Student Piece: Ray Warner

First of all I believe that the only way to make people change is to make them aware of an alternative way to live that is not too inconvenient for them. As the Dead Kennedys stated on the album “Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death”, America’s priorities are ones based on what is easiest, not always what is right or just. I have personal experience converting the people around me to the practice of recycling and being more energy conscious on the home front as well as in the workplace. Last year most of the 5 other people I lived with, in Olwell were not used to recycling in their homes prior to coming to college. Two of my roommates claimed that their home states did not even have recycling programs. Either way, I live with 3 of the same 5 from last year and other than once in awhile when I find a can in the trash, I can safely say I have made a conscious impact on their everyday habits regarding energy conservation. At my workplace over the summer I was surrounded by older men and women who were not only ecologically uneducated to an alarming degree, but were also traditionalists, set in their ways and unwilling (at first) to change. My place of employment just so happened to be an RV and boat dealership, where most if not all of the employees were avid outdoorsmen and women in one respect or another. This fact came to be a key talking point for me when informing them of the necessity to recycle to not leave company cars running for extended periods of time and so forth. There were a few incidences where I even had to break down step by step natural (and unnatural) processes such as the water cycle and the realities of deforestation and how such things affect them personally while enjoying the nature they so claim to love. Even little steps personally taken such as encouraging people to throw away their cigarette butts in obviously placed containers provided in popular smoking spots instead of carelessly tossing them around the lot in the long run, can have positive environmental impacts.
I believe that education is only the first step towards progression, but in the case of the many people we see everyday around us who can’t tell what should go in the black can as opposed to the blue one, we must teach them to crawl before they can ever walk.


-Ray Warner