In last week’s edition of The Poly, the EcoLogic team brought up some very good points regarding consumerism. It is indeed true that our urge to buy more “stuff” is one of the main contributing factors to global pollution. Unfortunately, consumerism is a value taught to the American public early on in life and would be quite difficult to repair without a significant change in the way we educate our youth from grade school through college.

RPI has endorsed The Rensselaer Plan so that we may “achieve prominence in the 21st century as a top-tier, world-class, technological research university, with global reach and global impact.” In order to become a top-tier educational institute, the administration must seriously consider environmental leadership. Other universities, such as Tufts, have already signed on to detailed environmental policies that clearly outline how the university is to act with regard to the environment and how it handles environmental education.

One such example can be found in the Talloires Declaration of 1990. The Talloires Declaration was created and signed by over 275 university presidents located in 40 countries worldwide concerned with teaching environmental sustainability practices within their curriculums, the president of Tufts among them. The Talloires Declaration stands as an outline for further environmental policymaking designed to yield specific results. Without such a foundation, it is difficult to implement a consistent Institute-wide environmental plan. At the moment, RPI does not seem to have a solid environmental outline.

Finally, it seems strange that RPI would go to such lengths to advertise how RPI students “change the world” without giving its own students adequate knowledge regarding how their decisions may create the next PCB-filled capacitor. I can understand how the administration would wish to avoid putting itself into a place where its actions would be restricted by its own policy, but such policies serve to separate moral entities from anything less. I urge the administration here to consider adopting a policy not unlike the Talloires Declaration that outlines specific goals the Institute can achieve. Doing so would be a first step in academic environmental leadership that will make RPI “a top-tier world-class technological research university.”

Jacob D. Hunt