Sustainability Got You Down?

Pondering With Jane

Sustainability Got You Down? by Jane Cole

This Spring break I felt guilty about driving to a forest in France and trying a piece or two of cured beef. I have been pondering, as I often do, about my impact on the environment. At UCU we bike, eat plant-based diets, protest climate change, and participate in sustainability week only to turn around and buy our foods packaged in hard plastic, not separate our waste, and fly to a European destination that easily could have been reached by carpooling, bus, or train. Granted, every little change in lifestyle counts (does it?), but do we really practice what we preach if we don’t even compost?

There are many ways to swap our habits for more sustainable ones, but is every lifestyle change as impactful as the next? Take traveling for example. Not taking that flight will probably lower your carbon footprint more than not eating meat for a year (depending on how much you like meat). Flying accounts for almost 3% of global emissions, which is quite a lot when considering only 20% of us are even able to fly. The large amount of CO2 emissions is mostly thanks to the takeoff, meaning taking a flight to Paris is as ridiculous as driving to the Jumbo. And like with carpooling, an emptier plane is even less sustainable than a full one (that’s why riding first class is an extra “fuck you” to the environment). All of this being said, thanks to high competition between airlines, it is appealing to choose to fly within Europe. I can get away much cheaper if I fly to Spain than if I choose to drive or take a train. Does excluding meat all semester justify taking that flight for my spring break vacation?

So I’ve been pondering… since chances are whatever I eat has some impact on the environment (be IT CO2 emissions, water use, or land use), I would make the least impact if I didn’t eat at all. The question is how can I exist while minimizing my impact and living sustainably? Do I then need to be an absolute purist vegetarian, or are my habits more important? A diet very low in meat, or pescatarian, vegetarian, and vegan diets all have very similar outcomes when it comes to CO2 emissions (compared to a diet with lots of red meat).

And what about where my food is sourced? Those grapes I’m snacking on have to travel from South America. And what about packaging? Buying unpackaged veggies from our local Sweet Green store instead of the supermarket could be an easy change (it’s “reduce, reuse, recycle” in that order for a reason). And what about how processed my foods are? Am I a sustainable vegetarian if I buy processed meat substitutes that are packaged in hard plastic when I could buy tofu and tempeh that come in soft plastic or beans that come in cans?

There are so many nuances to being sustainable. It is a difficult balance to not overregulate ourselves at the cost of our health and personal growth while still being mindful of how our decisions will affect the environment. We are sustaining a system that includes us and our wellbeing. After all, we can’t be sustainable if we’re dead.

Cinematic Waffle

by Yağmur Zubaroğlu

vagabond •/'vagəbond/ noun a person who wanders from place to place without a home or job

Agnes Varda’s Vagabond (1985) starts with villagers finding a young woman’s frozen body in vineyards of France. Throughout the film, we figure out this nameless young woman’s story, told through flashbacks and interviews with strangers who met her at different points of her travels. We listen to what these people have to say about Mona in the hopes of finding out her story.

As we accompany Mona through her adventures, she is always one step ahead of the camera. She is always going somewhere or doing something; the frame can only follow her and try to catch up with her pace. She is uncontrollable, unhinged, and extremely free. On the other hand, the narrators are fixed in the frame. Varda shows us who decides the narratives and how the history is written. It’s not Mona who tells her story, it’s all the others. She doesn’t get a say on what happened. But how much can we know a person from the stories told about them? The film is about Mona, but also not. What people say about her says more about themselves rather than the real story.

On one of her adventures, Mona finds herself squatting in an old but luxurious mansion with a boy. Mona writes her name with her finger on a mirror covered with dust. The boy quickly erases her name, telling her “You should leave no trace”. As he leans to erase Mona’s name, he also covers her reflection on the mirror. Her name and her face both disappear from the frame. Varda manages to fit the entire feminist historiography in one sequence. Men have been writing history and erasing women meanwhile. How far can we trace back the story of a woman without history? How much of her story can we know and how much of it we should accept as unknown? Varda suggests, maybe, at some point we have to accept that we will never know some things about the past.

Varda describes Mona as “the incarnation of the great NO!”. From the beginning to the end, Mona is cold and lonely, and she stays that way. There is no character development, some would say. Regardless of all the people she met throughout her journey, she refrains from forming any connection (and even when she finally makes a friend, she fails to sustain the friendship). We find ourselves thinking “what if Mona had a friend? What if the seasonal worker, the cleaner lady, the villagers… were more than strangers?” Maybe then the vagabond life could be possible.

Besides the feminist ideas, the film also comments on the lack of solidarity between the workers of the French countryside. Unlike the story we see on the screen, Varda compares the filming process to being on the street barricades in Paris in ’68. Telling Mona’s story to the audience was a product of solidarity and cooperation.

Vagabond is a beautifully made film that asks many important questions. I’ll finish by asking a question myself. If you were to meet Mona, how would you tell her story?

Unfiltered

by Elisa Uccello

“Happy Women’s Day, mom” - send.

It was almost a formality. I had no idea what exactly I was wishing her. Nevertheless, I expected a “thank you” and, at most, a “you too”. Instead I got: “This annoys me. It makes me mad when men congratulate me.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a social and political mark, not a celebrative date. I think it’s misused. It’s a day to think about prejudice and discrimination, not to give out vows and flowers as they do here.” Why had I never thought about that before?

On the 7th of March, I was walking back to campus with my best friend and we were arguing about whether there should be an international men’s day. We were both entirely convinced of our opposite views but continued aimlessly to discuss the matter, certain that precisely because of our gender, we can never see in the same light. His main argument: “It would be unfair to have a day for women and not for men. Double standards.” My insightful response: “It’s the same as having a white history month.” I left my hometown last year, with the devastating realization that the abstract, socially constructed labels that segregate us have very concrete and painful consequences. Every single one of my female friends there has been assaulted, abused, or raped. Every. Single. One. I’m sure there is a thought floating in your mind about how Brazil is a developing country, how there is way more misogyny there than in Europe. That was the thought that brought me here, with two suitcases and a hopeful smile. Perhaps too hopeful.

To say that men do not suffer the consequences of patriarchy would be of incredible ignorance. Men are very much affected by the oppressive system they established, the social norms they created, and the unreachable standards they set. However, the impacts are different for women and other genders. The latter was completely disregarded for the longest time. The former was purposefully erased from all significant accomplishments and discoveries they contributed to. To say that men have been oppressive rather than oppressed is not to say that they, individually, don’t go through anything. Rather, it is a claim that this denominated group doesn’t need a day to be celebrated because they haven’t had to fight to be seen, heard, and appreciated. For the woke dreamland UCU is proclaimed to be, I have been repeatedly shocked by the ignorance I’ve witnessed. Between being told to “stop being a feminist cunt” after calling out a prejudiced comment, and seeing a rapist joyfully hanging out with his friends who know, perfectly well, what he has done, I have been reminded one too many times that this fight is far from over.

I had always been amused by the 8th of March: a day when all the guys who I’ve watched make sexist jokes and claim sexual assault is just a mistake, post cute appreciation pictures with their mothers and pretend, for a day, that they give a shit. The 8th of March is not a day to celebrate but to mourn, to get angry, to grieve, to listen, to learn, to reflect on how far we still are from a minimally just society.

There is nothing wrong with the flowers and the vows. There is something wrong with the idea that that is what women want: flowers and not equality, vows and not recognition, social media posts and not justice, hugs and not security. We want more than empty words and nice gifts. We want you to hold your friends accountable, to hold yourself accountable, and to do better. That is the bare minimum, and it is exhausting to continue having to beg for common sense.

Letter Grades: UCU's Pineapple Pizza

by Mats Meeus

What do pizza and liberal arts education have in common? They’re both European inventions that were improved by spending some time in America. When pizza crossed the ocean, the Americans did away with Italian taboos, which gave us good things like sausage crust, deep dish, and slow-cooked tomato sauce. American liberal arts colleges grew out of the English college system, largely ridding themselves of religious dogma and solidifying their commitment to educational breadth in the nineteenth century. After spending a good amount of time stewing in the American melting pot, both pizza and liberal arts education came back to Europe in improved, modernized form.

In both cases, the journey back was long, and with long trips comes baggage. Every good American innovation had a questionable counterpart. Thick crust is held in high regard by most sensible people, but pineapple pizza tends to start fights. We sadly ended up with both. UCU was modeled on American colleges in order to take advantage of the best things they had to offer — academic breadth, the residential campus system, interdisciplinarity — but ended up bringing along some pieces of American baggage without good reason. Letter grades are one such quirk. The Dutch system of affording numerical grades from 1.0 to 10.0 allows for a great deal more nuance, especially on the higher side of the spectrum (in addition to letting us fail more spectacularly, which is always a nice opportunity to have). But the system is stacked against UCU students: an 8.0 converts to a GPA of 4.0, although 11% of grades at the UU are 8.5 or higher. This allows UU students to compensate for lower results — an opportunity UCU students are missing, as an A+ is numerically identical to an A. As a Facebook commenter recently pointed out, the amount of steps involved in translating a test result into a GPA score is truly staggering; first, percentage scores are converted to letter grades, which are then converted to GPA scores, averaged out, and converted to letter grades once again.

I have a hard time explaining UCU’s system to my Dutch friends. What, exactly, is a B+? A 7.5, officially, and a 3.3 in terms of GPA. But a B+ doesn’t feel like a 7.5. A 7.5 is half a point more than a 7.0, and half a point below an 8.0. There is an aesthetically pleasing fluidity to this system. These grades are tangible, inhabiting a location in one-dimensional space that I can visualize. A B+, on the other hand, sounds jarring, elusive. There is no logical continuation from B+ to A. Letter grades have to be converted to GPA’s before they can be averaged out; numerical grades need no conversion, because they simply make sense.

Do letter grade transcripts have some benefit over numerical grades for getting into international master’s programs? Not really: a number of UCU students end up pursuing a master’s degree in the Netherlands, where letter grades have to be converted to the Dutch system anyway. The second-most popular country for graduate studies is the United Kingdom, where most big universities accept Dutch grades. GPA’s can be calculated just as easily using numerical grades.

To sum up: letter grades are detrimental to our GPA’s, less nuanced, confusing, and aesthetically displeasing. They do not appear to have any real benefit over the Dutch system. What, then, is the point? Letter grades certainly contribute to our college’s international allure, which might be worthwhile in itself. Perhaps my preference for the Dutch grading system is a result of my own cultural bias. But the Dutch system has clear benefits, so I would argue that the old adage applies: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.