In the cafe series today, the environmental panel spoke about a very salient issue in our world today: preserving our planet. Even though it’s not a topic that’s always at the forefront of my mind, I realized by listening to what these men had to say tonight that it should be because it’s not like we can just hop over to another planet as soon as this one has been used for all its resources. And yeah, to be completely honest, I thought I was doing my part (or rather enough of my part) by recycling my empty milk jugs at home or tossing my used lunch plates in the compost bin at Trillium, but I’m becoming increasingly aware that that’s not enough. There’s so much more that is slowly destroying this planet than just an overabundance of plastic in landfills. These three professors made that point abundantly clear tonight.

For one, fracking (a word I only just learned the meaning of) is an enormous problem in many places in the world. By shooting fluids deep into the Earth in order to extract fossil fuels, some frackers have succeeded in doing so without some property owners knowledge at all. This surprised me a lot, not only because I was completely unaware that this was a practice actively being carried out, but also because it seems as though acquiring fossil fuels has become a much more competitive process than I thought it was.

On the bright side, though,  the professors enlightened the audience that because Cornell is a “hotbed of environmental activism,” no such thing (and by that, I mean fracking) occurs on our campus or near it.  In addition, the professors revealed that lake source cooling (a process that brings the cold water from the bottom of Cayuga Lake up  to campus to power our air-conditioning units) is the way that Cornell has chosen to keep our dorms cool. Learning both of these things gave me a certain sense of comfort because now I know that it’s not just the “going green” efforts that are being made in dining halls campus-wide that are tackling environmental issues, but rather it’s also things going on behind the scenes that are pushing for environmental reform in our little corner of the Earth. Not that I wasn’t already proud to be a Cornelian, but knowing that, as a school, we’re taking baby steps to leave a smaller footprint on Earth  makes me that much prouder of this awesome school.