Anderson+Describing+People

Lina Caro is a college student. She has been an environmentalist since she was quite young; her family used to take her on trips out to national parks. Lina is a typical middle-class college student, except one thing: she is an environmental club leader at her college. She works hard to arrange trips to environmental conferences, national parks, and

Lina has noticed a shift in her thinking during college. She is an environmental science related major (after all, she'd like to work in those national parks after graduation). Freshman year, like high school, she really focused on activism related to conservation. During her sophomore year, though, Lina took an environmental studies class and an ecology class. In those classes, she learned about New Ecology. She realized that people and nature did not have to be separate from each other.

After those classes, Lina began to work on environmental community within her college club. She’d always been known more of as that militant little underclassman; following what she learned in her classes, Lina became known as someone who promoted environmentalism in a way that was more accessible to outsiders (in the past, she’d looked down on anyone who wasn’t as much of an “environmentalist” as she defined it).

Now, as a senior, Lina was the leader of her campus environmental club. She was also very involved with a regional sustainability group. Instead of working for national parks, Lina was considering working for the sustainability group if she was lucky enough to be hired on the board of directors.

Many students who were not very interested in environmentalism became more interested as Lina explained how it affected them, too. Most of these students had likened “environmental activism” to “Greenpeace”. Lina showed them that this did not have to be the case.

Yet there were still many struggles to be faced. Other students vocally promoted their views that environmentalism was expensive and “hippie-like”. They had multiple criticisms of the environmental activism movement, and of Lina herself. The administration was more professional, but yet many members of it found sustainability silly—it was just a “fringe” activity to them, or a fad. Lina and her environmental club had to work hard and wade through probably needless paperwork in order to get the simplest goals accomplished.