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DAHLONEGA – Carbon footprints, renewable energy sources, going green, composting – these topics may not be familiar to the average student, but North Georgia junior Duane Kelley clearly understands their relevance to humankind’s survival.

Kelley, a transfer student from Young Harris College, was part of a group called Common Ground on that campus that taught environmental sustainability. The 20-year-old’s efforts helped garner a $10,000 grant to build learning and enrichment programs that involved the campus in environment-friendly practices. He plans to do the same thing at North Georgia College & State University within one year.

Kelley started small on Earth Day, April 22, by taking 13 trash bags from buildings across campus and separating the recyclable content.

“I want to combat waste management ignorance on campus and show how much we save by reusing, reducing and recycling,” says Kelley, who will graduate next May.

A group of students – five Charlie Company cadets and Kelley’s fiancé Ashley Crunkleton – sifted through more than 100 lbs. of trash for an hour, retrieving aluminum cans, plastic containers, paper and cardboard. Kelley weighed the trash bags before and after the recyclables were taken out, calculating that approximately 20 percent of the total trash was salvaged for recycling.

“When we were digging through the trash, certain recyclable materials were contaminated. I bet about 65 percent would have been recyclable,” says Kelley.

That telling figure is one of the reasons Kelley knows some action must be taken on campus. “Our imprint on this planet will be much less noticeable if we do,” says Kelley.

The political science major is on a new Student Government Association committee to study recycling, but he says that reducing the use of natural resources and reusing resources is a key part of the solution for sustainability.

EDUCATING EARLY

Earth Day came during the end of the semester as students began to cram for final exams, but that didn’t stop one class of 21 female students, mostly teacher education majors, from focusing on another type of test – how to help preserve the planet.

Kelly West’s Environmental Science class took the spring semester to plan and organize an Earth Day event for Sardis Elementary School in Hall County and executed it on April 2 to fit around the grade-school schedule. Despite the project’s early arrival before Earth Day, its clear focus was to educate a future generation on how to conserve the environment and earth’s natural resources.

“We really are at a point where current and future generations are going to have to step up and make changes in the way we treat the environment and the choices we make,” says freshman Courtney DeWitt, one of the event’s organizers.

The 90-minute showcase at the Hall County school included a snack shack with organic fruits donated by Jaemor Farm Market in Alto, a recycling relay where students raced to pick up materials and place them in recycling bins, and “Save Our Water” interactive skits about water conservation. It also included a planting station, where students identified parts of a plant and planted their own seeds; a compost station, where students filled plastic bottles with organic material to learn about decomposition; and a small recycling demonstration showing how paper is recycled.

“My students not only learned about the environment and environmental sustainability but how to make those concepts applicable to first-grade students,” says West, an instructor of biology at North Georgia. “The activities they set up for the children were fun and helped them grasp concepts that are hard for some adults.”

The Environmental Science course is part of a learning community of four interlinked courses that helped facilitate the Earth Day project.

“In a normal class you might not have that bond but in a learning community, you want to hold up your responsibility to each other,” says DeWitt. The 19-year-old didn’t want to see anyone fail and that sentiment among the group helped keep the Earth Day project on track through the semester.

DeWitt tries to practice what she taught the children. In addition to recycling, she uses reusable bags when shopping for groceries and light bulbs that require less energy throughout her apartment. Some of the students from the class also started their own recycling program in Donovan Residence Hall and take their recyclables to Lumpkin County facilities.

INCREMENTAL CHANGES

Alpha Phi Omega President Elizabeth Bauman wanted to use Earth Day as a symbolic time to initiate new members into the NGCSU chapter of the national service fraternity. Members collected recycling from the residence halls on April 22 and took it to local recycling bins the following day.

“This last service project kind of ushered in a new era,” says Bauman. “One of the main purposes of the fraternity is promoting leadership by providing initiative and motivation to make changes. When new members see a change it gives them the motivation to do even more.”

Students in the Foundations of Leadership course finished shooting and editing 12 videos just before Earth Day and screened the films for students on campus. The videos will eventually be used in the Lumpkin County community.

“Some are very funny and some are very educational,” says Michele Hill, who teaches the course. “All spoke to the issue of how the planet is in need of such activities and how recycling helps.”

Kelly Davis combated the problem of littering by going directly into her community. The freshman, as part of a “civic action” assignment in a history course, managed a trash pick-up on April 18 in Suches. She and a youth group from her church covered at least seven miles of road on Highway 180, collecting a trailer full of trash.

“That stretch of highway was looking terrible,” she says. “We wanted to make the community look better for the Tour de Georgia that came through town.” The high-profile bicycle race came through Suches on April 25, ending at the entrance to NGCSU in Dahlonega on the same day.

Jason Dyer, a 32-year-old double major in English and music, juggles school with a job at Genesis Alternative Inc., a new sorghum-ethanol manufacturing company based in Blairsville.

“When I was in the 4th grade, I read an article in the Weekly Reader about oil running out, and I’ve been worried ever since,” jokes Dyer.

He used the April 15 Honors Day at the university as his platform to talk about a sustainable and renewable energy resource growing right here in Georgia. Sweet Sorghum grass, the basis for the company’s ethanol production, is widely available in nature, can be cultivated in various climates and provides a higher ethanol yield per acre than corn.

Advocacy through the arts was professor Michael Marling DeCuellar’s solution to creating environmental awareness. He is one of 13 artists in Georgia Green: Eco-Art from the Peach State, an exhibit at GCSU in Milledgeville through June 8.

In the classroom, adjunct business instructor Eugene Elander distributed to his finance class a story from the April 14 Newsweek about the Aptera Car, which he says gets 300 miles per gallon and goes on sale in California next year.

“The story is intended to not only focus on ‘thinking outside the box’ but also to show that sometimes change comes incrementally.”

Bringing this incremental change to the university and creating an environmentally conscious campus community is taking place primarily through the individual efforts of students, faculty members and others.

A major grant to augment some of these efforts will come in the form of approximately 40 recycling bins to be placed on campus this summer. The National Recycling Coalition and the Coca-Cola Company awarded the university the 23-gallon bins, which can be designated for glass, plastic and aluminum.

To find out what major projects other American colleges and universities are undertaking to help bring about environmental sustainability, go to Higher Education Goes Green, a campaign of Solutions for Our Future, a national project to build awareness of higher education’s service to the public.

From www.accessnorthga.com/detail.php?n=209542&c=10

Earth Day participants at NGCSU show commitment to promote change