Recycling at Columbia is complicated. Each campus has different rules that often differ from municipal laws or our hometown laws.

Bwog spoke with Cathy Resler from the office of Environmental Stewardship to find out more. Simply put, Barnard College recycles everything. Columbia’s Morningside campus, however, follows city laws.

The flowcharts often posted near recycling centers are too long and detailed for most people to bother with, and as a result, recyclables are often contaminated with unrecyclable materials.

To simplify your life, we have created a Handy Flowchart Thinger that should answer the constant question, “Can I recycle this?” Beware, this chart is only valid for the main Columbia Campus–not TC, MC, or Lamont-Doherty (click here for a printable black-on-white version):

Click for a large pretty PDF.

“But why,” you ask, “does Columbia only recycle certain materials?” We answer that question after the jump.

Read more…

Eco-friendly Bwogger Mark Hay explains why he has a massive crush on Bharrat Jagdeo- and why you should too!

Guyanese President Bharrat Jagdeo had just finished his speech, “What’s Greener than a Rainforest: Economic Transformation and Forest Conservation in Guyana,” this past Friday when a member of the audience eagerly sprang towards the microphone to boldly declare: “My favorite president in the western hemisphere was named Barack; now it looks like I’ll add Bharrat.” Columbia has fallen madly in love with Mr. Jagdeo, and it is easy to understand why. Jagdeo entered Guyanese politics at the age of 26 and ascended to the presidency just nine years later making him, in 1999, one of the world’s youngest leaders. He has maintained his position, and an unimaginable level of popularity at home and abroad, for a decade now- and seems to have done it all with an unflagging idealism tempered by optimistic pragmatism (almost a contradiction in terms, but somehow he pulls it off).

And he’s green to boot. In June of this year, Jagdeo launched a “Low Carbon Development Strategy” for Guyana – one of the largest and most practical applications of sustainable development ever implemented. It was this milestone program that had the entire audience, including Interschool Committee for Sustainable Development Co-Chair and moderator Ruth DeFries batting butterfly kisses at him for an hour.  DeFries, though, gave a moment’s pause in her adoration when Jagdeo seized upon her reference to Columbia and Yale’s cooperative Environmental Performance Index to lambast the metrics used in the index’s compilation, lament Guyana’s placement on the list, and suggest methods for better reflecting reality in such widely-read resources. Read more…

Match the quote to the speaker.  To give you a break from problem sets, it should be pretty easy, but answers after the jump anyway.  Good luck!

Answers after the jump! Read more…

Since we posted about this earlier: if you want to be an EcoRep, but you didn’t have time to fill out the application by the previous deadline (Saturday), it’s not too late! The deadline has been extended to Thursday, and the application shortened. Now just answer any two questions and the last (three total) and e-mail it to go.green.columbia@gmail.com.

On September 11 of this year, former Clinton administration official Nilda Mesa assumed a sizeable responsibility: the post of Environmental Stewardship Director, charged with making Columbia’s footprint a little bit smaller. Bwog caught up with Nilda in her airy fourth floor office, across a bowl of organic fruit.

Bwog: You’ve been here two months. How’s it going?

Nilda: It’s actually been really great. I’m still trying to meet folks who I should be meeting here, which I’ve been told will take several years. But I’m not really waiting to do that before kicking around ideas and brainstorming with people. What I’m really liking is how enthusiastic people are about these issues and the level of commitment and intelligence and out of the box thinking that I’m finding really at all levels. It’s a huge institution that doesn’t necessarily move that quickly, but I’m finding the interest and level of commitment to do the right thing just really wonderful, and at the highest levels. I wouldn’t have taken this job unless I knew this was coming all the way from the top.  

How does Columbia compare to other places you’ve worked?

Some things are similar, some things are not. A lot of my background’s been in the federal government and also in law practice. This isn’t as big of a bureaucracy as the federal government, so that’s good. When I first got out of law school, a lot of what I did is work with community groups, not in New York, LA mostly, and that part of it, there’s a very similar dynamic. That’s been very comfortable terrain to me.



What are your big priorities this year?

Trying to learn the university as an institution is really time consuming, as someone who’s never been here either as a student or an employee. Because I think that whatever this office comes up with has to be grounded in what Columbia is, and its values and its structure. I don’t really believe in just coming out with these pronouncements that have no reality to what peoples’ lives and activities are really like. Read more…

Columbia’s a mess of bureaucracy. We all know that. You even have to deal with bureaucracy online – think class registration. Open SSOL. Open the Directory of Classes. Open the Bulletin. Open CULPA. Flip back and forth like mad as you try to correlate classes between the directory and SSOL and the Bulletin, check up on their teachers on Culpa, and register for what’s (hopefully) the right class. It’s insane. And it’s why the recent changes to various administrative websites are a big, promising step in the right direction. Bwog Techonology Specialist Mark Holden brings you a discussion of some of the changes that have been made, and what direction future changes need to take.

Health Services

The Health Services website has moved into the 21st century in multiple ways: the design is nice and aesthetic, and now it’s possible to schedule an appointment online. I mean, that’s sort of a “d’oh!” feature these days in the world of e-commerce and social networking, but at least now they’ve got it.

SSOL

The previous incarnation of SSOL was starting to show its age, and while the new SSOL design is pretty snazzy, unfortunately the design is about all that’s different. The underlying software remains as counterintuitive and difficult to use as it’s always been. Admittedly, it’d be more work for Columbia to overhaul SSOL from the ground up, but damn, the system needs it. The changes to SSOL so far amount to taking an old lemon of a car, repainting it, and failing to repair the engine. While they’re nice, they’re not enough – we need a complete overhaul.

Directory of Classes

Nothing has changed. Everything needs to change. The directory of classes is so unprofessional looking that when I first encountered it as an almost-freshman, I immediately clicked away thinking that it was an outdated resource. I’d imagine I wasn’t the only one. Look at it! Look!!! Look at that logo! Read it straight across like a normal human being and look what it says: “Directory University Columbia of Classes.” Disturbingly poor design on the part of a multi-billion dollar university. Worthless!

Environmental Stewardship

Columbia has a stylish new website devoted to saving the world. It provides in easily-comprehensible format lots of resources for environmentally concerned students, such as info on “green computing” and “reduce, reuse, recycle.” It looks promising both for the environment, in terms of the content it presents, and the people that might want more info, in terms of usability and design.

What needs to happen

The current registration system is a disgrace. It’s the most back-asswards, confusing, unmanageable registration system on the face of the earth. SSOL, the directory of classes, and the bulletin currently are three distinct entities, when really they should be linked together so that students can easily read about classes and major requirements from within SSOL and then with one click register for the right class. The present system is awkward, unwieldy, and confusing, an outmoded dinosaur from the early days of the internet that somehow hasn’t yet expired. It’s about time it were scrapped.