Campus Earth Summit: Sustainability Focus or Farce?

The 7th annual Campus Earth Summit was held on January 31st at the College 9/10 Multipurpose Room at UC Santa Cruz. The well-attended event was organized by the Student Environmental Center and the Sustainability Office at UCSC and featured local speakers, a 'low carbon' lunch sourced from local organic farms, workshops on reducing 'carbon footprints' and conversations about environmental sustainability at UCSC. The summit was held in conjunction with Focus the Nation, a nationwide climate change teach-in happening simultaneously at over 1,000 colleges and universities across the USA.

There was so much excitement and talk about the future, but actions of the past were hardly discussed at all. None of the keynote speakers mentioned that on December 21st, 1991, the Coalition to Move Colleges Nine and Ten issued a press release about the destruction of "Elfland" through the logging of approximately 100 redwood trees where the College 9/10 Multipurpose Room stands today. The press release stated, "Elfland, as the area is called, is unique to the UCSC campus. Huge ferns grow in the valleys next to giant trees; tiny highland meadows support deer and endangered native grasses. It is a wildlife corridor and biologically diverse area on campus. Giant sinkholes pock the area, which overlies limestone caverns and has an important and poorly understood connection to the campus underground hydrology."