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.
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. You deserve to check up on your stubbed toe before it falls off.
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By Nicole Funk, KSEC, University of Kentucky 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! By Cara Cooper, KSEC Organizer
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. |
AboutThe Young Kentuckian is a blog of the Kentucky Student Environmental Coalition where youth share their work and ideas for Kentucky's bright future. Follow The Young Kentuckian on Facebook!
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