Kentucky Student Environmental Coalition
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  • Home
  • About
    • Who We Are >
      • Meet and Join the Team
      • Mission and Strategy
      • Past Events
    • Media >
      • The Young Kentuckian Blog
      • Power to the People Podcast
      • Press >
        • Media Coverage
        • Media Resources and Contacts
        • Media Advisories and Releases
    • Allies + Networks
    • Contact
  • Get Involved
    • Plug In
    • Catalyst Activist Camp
    • Campus Affiliates
  • Resources
    • Resources
    • COVID-19 Mutual Aid
  • Donate

An Easier Life Is Not Necessarily An Easy One

2/22/2017

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By Cruz Avendaño Dreyfuss​, Centre Environmental Association
Activists set lofty goals for the world and work hard to attain them. They get educated and use their knowledge to further their causes. It’s exhilarating. It’s exhausting. Students set academic goals and (hopefully) study hard to achieve them. They get educated and use that new information to better their future. This can also be exciting. This is also exhausting.
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​​KSEC is primarily made of student-activists: some of the more enthusiastic and exhausted people on the planet that we strive to stabilize. Balancing school and KSEC and anything else we do is difficult. 

But, we often remind ourselves, many of us have it relatively easy. Many of us in KSEC don’t need to worry about oil pipelines tearing through our communities. Many members don’t deal with violent discrimination on a daily basis. Many of us can walk, talk, and breathe, without immense effort or pain. Perspective motivates us to push through adversity, and can lead to some great achievements. But it can also be dangerous. Perspective can make a person push too hard.
Perhaps you’re not someone who wakes up after their nightly two hours of sleep and walks a mile to the first of three daily jobs. Perhaps you stayed up late doing homework and are tired because you slept five hours instead of your usual seven. From a Utilitarian point of view, your situation is easier than that of someone who works three jobs on two hours of sleep. Even if you’re tired, you (in this scenario) slept a whopping five hours while someone else barely managed two. But life can feel difficult even when it’s comparatively easy. And when someone’s “easy” life feels difficult, that person may feel weak, or as though they should ignore their struggle in order to alleviate someone else’s.  

This can be beneficial, to an extent. If, while hiking with your friend, you stub your toe on a rock, that hurts pretty bad. If your friend steps in a hole and breaks their ankle, you can probably power through that stubbed toe and help evacuate your friend. 

But the toe still hurts. It probably reminds you every step. You can ignore it for a while, but if you never take a moment to check on how it’s doing, it can get more and more severe. If left untreated, your stubbed toe could become a missing toe, and now the severity of your situation is getting closer to that of your friend’s. 
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You deserve to check up on your stubbed toe before it falls off. 
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We activists spend our lives fighting for justice for ourselves and our fellow earth-dwellers, and it’s tiring. But we do it because we believe it’s right. This is how we want to spend our lives. But please, activist or not, don’t let someone else’s difficulties invalidate your own. You don’t need to be a martyr to be effective. 

KSEC works hard. We are eager and we are weary. We do not ever stop working for what we believe in. We maintain momentum by addressing our difficulties. We assess their magnitude relative to our current situation and then either drink another cup of coffee, call it a night, or take a quick rest and get back to work. Because sometimes you need to power through and meet a deadline; sometimes, you need to take off your shoe, wrap up your toe, and keep walking; and sometimes you need seven hours of sleep to fight for the person who can only manage two.
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KENTUCKY STUDENTS LEAD THE FIGHT FOR LOCAL FOOD

10/26/2016

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By Nicole Funk, KSEC, University of Kentucky
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PictureUniversity of Kentucky students mix pumpkin muffin batter
On October 12th , 2016, the Kentucky Student Environmental Coalition (KSEC) hosted its first annual Local Food Day of Action.

Universities across the state celebrated the day with events and activities to raise awareness for the importance of local food and to promote local food on campuses.

Students at Northern Kentucky University chalked their campus with messages about the Local Food Day of Action. At Murray State University, students tabled to promote the day, allowing students to learn more about local food. Students also tabled at the University of Louisville to educate others on why local food is beneficial, how the university has progressed in their embrace of local food, and introduced more of the campus to KSEC's organizing work. Visitors were able to fill out a survey about the kind of local food they would like to see on campus. Finally, at the University of Kentucky, students baked pumpkin chocolate chip muffins using local eggs and flour as well as squash and pumpkin grown on UK’s South Farm. The muffins were handed out to students to raise awareness of and appreciation for local food.

These Kentucky-wide activities helped spread KSEC’s message of support for local food. The Day of Action allowed students across the state to find out why food grown and produced in Kentucky is so valuable.

Here’s to hoping this day will inspire students, faculty & staff, and community members to bring more local food to our campuses!

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STUDENTS ACROSS KY TAKE ACTION ON NOVEMBER 20TH!

11/21/2014

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​By Cara Cooper, KSEC Organizer
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Young people across Kentucky know what is at stake if our communities and institutions don’t take sustainability seriously, our future. That is why we are united in the fight to protect our health, our communities, and our planet and it’s why we hosted a statewide day of action on November 20th.

Twelve campuses took action towards campus sustainability, reduce waste, increase energy efficiency and renewable energy, and support the local food economy as a part of the Kentucky Student Environmental Coalition's Sustainability Day of Action. Each student organization chose actions or events that could further their own organizations campus goals while staying united in the message that our campuses must be leaders when it comes to protecting our communities, our natural resources, and our future.

A day of action is just that, one day. But we know what is at stake and we won’t stop until we are sure that our future, our communities, and our planet can thrive. We deserve the same chance to flourish as previous generations without having to choose between the economy and our health, the needs of people now and the needs of people in generations to come. Sustainability is the only option.

One priority of young Kentuckians is the transition to a renewable energy future and protection of our precious air and water resources. Both University of Kentucky's Greenthumb and Eastern Kentucky University's Green Crew took action towards securing commitments from their university administration to creating and implementing a climate action plan to reduce greenhouse gases and move their campuses towards carbon neutrality. At Murray State University MESS collected petitions for their on-going Green Fee campaign to fund sustainable projects and renewable energy installations and Centre College's Centre Environmental Association educated peers and built support for a revolving loan fund to take their college's commitment to sustainability to the next level.

Another priority of Kentucky students is around the  reducing the amount of waste associated with our campuses. Many campuses across the Commonwealth still don't have campus-wide recycling (hard to believe since it’s almost 2015, but it‘s true!) so several schools focused their events on launching recycling campaigns and promoting on campus recycling and education. Campuses involved included Transylvania University's TEAL Organization, Alice Llyod College's Environmental and Outdoor Club, and Kentucky State University's Green Society (KSU is Kentucky's only historically black university AND the only public university in the state without a campus-wide recycling program). University of Louisville's GRASS Organization also participated by promoting their on campus "Free-Store" as a way to encourage reducing waste and reusing clothing and other items, rather than buying new. Berea College’s HEAL organization participated in a clothing drive to promote reusing and to collect much needed items for their local homeless shelter. Dupont Manual High School's Environmental Club also used this day of action to launch a new campaign to ban Styrofoam and to increase the amount of local food available in their cafeteria.
​Events and actions also took place at Morehead State University where their newly revived environmental club Environmental Eagles screened the documentary Dam Nation (Kentucky has dams on many of our waterways at a great detriment to the natural environment), and at Northern Kentucky University.

Beginning with Kentucky's campus communities, KSEC works toward an ecologically sustainable future through the coalescence, empowerment, and organization of the student environmental movement. We are a unified front moving forward on environmental justice through activism, development, and education. We believe in holding campuses, corporations, and governments both responsible and accountable not only in maintaining the environment but allowing ecosystems to live and prosper. We seek to expand our reach and engage our communities by building relationships with non-student driven organizations which stand in solidarity with our cause. By using our unique position as students, we demand that our universities practice sustainability by utilizing clean, renewable, safe energy. 
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    About

    The Young Kentuckian is a blog of the Kentucky Student Environmental Coalition where youth share their work and ideas for Kentucky's bright future. 

    If you would like to write a post for the blog, please email Acacia Maggard.


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