| Earth Day focuses on environmental responsibility A bike wash—with environmentally-friendly soap—and a tree planting project highlighted last week’s Earth Day festivities, sponsored by AU’s student environmental group, Eco-Sense. “This is the one time of year that everyone—rich or poor, Democrat or Republican—is an environmentalist,” said Eco-Sense president Claire Roby. In conjunction with Eco-Sense’s Bikes and Biodiesel policy proposal, which aims to make the AU campus more bike- and carpool-friendly, the festivities kicked off last Tuesday with a bike wash in the Letts-Anderson Hall quadrangle. The week also featured a lecture by Mike Tidwell, a documentary filmmaker, author, and founder and director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and the U.S. Climate Emergency Council, who discussed the global climate crisis. “We [brought] Mike Tidwell to speak because global climate change is something that affects all of us, and is, by far, the most important issue we can hope to address on Earth Day,” said Roby. The week concluded with a planting project at the Joseph Cole Recreation Center in northeast Washington. Nuclear Studies Institute hosts conference AU’s Nuclear Studies Institute cosponsored a youth conference on campus Apr. 21 that examined the danger still posed by nuclear weapons. “Think Outside the Bomb” featured a daylong roster of speakers, including former acting director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency Thomas Graham, now president of the Lawyers Alliance for World Security, and Arjun Makhajani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. “Our goal is to make sure that awareness of the nuclear threat stays high in the consciousness of students,” said Professor Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute. “It’s part of my ongoing effort to educate people about nuclear issues and to arouse their awareness to the fact that the nuclear threat has not disappeared. There has been a lot of attention paid to the dangers posed by global warming and environmental change, but unfortunately that has taken attention away from what has been a long-term, and many of us still think, a more imminent threat of nuclear catastrophe. There’s been a lot of focus on nuclear terrorism, but people have lost sight of the fact that there are still 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world.” |
