Kick Off Event: Movie Watching

Thank you to everyone who came last night! Watching the movie was a good way to inspire all of us to do what we can this week, especially since he sacrificed so much. We encourage any of you who didn't get to make it to watch the movie on your own time, its a wonderful story about doing things differently and "opting out" of systems which you don't believe in, as Joel Salatin would say.

Here are a few choice quotes from the movie to take with you:

"People say they couldn't do without this or that, so I said lets just do without it all to make it easier"

"The average American produces about 1600 lbs of trash/year"

"You have to go see how the animals are treated [on the farms where you get your food]"

"Do we have to be a disposable culture?"

"I felt sad for the wanting part of me dying"

"If i can direct my energy towards something good [like trying to live sustainably] then why not"

"People are very traumatized when they are presented with the idea that they should do without"

"The project is to bring attention to the issue"

Air Drying Your Laundry

Here is another easy and sustainable habit you can get into, despite weather you live on or off campus.
I started air drying my laundry last year when I lived in Lee Hall. You would think that in our tiny room there would not be enough space to hang up all my clothes, but I used every square inch we had: bunk bed tiers, door corners, bed posts, and my favorite, staggering my open drawers and using those and drying plateaus.
For smaller items I would just hang them around the rim of my laundry basket. A drying rack also gives you a lot of surface area w/o taking up a lot of space. Now that I live off campus, I dry my larger items (like towels and small rugs/bath mats) on the edge of our balcony. When you do your laundry at night and leave it out to dry, it will usually be dry in 24 hours.
The way I figure it, you can't wear all the clothes you're washing the day after you wash them, so why not just air dry them, it saves you money as well as electricity.

Recycling Paper in Your Room

Some of you might already do this, but here is my system for insuring I never have to throw away a piece of paper in my room.

This is a picture of my makeshift recycling bin under my desk. It is simply the lid to a box. I can put old homeworks in there, receipts, packaging cardboard like old Klenex boxes, etc.




When this gets full I empty it out and separate it into two categories: printable used paper and non printable paper scraps. I take the staples out of the usable paper and keep it under the recycling bin for whenever I need to print a homework or anything.

I use the other scraps for either notes or they simply go to the Foxridge recycling.

The Way Fishing Should Be

In this video, chef Dan Barber talks about "How I Fell in Love With a Fish" after he visits an uber-sustainable fish farm in southern Spain. The condition of fisheries world wide is scary and traditional fish farms are not without their environmental problems (concentrated area of waste, the fish feed formulas). In Earth Sustainability a fisheries professor told us that the only fish he would recommend eating is the wild Alaskan Salmon. But if it has to travel all the way from Alaska, is that really sustainable? This farm in Spain is a closed circuit fish farm, similar to that of Joel Salatin's Polyface farm in Virginia. The fish feed on the algae, and birds eat the fish, there is no fish feed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EUAMe2ixCI

Here are some choice quotes from the video:

"Have you ever heard of a farm that doesn't feed its animals?"

"We farm extensively, not intensively"

"20% of our fish and fish eggs are lost to birds"

"This is a fish farm as well as a bird sanctuary"

"This is a recipe for the future of good food"

Kick Off Event!

This Sunday, March 28th, is the No Impact Hokie kick off event!

Come on out to Brush Mountain A in Squires at 8:00pm for an overview of the experiment and a free showing of the movie "No Impact Man."

Food will be provided!

The Date Of No Impact Week Has Changed!

The no impact week has been changed from March 22-26 to March 29-April 2 due to scheduling. This should actually work out better because it's now the same week as the Eco Olympics on campus, if you haven't heard about it check it out.

iChange Sustainability Winners!

Hey Nick, Mo, Grace, and Emma!

Congratulations! Your "No Impact Hokie" project has been selected by SGA's iChange as the winner of the Sustainability Contest! We are proud to award you $200 along with the opportunity for an internship in the VT's Office of Sustainability (if one of you is interested). As iChange's Sustainability Contest winner, we would also like to assist you in any way to make "No Impact Hokie" the best it can be! Whether it's through marketing, university connections, planning,or anything else, we'd love to help in any way we can!

Lauen Fialkow

Director of iChange