archnemesis: single-use plastic bags.

“We just cleaned this fence off earlier this morning and look at it now,” Pearson said. “There’s gotta be hundreds more now.”

As Superintendent of Waste Disposal for the city of Santa Cruz, Pearson has been fighting an uphill battle against plastic, and everything else Santa Cruz residents throw away, for 20 years.

“Plastic, plastic, plastic,” Pearson said with a grimace. “There’s no reason people should be using that.”

But use it we do, and in massive quantities. 

According to a recent special report on waste by The Economist, the average American produces over 700 kg, or 1,500 lbs, of trash per year. Landfills house the remnants of our wasteful habits and consumption patterns, with every plastic cup, candy wrapper, popcorn bag, sushi container, toothpaste tube and plastic fork that we buy, use and throw away every day with little thought. 

With a growing population, increasingly threatened planet, and ever-shrinking supply of habitable land, it seems that wasteful habits cannot be sustainable forever. There simply will not always be enough space to cast off our refuse. 

Modern waste habits are driven by one-time-use convenience, said environmental studies professor Margaret Fitzsimmons, whose research focuses on resource management.

“In terms of domestic waste, packaging is the major component,” Fitzsimmons said. “People are too accustomed to the convenience of just picking a package up and then throwing it away.”

Photo by Isaac Miller.

The Inner Workings of Waste

At the Santa Cruz landfill, Pearson is running an independent enterprise unfunded by tax revenues, and his precious commodity is space. He operates what is called a “sanitary landfill,” meaning the waste must be covered.

“If I can smash it, push it down, or put a ton of garbage in a cubic yard, that’s more profit for me,” Pearson said.

The fact that waste even has to be managed in such a space-conscious manner is somewhat of a modern phenomenon, and serves as a testament to how much waste we actually produce. The Santa Cruz landfill began as an “open canyon dump” in 1926, into which residents freely disposed of their waste. Because of the volume of trash today, the site must be carefully regulated, managed and spatially calculated to ensure room for future generations’ trash.

“I don’t think people really realize the ‘end’ of their stuff,” Pearson said.

That “end” is located just two miles north of Santa Cruz off Highway 1. If it weren’t for the persistent squawking of seagulls, a visitor to the area might not even realize he or she is standing on a literal mountain of garbage, over 80 years in the making. 

This constant barrage of garbage means that the more trash Pearson can divert, or keep out of the landfill, the longer the site will have open space to keep running.

“We’re so regulated and it’s so expensive to run a landfill, we find it’s cheaper to recycle,” Pearson said.

Santa Cruz has a somewhat efficient rate of diversion. Sixty percent of everything that is produced in the city of Santa Cruz is diverted from the landfill for beneficial reuses including recycling, composting, e-waste and scrap metals, Pearson said. 

The landfill is constructed in a series of “cells” that are engineered and subsequently filled with garbage one at a time and then covered. Carefully planned and measured, these cells are constructed by a team of soil experts, geologists and engineers who seek to maximize space and minimize environmental impact. One cell can be 40 feet wide, 100 feet long, and 100 feet deep and can last anywhere from five to 10 years before being covered. 

There are two major environmental issues that every modern landfill is forced to deal with: methane production and water contamination, Pearson said.

To tackle methane production, which occurs when garbage decomposes in an anaerobic environment, methane wells sequester the substance, which is then either harnessed in an energy facility or destroyed by flaring it off.

To prevent “leachate,” or contaminated water, from entering the groundwater systems, the bottom of the cells are lined with impermeable clay soil or plastic sheeting. Once the cells are full of trash, they are covered with clay soil, mulch and seedlings from organic compost matter to prevent soil erosion. 

The end result is a landscape that resembles rolling grassy hills, except the hills are massive piles of our trash.

Photo by Isaac Miller.

Waste Watchers

People’s refuse has always served as an indicator of what day-to-day life was like at any given time in history. Anthropology professor Judith Habicht-Mauche, whose research focus is in archeology, explains that “garbology,” or the study of modern trash from an archeological perspective, is widely used to study the material culture of today’s society.

“I think that garbage tells a lot about who we are,” Habicht-Mauche said. “It tells us about the material remains of our day-to-day life.”

Just last year, Santa Cruzans threw away 52 thousand tons of trash — excluding recyclables and organics, which are diverted from the landfill. From a garbologist’s perspective, the contents of our landfill might reveal the underlying values and trends of our community. To Pearson, the contents of his landfill often reveal how careless people can be when kicking something to the can.

“I have to pay someone $20 an hour to clean up other people’s garbage,” Pearson said as he watched employees filter through what is supposed to be a pile of organic waste. “I mean, why do you throw [plastic] in a green waste can? Is it because you’re cheap, uneducated, lazy — it’s ridiculous.”

Habicht-Mauch explained that the carelessness people tend to have when it comes to their disposal habits, in addition to its universal presence in human society, is part of the reason why trash can be so informative.

“Archeologists will often say how democratic garbage is,” Habicht-Mauch said. “It tells us about everyone’s life because everyone gets represented in garbage. We can see rich people, poor people, men and women, young and old.”

Furthermore, when it comes to people’s consumption habits — what they eat, as well as what they buy and then don’t eat — trash is honest when people often are not.

“[Trash] tells us about what we do, not what we say we do,” Habicht-Mauche said.

Photo by Isaac Miller.

Cutting Down the Crap

It is becoming increasingly clear to environmentalists that our unsustainable habits cannot continue unabated. 

As the Waste Prevention campaign coordinator for the Student Environmental Center (SEC), second-year student Nicky Chronis seeks to change the way that students think about what they buy and consume.

“Everyone is so busy that I think they feel justified in not caring about it,” Chronis said. “I’m taking into account future generations and I don’t want them to face the consequences of what I’m throwing away now.”

The SEC campaign encourages the university to make more responsible purchasing decisions, such as 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper. It also promotes waste-free campus events, starting with the summer 2008 new student orientation going zero-waste for the first time.

Silas Snyder serves as the resource conservation coordinator for university housing services at UCSC and works closely with waste reduction committees at the various colleges to reduce the amount of trash that we truck to the landfill. Snyder said that the solution is part individual, part systematic.

“Part of it is a global effort — don’t put anything in the trash, reduce, buy in bulk, etc.,” Snyder said. “The other part of it is providing individuals with the opportunity to properly process their waste through recycling.”

At the university level, the University of California Office of the President has outlined a systemwide waste policy that plans a zero-waste UC system by the year 2020. Snyder said UCSC is currently at a 50 percent diversion rate, expected to increase to 75 percent by 2012.

Zero waste is an ambitious goal for such a large system, and both Snyder and Chronis consider a comprehensive and in-house composting system on campus vital to achieving that goal. 

The recent introduction of trayless dining in the campus dining halls cut down food waste from 3 to 4 ounces per plate to 1.75 ounces per plate, Chronis said. However, only the College Eight dining hall is equipped with a food pulper to convert this wasted food into compostable material, which is then outsourced to a local farmer. Chronis explained that in order to achieve zero waste, the school cannot continue sending its compost off-site.

“We produce so much compost as it is that the city can’t even handle taking it all,” Chronis said.

There is a long way to go, but a rapidly changing planet requires our commitment, Snyder said.

“The students who are going to be here when we have to be zero-waste are second-graders right now,” he said. “Can you imagine all the climactic change, landfills filling up, and ocean pollution that’s going to occur until then? It’s going to be a very different place.”

It is this kind of mindful awareness of waste that Pearson hopes will become more prevalent. Indeed, for someone who spends his days surrounded by the trash of 60,000 people, Pearson has managed to not resign himself to the fact that humans are driven to degrade the earth. In addition to abolishing the reviled single-use plastic bag, Pearson hopes people will begin to think less about one-time convenience, and more about reuse.

“It’s a circle, you can’t have something that goes in a straight line and stops,” Pearson said. “People have to start thinking that way in everything they buy and use.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Talking Trash: The Truth About What we Waste

Photos by Alex Zamora.

Picturesque sunsets and warm evenings set the scene in Santa Cruz for spring fashion. UCSC’s fields boast beautiful bouquets of wildflowers and breathtaking views.

Spring fashions are as varied as the blooms that welcome the season. While a coat might seem heavy for spring, a light trench or cotton blazer is an easy way to be practical and look sharp throughout the day. Navys, blacks, whites, and metallics are always classic and are a “go” for any season, but don’t forget to be bold and make it your own. Remember it’s not the chain stores that have all the deals — thrift stores have plenty of options at fantastic prices. Go vintage and take advantage of the clothes and the local surroundings waiting for you whenever you need a new muse.

Spring brings about a reversal in personal style. The color palette changes from the darks of winter attire to the lights of spring frocks and bright colors. Sandals and flats replace winter boots, and sunglasses will be a year-round Californian classic. While some trends persevere through the seasons, some touches are particular to spring. Pastels and floral prints are perfect harbingers to the season. Living in Santa Cruz provides us with a beautiful backdrop to any outfit along with unpredictable weather — which provides countless opportunities to layer up or layer down, sometimes multiple times in the same day.

Panther Beach is perfect for barbecuing or escaping the stresses of school. These UCSC students, dressed in crisp eyelet dresses and button-down shirts, model a few examples of different styles that compliment spring. Brightly colored shorts and skirts are a must — just don’t forget that SPF.

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Refresh & Redress

Illustration by Justin Martinez.

UC Santa Cruz’s athletics department is becoming renowned nationwide, and even globally, for its success in sports such as men’s volleyball and tennis. A growing number of high-school athletes are reaching out to Slug coaches with hopes of calling Santa Cruz their new home.

“You get a lot of letters when students are interested in Santa Cruz,” said men’s tennis head coach Bob Hansen, “… and in tennis a lot of players are foreign. It’s such an international sport.” 

Hansen pointed out several players over his nearly-30-year career coaching at UCSC, including senior and assistant head coach Justin Dorfman, who is from Hong Kong.

“I definitely feel like sports has brought a lot of international students to the U.S.,” said Dorfman, who contacted Hansen after hearing about his reputation for player development during a visit to a tennis academy in Boca Roton, Fla. “Tennis has grown a lot and other countries don’t really have college tennis. But in other sports you see a bunch of people from other countries starting to go [to the United States], like basketball and swimming.”

The rest of the student athletes who end up considering UCSC are recruited by coaches. 

“Recruiting is the lifeblood of the program, and the focus is to match our goals as a program with the goals of prospective student athletes,” said men’s volleyball head coach and UCSC alumnus Jonah Carson.

There will be several talented athletes entering the freshman class this fall, such as volleyball league MVP Erik Liederbach and Erich Conan, a tennis player who is ranked 221st in the country out of roughly 1,600 high-school seniors. 

A coach can hear about a player in several different ways, such as perusing high school athletics websites and scouting games. The recruitment process varies, however, depending on the sport.

“With some sports like golf and swimming, you don’t have to see them because you know times and scores,” athletics director Linda Spradley explained. “If they golf 100 you know they’re not going to make the team, but if they golf 80 you grab ’em.”

Some coaches also take advantage of the usefulness of technology as they look for possible recruits.

“I would say the manner in which kids are recruited now versus before has changed, but it is still basically the same goal: to get the best UCSC-eligible athletes,” said men’s tennis assistant head coach Bryce Parmelly. “Most recruiting these days is done online.”

For men’s tennis in particular, there is a recruiting site (www.tennisrecruiting.net) which gives extensive information about players, from their rankings by section and nationally to what colleges they’re interested in. “It’s all pretty precise and easy,” tennis head coach Hansen said. 

Yet recruiting is by no means a simple process for coaches.

“Coaches spend a lot of time recruiting,” Spradley said. “It’s very time-consuming and difficult. We may get 500 students who want in and coaches have to answer all of them.” 

Spradley added that recruiting occurs year-round, not just around college decision time. This means coaches have to juggle looking at prospective players at the same time as managing their current ones.

This is made all the more difficult by the lack of finances dedicated to recruitment.

“Coaches have no recruiting dollars,” Spradley said. “None. No budget for it, no distinct money set aside for them, and most teams don’t reimburse a drive to Southern California [to recruit a student].”

Spradley also points to the fact that there is little money in the athletic department in general as the more overlying issue.

“We need money and we don’t have it,” she said. “Our ability to recruit depends on money.”

In addition, because UCSC is a Division III school, it cannot give out athletic scholarships. Whether or not this plays a significant factor is debatable. But Spradley believes the general consensus is that an athletic scholarship shouldn’t make or break a student’s decision if they really love UCSC.

“I’m sure there are students who need financial aid or feel entitled to an athletic scholarship because they’re a good athlete, and will go to a school irrespective to location or major,” she said.

Volleyball head coach Carson added that the lack of athletic scholarships is not synonymous with a lack of talent.

“It’s still important to remember we’re a championship team with elite athletes,” he said. “Just because we don’t have scholarships doesn’t mean we’re not a good school. In fact, I think it makes us better.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at UCSC Coaches Focus on Recruiting

  

Photo courtesy of Dennis Schwartz.

On April Fools’ Day, Daniel Press, the head of the environmental studies department, wrote an opinion piece in the San Jose Mercury News deriding UCSC’s recent purchases of renewable energy certificates, calling them a “feel-good scam” and saying that the school, which purchased certificates for 57,000 megawatt-hours of clean energy in 2007, “was getting fleeced by green-energy scammers.” Despite the cover date, however, his piece was no joke, and it was completely wrong.

In 2006, UCSC students voted to raise their tuition by $3 in order to purchase renewable energy certificates to reduce the carbon footprint of the school’s electricity use. Because its utility, PG&E, doesn’t have a green power program that would allow the school to pay extra for a greener mix, the school chose to buy certificates. In 2006, they were for California-based geothermal power. In 2007, over half came from California wind, the rest from a mixture of biomass in Florida and wind in Oklahoma, Texas, and the Dakotas.

In his piece, Press said “certificate brokers have persuaded hundreds of colleges to buy the ‘environmental attributes’ of wind, landfill gas and solar energy – but not the electricity itself.” And he is exactly right. Renewable energy certificates are a market-based answer to a simple physics problem that Press understands well: once electricity is on the grid, you can’t route “clean” electrons to those who pay extra for it and away from those who don’t.

Part of that has to do with the sheer complexity of the electric grid. With the need to respond instantly to shifts in demand and the lack of ability to store energy, the grid is a deeply intertwined, delicate system, cobbled together from midcentury infrastructure designed to service always-on coal plants and the comparatively recent additions of intermittent renewable resources like wind and solar. It’s a mixed-up, tumbled-around creature, and the power you get out of the outlet under your desk is a mashup of electrons from any number of sources, much like a cup of water dipped from a river formed by a thousand small tributaries. Trying to divine where each drop came from is impossible.

Normally we don’t care about the details – the lights turn on just the same whether the electricity was generated from coal plants, wind power, or gerbil wheels. But now that we’re demanding cleaner electricity from renewable resources, we want to be able to pay extra to get our electrons from the wind and sun, not belching smokestacks. By paying extra for green power, so the argument goes, it should incite investors to build renewable energy, which is more expensive to build than fossil fuel plants and has a longer payback time. But if we can’t route green power straight to our homes, how can we give people and universities the ability to send an unequivocal economic signal to build more wind farms and solar arrays?

The idea, first instituted in the late 1990s, was a pretty revolutionary one, and went like this: assign every megawatt hour of clean energy a unique serial number (a certificate), and then sell the certificate as the sole claim to that generation, but independent of the actual electrons. That way the wind farm has two things it can sell: first, the undifferentiated electricity (it’s not “wind power” anymore) to the local utility, and second, all the good environmental benefits of that electricity embodied in the certificate, which can then be sold to the highest bidder on national commodities markets. The final buyer (say, UCSC) has sole claim over the renewable attributes, and once the transaction takes place, the serial number is retired so no one else – not the state it was generated in, or even the owner of the wind farm – can claim the environmental benefits of that megawatt hour.

There’s no other system quite like it, but it works. Individuals and companies can buy renewable energy whether their utility offers it or not, and renewable energy generators get paid for more than just the electricity they produce. They are compensated for the environmental benefits we all enjoy. Before this system of certificates, our common natural resources were given away free to industry to use up and pollute, and there was no financial gain in avoiding the environmental pillaging that was fully allowable by law. The system of renewable energy certificates is an artificial system, but it’s effective as both a way to monetize the act of not polluting, and to incentivize new renewable development. All this in a market-based system of commodity trading where the market determines the price.

And here are the results: wind power capacity has grown on average by 24 percent per year in the U.S. since 2000, 46 percent in 2007 and over 50 percent in 2008. Certificate prices rise and fall but have trended sharply upward over the last decade, improving financing options for new facilities. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in the last decade households and businesses collectively have provided a larger market for new renewable energy developers than all state government renewable programs combined, and these voluntary purchases support more than 4,000 MW of new renewable energy capacity nationally, steadily increasing over time. Every state uses certificates to track their renewable energy generation and progress toward their renewable energy goals, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recognizes big purchasers of renewable energy like UCSC and Intel as part of its Green Power Partnership program.

Columbia Energy Partners, a developer of wind energy projects in the northwest, finds certificates are crucial for getting new projects in the ground. “Wind projects are immensely capital intensive, often requiring funds way in advance of project development,” they said. “As wind turbines are becoming more and more expensive, you have to have every revenue stream on the back-end to cover your costs. Renewable energy certificates are critical to our projects. Apart from the financial imperatives, in the presence of global warming, any incentive for renewable energy only makes sense.”

Basin Electric Power Cooperative, a utility purchaser of wind energy in North Dakota, has a similar story. “We started out planning for one turbine, but then when we started seeing the interest from the U.S. government and from [consumers] in purchasing renewable energy certificates, we decided that we could build more wind. Certificates make wind competitive with coal or other traditional forms of energy.”

Because of its purchases, UCSC is No. 6 on the U.S. EPA’s Green Power Partnership Top 20 College & University list, just below the entire California State University system. Chancellor Blumenthal is a signatory of the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment, a pledge by over 600 college and university presidents to at least partly reduce their schools’ environmental impacts by purchasing or producing at least 15 percent of their institutions’ electricity consumption from renewable sources. The only way this purchasing can be done is through certificates, and in purchasing 100 percent renewable energy, the school has done far more than the minimum required by the commitment.

President Obama’s energy plan calls for increasing the nation’s use of renewable energy to 25 percent by 2025, up from the current 2 percent. Twenty-five percent might not sound like much, considering the urgency of the climate crisis, and it is far less than the 100 percent goal Al Gore challenged the nation to last year, but getting there will take all the political will, private investment, and public action we can muster.

This means that we have to start cutting back on our energy use and buying renewable energy now, just as the school is doing. Renewable energy sales last year to individuals and businesses were responsible for more demand than all the state goals put together, and we need both markets if we’re going to build enough renewable energy to wean ourselves off foreign supplies, stop destructive coal mining, and stave off the coming climate crisis. Along with reducing our overall energy use, buying renewable energy is one of the most important environmental steps we can take, and UCSC should be commended for doing both. Keep it up.

 —–

Jeff Swenerton is communications director of the Center for Resource Solutions, a San Francisco-based nonprofit working to advance sustainable energy. He can be contacted at jeff@resource-solutions.org.

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at UCSC is a Green Power Leader

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Slug Comics

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at This Week in Photos

The garden at Kresge is maintained by students. A new independent study course has expanded participation in the garden co-op. Photo by Rosario Serna.

It was Voltaire’s Candide who told us “we must cultivate our garden.” 

Those who started the Kresge Garden Co-op listened.

Just outside the east fences of the garden, a brilliantly colored “Viva la Compost” sign can be read next to heaps of fresh soil and brown manure, reflecting the organic and self-sufficient manner in which the co-op manages its garden. A myriad of vegetables and fruits grow there, including cabbage, garlic, onions, carrots, plums, peaches and spinach.

Kresge College recently began offering a two-credit independent study course that focuses on expanding and improving the quality of the garden. Since the inception of the course, the garden has thrived, thanks to eager and involved students who enrolled in the spring session.

Ryan Abelson, a Kresge gardener and second-year environmental studies major, now serves as a TA for the class. Abelson has seen the garden grow tremendously in the last two years.

“In the beginning, there wasn’t that much formal structure. It used to just be Kresge students to themselves, self-maintained,” Abelson said. “The co-op has been a lab, where we can bring in new kids of all ages. We have staff, parents, little kids, [and] students from all colleges. We all make it happen.”

Abelson commented on the growth of the co-op since the beginning of the class last spring quarter.

“When I took the class there were around 10 to 15 people,” he said. “Now there are around 20 to 25 people. The class is really hands-on — you’re digging, planting, weeding.”

Abelson said that the class teaches important lessons to students.

“We want to teach people ways to be self-sufficient,” Abelson said. “We’re not focused on production, but rather education and awareness. It’s all about the community. We use the resources here to educate people — and feed people too.”

The Kresge Garden Co-op also prides itself on its organic production standards.

“We only support farmers who buy seeds,” Abelson said. “We don’t support genetic modification.”

Kresge gardening class instructor Dave Shaw first discovered the garden as a student in 2004. 

After joining the UCSC faculty in 2008, he started teaching the class and has since seen what he considers to be “tremendous” growth.

“Since the beginning of the co-op, we have doubled the amount of beds and bed space, we have strengthened the relationship between the garden co-op and the food co-op at Kresge, and we are beginning to offer services to other groups that have invited us to collaborate,” Shaw said. “The garden co-op is now thriving. It’s like a garden renaissance out there.”

Shaw emphasized the importance of the students in enabling the garden to thrive.

“The students are running this co-op, and that’s super empowering,” Shaw said. “We’re building a really strong community, and it’s working. People are learning these skills and running with them.

Bodhi Crandall, a third-year environmental studies and economics major from Cowell, said he is grateful for Shaw and the garden.

“It’s been really great because Dave [Shaw] takes a lot of the time to build community and teach us everything,” he said. “[The garden] is a nice demonstration of organic procedure.”

Shanin Arianna, a second-year philosophy major at Kresge, is part of the two-credit independent study with the co-op. Though Arianna is new to gardening, he said that the experience has been very worthwhile.

“I have a lot of fun doing it,” Arianna said. “You don’t have to think about much while you [garden]. It’s really beautiful out here.”

Abelson said it is important to expand the skills learned in the garden to other places.

“We want people to come, cultivate plants, and outsource them,” Abelson said. “Only so much focus can go into this.”

Besides cultivating their own garden, students working in the Kresge garden have hopes for other colleges, like Oakes and Porter, to create co-ops of their own.

“We’re going to Oakes and to Porter and expanding,” Shaw said. “It just shows that what we’re doing is really working. We’re cultivating the good life.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Kresge Garden Fosters Vegetation, Community

A glance at the food labels in any given dining hall would prove our campus chummy with the organic movement. We utilize gardens and food co-ops, and we even have compost stations at all 10 colleges. So, we’re doing all we can, right?

Wrong.

However environmentally conscious we strive to be, there are still copious amounts of food waste and trash at the end of the day, each and every day. Right now, our campus has a diversion rate of about 50 percent, meaning that half of all the waste we produce goes to beneficial reuses like compost or recycling. The other half takes a one-way trip to the dump.

So it’s true, we are flexing our greener muscles. But it’s time to up our game and get more aggressive. A friendly gesture toward a greener tomorrow simply is not enough anymore. A few random compost bins here and there won’t cut it. 

The UC Office of the President has put forth a goal for future waste practices UC-wide, hoping to up our current diversion rate to 75 percent by 2012 and dump only a quarter of our waste. By 2020 we are aiming for a zero-waste policy, reusing everything and bidding the local landfill a permanent adieu.

Although lofty, this goal is not out of reach. But UCSC has to take some progressive measures soon, or this vision of a cleaner campus could very well get dumped, along with that 50 percent of our oh-so-reusable waste.

As a means of achieving this goal, it’s time we revamped our compost system. Currently only semi-effective in its disjointed college-by-college state, UCSC’s practice of this sometimes smelly art form isn’t living up to potential. First of all, the UCSC waste that is composted is not even handled on campus. We ship it off so those better equipped can literally do our dirty work for us. With the amount of students here and the sheer strength of the average college appetite, this route will no longer be effective if we plan to achieve our zero-waste goal. We eat too much and throw away too much to send everything offsite. Self-sufficient sustainability is the name of the game. Put on your big-kid pants, UCSC, and learn to take care of your own mess.

What we need is a cohesive system, a campus united under old banana peels, wilting lettuce, and eventually, rich, reusable soil. It is necessary that the various compost stations around campus have communication, and that we gear up enough as a school to handle the waste we produce. This would give us a jump-start in claiming this zero-waste beacon, and also make for a strong system with some staying power. It’s a solid first step, and while it’s not the only road toward zero waste, it’s definitely one of the most important.

The good news is we just have to keep doing what we’re good at here in Santa Cruz: play up that eco-friendly vibe like it’s going out of style. But we could certainly do with a little more organization and fine-tuning. And where better to hone our skills than the place where we stuff our faces? The College Eight dining hall has the right idea, utilizing a “food pulper” that mashes leftover food together to make it more compostable. This is a squishy step in the right direction. In fact, adding a pulper in every campus dining hall could be just the step needed to help us build the foundation for an improved compost system. 

The intention is good so far, but now it’s time to really organize and do something constructive with the heaping pile of waste before us. Let’s dig in.

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at From Trashy to Classy: A Compost Makeover

Students danced to Latin American music at the 30th anniversary celebration for TWANAS on April 21 at Oakes. Photo Courtesy of Evelyn Lara.

Students crammed into the Oakes Learning Center last Thursday to dance, eat fresh Mexican food, watch a film about resistance, and discuss the importance of having a Third World voice in UC Santa Cruz’s student media.

The event was held to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Third World and Native American Students Press Collective (TWANAS).

Key coordinator Pedro Espinosa said the press collective considered not publishing this quarter.

“It was a matter of getting people to join the staff,” said Espinosa, a fourth-year community studies major and Latin American and Latino studies (LALS) minor. “Money was not a problem.”

Third-year Zassmin Montes de Oca, a community studies major, is one of Espinosa’s recruits. She decided to join to gain experience in writing.

“I wanted to write about topics that matter to me,” Montes de Oca said. “I also wanted to try something new. I have never written for a paper before. It’s cool to know that other people are going to pick it up and read it.”

TWANAS content consists of artwork, essays and photography involving issues that affect students of color.

Montes de Oca heard about TWANAS when Espinosa made an announcement at a Students Informing Now (SIN) meeting about a month ago. SIN is an on-campus organization that advocates for immigrant rights. 

“He asked everybody at the meeting to come out,” Montes de Oca said.  

TWANAS was not only successful in recruiting staff members, but also in getting people to attend the party held for the publication’s 30th birthday. 

“Considering how many showed up for the celebration, it makes the work that we do for the issue worthwhile,” Espinosa said. “This is what UCSC needs to see and we will continue the work.”

Because of the high turnout, Espinosa is not worried about getting people to sign up next year, he said.

“[The high turnout] means there is a possibility that more students will join the staff, that there is an audience out there that reads TWANAS, and that there are students who are willing to do something.” 

After the audience watched the dance group Sabrosura perform, students chowed down on food from Taqueria Santa Cruz and danced to San Jose-based band La Colectiva. The band played a style called Son Jarocho, traditional music from the Mexican state of Veracruz, until 11 p.m. 

“The students don’t usually get the opportunity to dance to this type of music at UCSC, so they loved it,” Espinosa said. “They kept playing a good 30 minutes after the event ended because of the students’ reaction.”

Before the dancing took place, students engaged in an open dialogue on how a voice for students of color is vital to the local media. 

Second-year Natalie Ramirez, a LALS major, referenced Cohn Hallinan, the founder of the now-defunct UCSC journalism minor. Hallinan was a guest speaker in Ramirez’s journalism workshop earlier that week. Ramirez said that Hallinan’s words “A revolution will not and has never happened without the press” stood out to her.

“None of our mediums are being used too effectively,” Ramirez said about press collectives outside TWANAS. “We need to collaborate with the media so it can really take effect on this campus.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Students Celebrate 30th Anniversary of TWANAS

Illustration by Joe Lai.

Fourth-year Antonio Bautista is on a climate-changing mission. Bautista, an environmental studies major, is the climate action intern for the Chancellor’s Undergraduate Internship Program (CUIP) and is one of three undergraduate student members of the Chancellor’s Council on Climate Action. 

This council, which is composed of faculty, administrators and students, recently released the first-ever draft of the Climate Action Plan, which outlines UCSC’s commitment to reduce its carbon emissions in the coming decade. 

Bautista is rallying to get students to both read the plan and submit their comments and feedback to the council for revision during the public comment period, which extends until May 8.

The plan takes inventory of the university’s current greenhouse gas emission levels, which are at roughly 79,726 metric tons of CO2 equivalents. The plan aims for that figure to drop 2,000 levels by 2014, eliminating over 14,000 metric tons of CO2 in the process. With other milestones along the way, the ultimate goal is a carbon-neutral campus.

Bautista spoke with City on a Hill Press to explain the campus’s carbon forecast and how the plan hopes to achieve it. 

—–

CHP: How did the process of making a climate plan for the university begin?

AB: The chancellor signed on to what is called the American College and University Presidential Climate Commitment (ACUPCC). When you agree to that, you agree to create a climate action plan. It was a student, though, who first went to the chancellor and bugged him by saying, “When will you agree to do a climate action plan? Because we haven’t done it and we need to do it now.”

From that, the chancellor went ahead and created the Chancellor’s Council on Climate Action and approached Daniel Press, chair of the environmental studies department. As the chair of the climate council, [Press] got everyone together on a task force, including Larry Pageler from Transportation and Parking Services (TAPS), Alan Spearot from the economics department, Ali Shakouri from the engineering department and three student interns, among others. 

The plan sets forth ambitious goals. How are they going to be implemented?

The Climate Action Plan outlines some of the methods, including putting solar panels on facilities here and doing more energy efficiency projects. It also focuses on trying to change the mobile ridership on campus by introducing more bike paths and bike shuttles to use those kinds of methods to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

Why is student input and feedback about the Climate Action Plan so important?

Basically, right now the Climate Action Plan is just a document. It could easily just become another document with no importance. The administration needs to know that students are interested in this and support it and that they’re going to be the watchdogs. We’ll read all the student comments we receive and then incorporate all the useful ones into the official Climate Action Plan. If students aren’t vocal about its implementation, it will be weak. Especially because of the budget cuts right now, sustainability isn’t a priority.

In your opinion, what’s missing from the Climate Action Plan?

We’ve developed some of the clear paths that we’re going to take to achieve our greenhouse gas emission quotas. … Also, it clearly outlines that energy efficiency is going to be one of the routes by which we’re going to achieve a reduction in emissions. 

What’s missing from the energy efficiency part of the plan is the how. What projects are going to be undertaken and when? How much are they going to cost? It clearly lists energy efficiency as one of the routes to get us to cut down our emissions, but it doesn’t say how we’re going to do it.

Another component that is missing is behavioral changes, which would include anything from teaching students how to reduce their energy and water consumption to really changing their lifestyles. We don’t include anything on that and it clearly needs to be a big part and could be a big cut to emissions.

In a time when our university is experiencing extreme budgetary stress, why is this important?

It’s important to have a clear plan on how we’re going to cut our greenhouse gas emissions. It’s especially important right now, because the United States is figuring out a way to do that too. We’ve gone from really debating if global warming is a problem to saying that it definitely is. We need a document that involves every student and that every student knows how to participate in.

How supportive has Chancellor Blumenthal been throughout this process?

He supports it, but he hasn’t supported it in the way it matters, and that’s the implementation side of things. In order to get to that point [of implementation] we need to know that the money is going to be available. The source of funding is for the chancellor to figure out, but we’re hoping it comes from his office. Since we’ve signed on and committed to reducing our greenhouse gas levels, we have to do it. We’re only as good as our word.

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Climate Action Council Seeks Student Feedback

Arielle Greenwald sells CAN’s direct-trade coffee each Wednesday afternoon at the downtown Santa Cruz Farmers Market. Photo by Hilary Khteian.

Fourth-year Merrill student Moises Plascenia is preparing to embark on the adventure of a lifetime.

Plascenia will leave for Jose Maria Morales, Mexico, this June and will study and volunteer with other students there through the Community Agroecology Network (CAN). 

“We’re going to be traveling from Mayan community to Mayan community, collecting stories, collecting farming techniques of the area, basic demographics of the area,” he said.

Plascenia is currently an intern for CAN, a nonprofit organization based in Santa Cruz that supports farmers in Central and South America through direct trade practices. Steve Gliessman, an environmental studies professor at UC Santa Cruz, started the organization in 2001 in response to Latin American farmers’ plummeting wages.

UCSC students interning with CAN help farmers improve their crops, develop more sustainable practices and increase biodiversity. Volunteers and interns both abroad and in the United States work to ensure farmers a living wage. Here in Santa Cruz, volunteers sell their coffee every Wednesday at the farmers market to support the cause.

Photo by Hilary Khetian.

“What we try to do is set up a trade relationship,” said Tom Maimon, a fourth-year CAN intern who will go on the same trip as Plascenia. “[In the conventional market] there’s these middlemen, exporters, importers, grocers, distributors, roasters, retailers, and all those retailers take a cut from the producers.”

CAN farmers can ship their coffee to the United States directly through the mail system, cutting out the middlemen. This puts more money in the farmers’ pockets. 

CAN outreach coordinator Grace Voorheis put it best: “The coffee we sell goes beyond fair trade. It’s a direct market.”

Plascenia, Maimon and their classmates will work with the Mayan Intercultural University of Quintana Roo, Mexico. Together they will conduct surveys, research and create an ethnography of the region.

Ultimately, though, Plascenia said he and his fellow volunteers aim to find “sustainable positions for the communities.” 

“By sustainable, I mean sustainable agriculturally, sustainable economically and sustainable in the cultural fashion,” Plascenia said.

There are several Latin American countries where CAN interns may serve. The organization offers internship programs in Costa Rica and El Salvador, as well as a new program in Nicaragua and two in Mexico, like the one Plascenia and Maimon will be going on.

Maimon, a community studies major, sees the internship program as a chance not only “to go abroad and study in another country, but [also to] have that study be a service study, so that [students] are not just going to another country and then taking what they learned and leaving, but having the learning process be an equal exchange of something.”

“It’s a transformative experience,” Maimon said. “It’s not just like EAP.”

Alayna Fredrick, who is currently interning in Costa Rica, said in an e-mail that time moves much slower there. 

“I’ve only been here for two weeks,” Fredrick said. “But the heat makes it feel like a month.”

Fredrick also notes that a myriad of benefits come out of CAN. 

“[Through the internship] deep relationships are built and learning is shared,” Fredrick said. “Through the direct market system, producers see all the revenues from the sale of their coffee. [Consumers] learn and understand the hardships, inequities and costs of the T-shirt they’re wearing or cappuccino they drink every morning.”

Members of CAN are hopeful about the future, yet realistic about its possibilities.

“Coffee is one of the most traded commodities on the planet,” Voorheis said. “It’s kind of daunting to say that CAN is changing the way conventional markets work, but you know, it’s a start.”

Looking ahead, Plascenia is excited and optimistic, both about his own future and our nation’s relationship with Latin America. 

“With the green movement going on and our economy right now, we’re looking for a better way to go,” he said. 

Plascenia said the conventional trade model is too exploitive.

“I think that CAN offers a different channel, in which we can still get what we want but do it in a way that’s more humane,” Plascenia said. “I really do think that CAN is setting a precedent.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Local Nonprofit Connects Students With Farmers in Latin America

Wheelbarrows sit ready to be used by UCSC gardeners. Photo by Rosario Serna.

The sun breaks through clouds to find students from the Program In Community and Agroecology (PICA) tending to their gardens. Spring has arrived and it is time to turn soil beds and mulch in this pocket of campus. But except for the bus stop announcing the Village and Farm, there is little that suggests to the outside world that this microcosm of sustainable agriculture and cluster of bungalows even exist. 

PICA, which was started in 2002, teaches students about self-sustainable living through farming and community. Involved students  create and maintain gardens in addition to running a Village-wide composting program. A two-unit seminar on sustainability is offered to PICA students each quarter.

PICA residents live at the mouth of the lower quarry in Quad B. Their bungalows are easily distinguished from the rest of the Village community because of their proximity to the gardens and greenhouse.

“Our mission is to get students to get [their] hands dirty, to get involved in community,” said program coordinator Vivan “Bee” Vadakan.

PICA accomplishes these goals in two ways: connection with food sources and connection with each other. PICAns, as they are affectionately called, create their own garden patches, which they tend to regularly. Often, they even work on Saturdays.

“There’s a rooting here, a sense of entanglement with the earth,” said fourth-year Kate Shaffner, a resident adviser for Quad B. She added that PICA gives her “a sense of place.”

Community involvement also comes from shared meals and food culture, Vadakan said. PICAns take part in a cultural cooking series featuring different ethnic dishes from around the world. 

“[PICAns] get to learn how to cook for 40 people,” she said. “That’s something that is very powerful to them.”

Fifth-year Cuc Vo, a current PICA intern, said the group recently shared a North African-themed meal. After their weekly three-hour-long seminars, he said he enjoys relaxing with a group meal.

Shaffner, who holds quad meetings at the beginning of each quarter, said that community issues that arise are often discussed during shared dinners.

Vo and fourth-year Ann Ngo, who are both interns this quarter for PICA, said they do more than build a community inside the Village. Under program coordinator Vadakan’s guidance they are setting up a garden at Vo’s alma mater, Oakland High School, in Oakland, Calif. 

“They lack community,” Vo said of students at Oakland High School. “We want to get it more green. There’s so much pavement, it’s like a prison.”

Vo and Ngo spend 12 hours a week interning for PICA. This includes leading workshops and helping with the gardens. In addition to their commitments at UCSC, they set up workshops for students and staff at Oakland High School. 

By getting the adults and students to get their hands dirty, Vo hopes that there will be more cooperation between the two groups. 

“We’re using what we learned,” Ngo said. “[In the garden] they can have a calming place to move negative energy into positive energy.”

Vadakan said the program serves as a model for sustainable community living.

“Community takes commitment — there’s effort involved,” Vadakan said. “You have to be mindful.”

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PICA hosts different workshops to encourage self-sustainability throughout the school year, including an upcoming solar cooker workshop on May 23 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Attendees will learn how to save energy and make food using solar cookers built out of household materials.

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at The Power of Sustainable Living

Illustration by Rachel Edelstein.

Everywhere you turn, it’s there. 

Climate change, as little front-page attention as it receives, is what many experts agree to be the single greatest threat facing Planet Earth, and all life on it, in all its four-and-a-half billion years of existence. 

Frankly, the thought of a planet — my planet — burnt to a crisp and thus completely unable to sustain any form of life terrifies me. Many times, after reading the latest reports on the exponential rate of polar ice caps melting or the extinction of an unprecedented number of species, I felt hopeless and vulnerable. These problems are too big, and the people aware enough to care are too powerless when compared to the monolith system of consumption that got us here in the first place. The world is going to hell in a handbasket and, I’m sorry future generations, there’s nothing much we can do about it. Good luck.

At first, my despair was paralyzing. Literally. I’d cower inside for hours, hiding from the precarious outside, knowing that the world as I know it could be gone in just a few years. 

However, amid all the apocalyptic predictions I suddenly became distressingly aware of after watching “An Inconvenient Truth,” there was an unwavering shimmer of hope. The silver lining was small, but it was undoubtedly shining.

It came in the form of scientists saying there were other ways, that it wasn’t too late to save the planet and the precious life that calls it home. It came dressed in suits and leather loafers, drafting bills aimed at making the environment our top political priority. It came clad in organic cotton and Birkenstocks, protesting capitalism and neoliberalism at the G20 summit, riding bikes and buying local, ready to dig deep in the trenches, planting seeds of change through the sowing of home gardens.

But hope has come most powerfully, in my life, in the form of my peers. 

I’m inspired by the wheeled warriors who bike up Bay Street instead of driving a car. I’m energized by students petitioning for campus initiatives that would move us toward a greener, more sustainable campus. I’m galvanized by the Coalition to Save Community Studies, which, while not directly related to the environment, stands as a testament to students who could have bowed down to the administration, but who instead are fighting tooth-and-nail to make sure the very heart of their department isn’t cut out. 

We’ve been indoctrinated since the day we were born that we don’t have any power, leaving us to depend on others to make the decisions for us. These de facto policy makers, sitting in their ivory towers far removed from reality and the people on the street, have led us down a path towards economic and ecological destruction. 

Slowly but surely, people are realizing they hold the most powerful weapon of all — the power of choice. Seventy percent of the population elected Barack Obama, a far cry from the usual presidential suspects, to be the leader of the free world. He has chosen, with all that’s on his colossal plate, to make the environment one of his top priorities. By appointing Stephen Chu, the focused and forward-thinking physicist from Berkeley, as his Secretary of Energy, Obama is signaling to the world that we have a problem, and we need to deal with it ASAP.  

Daily, we can make choices that will enrich our lives and simultaneously protect our planet. Choosing to ride a bike, taking the bus, switching out our lightbulbs, buying local, voting for environmentally-oriented policies, electing environmentally-focused public officials, emailing Chancellor Blumenthal and demanding a comprehensive climate action plan… the list of the minor and major things we can choose to do that will, in the short and long term, save us from ourselves is endless. 

Already this quarter, students are realizing what power they have inside themselves. Even more importantly, they are realizing what power they have together. 

Our own power can be frightening. It can be exhilarating. But we can’t afford to sit back and watch as the world falls to pieces.

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at We’ve Got the Whole World in Our Hands

People Power, a group that has been working for almost twenty years to designate King Street as a place for bikes first and cars second, presented their idea in a special City Council meeting April 21. The establishment of a bike boulevard would promote safety and sustainability on the streets, and it would allow Santa Cruz to take ownership of its reputation as a forward-thinking community, particularly when it comes to alternative transportation efforts.

Although critics of the project fear it would put undue strain on the city’s already depleted budget, in the long run the benefits of the bike boulevard would far out weight its initial costs. 

Furthermore, as our country tackles the daunting task of enduring the worst economic downturn in decades, the scene is set for a new order to take over –– one based on environmental consciousness that puts people before profits.

We live in a college community, where the majority of students own two wheels, not four. And long-term residents are just as eager to save money and free themselves from fossil fuels. By building a bike boulevard, the city will give its residents the infrastructural support they need to get out of their cars and onto the pavement.

While there are many public projects that deserve not only funds, but attention, the added benefit of providing a safe route along a busy strip of our city is yet another reason why King Street needs to undergo a remodel. 

Our city is already loaded with bicyclists, and the number of pedalers seems to grow every day.  We live in a city that constantly pushes for further eco-friendliness. Now we need to put our time, resources, and money where the cyclists are. 

Two deaths and one major injury occurred involving bikes and cars last year alone, not to mention the non-fatal accident that occurred at Bay and King Streets on Wednesday. It doesn’t take a large stretch of the imagination to figure out who was harmed in these accidents.

People Power’s proposed ballot measure would give Santa Cruz’s citizens a chance to democratically participate in the decision over King Street, putting the power in their hands to decide which direction the city should go with this project. 

It is time that Santa Cruz took substantial actions towards making itself the sustainable mecca it could be.  We have the power to set a precedent for future projects locally, throughout the state and across the nation. 

The backward nature of Santa Cruz is what makes it progressive, and essentially what makes it uniquely Santa Cruz. It’s time to turn the tables, put bicycles before cars on King Street, and practice the fantastic backwardness we love to preach.

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Put the Money Where the Bike Is

Comic book store owner Joe Ferrara looks forward to Free Comic Book Day, an annual event in which comic stores give out comic books for free. The event will be celebrated this Saturday by Ferrara’s store, Atlantis Fantasyworld, as well as Comicopolis on Front Street. Photo by Alex Zamora.

Hollywood’s comic-based films for audiences of all ages continually bring in profits, and the comic book genre has proved its staying power in this digital age. This weekend locals can pick up free comic books in celebration of the eighth annual international Free Comic Book Day.

Every year on the first Saturday in May, 2,000 comic stores nationwide give out nearly 2 million comic books. Free Comic Book Day comes to Santa Cruz this weekend from 10 a.m. until 7 p.m. at two local comic book stores: Atlantis Fantasyworld on Cedar Street and Comicopolis on Front Street. 

Joe Ferrara, the owner of Atlantis Fantasyworld, said that Free Comic Book Day is his favorite day every year.

“Year in and year out, it’s just a wonderful way to celebrate comics,” Ferrara said. “The whole idea here is to show people that this entertainment medium has grown from just-for-kids to adults. We hold it to show people the diversity of comic books.” 

Ferrara estimates that the most popular series will be the Wolverine comics, to coincide with the release of the “X-Man Origins: Wolverine” movie in theaters nationwide this Friday.

“The movie industry coincides Free Comic Book Day with a release,” Ferrara said. “Last year was ‘Iron Man,’ and now it’s the Wolverine movie. People go to see the movie and then pick up a couple of books.”

The origins of Free Comic Book Day are rooted in Concord, Calif. Joe Field, a friend of Ferrara and owner of the Flying Colors comic book store, was inspired by the Free Cone Day held every year by the Baskin-Robbins across the street from Field’s shop. Field approached several distributors with the idea and now the event is celebrated internationally.

The selection ranges from “Archie” to “X-Men,” Ferrara said. He estimates that Atlantis Fantasyworld will be giving away over 4,000 comic books this Saturday. There will be a table display of 15 different comic books for people to pick up. 

As part of the festivities, Atlantis Fantasyworld will also have the 25th anniversary comic book cover of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” All “Watchmen” merchandise will be 30 percent off on Saturday only, all “Peanut” merchandise will be half off, and several titles in hardcover books that are usually priced at $30 will be sold for $5.

Dan Brereton will be making an appearance at Atlantis Fantasyworld this Saturday. Brereton has illustrated for several comics, including “Batman,” and most recently on a comic book called “Beta Ray Bill” featuring the popular character Thor. Brereton will be signing comic books during the day for the event.

Troy Geddes of Comicopolis explains that the event is more about getting people into reading comics than making a profit.

“We can have a good [business] day because it’s a promotional event, but it’s really about getting people into reading,” Geddes said. “Every year there’s more publishers, and it’s getting bigger and bigger.” 

Geddes estimates that the better-known comics such as “Green Lantern,” “Batman,” “The Simpsons” and some independent comics will be the first to go. He also said that several of the books available will be combined editions — two or more different comics in a book that will have both sides with the comics’ cover art.

Ben LaCara, a second-year Stevenson student and computer engineering major, hopes to find his favorite series, “Why, The Last Man,” and other titles at the event.

“I really like the plot [of the series],” LaCara said. “They’re really fantastical books. It’s a means of entertainment. I didn’t really grow up reading them though.”

LaCata became interested in comics during high school when a friend lent him a comic book, he said.

“The whole idea is that it’s supposed to be fun,” Ferrara said. “If it was free ice cream day, I’d make a beeline for it for sure.” 

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For information on available titles, pricing on merchandise and store hours, visit FreeComicBookDay.com.

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Free Comic Book Day Giveaway Comes to Santa Cruz