Rick Bass hunts in the Yaak Valley of Montana and finds that being a hunter helps keep his imagination vital. The remote valley has an abundance of wildlife and the terrain shapes both the landscape and the people who live there, many of whom become hunters. Bass argues that the uncertainty of the hunt requires imagination in a way that more certain activities like farming do not.

1. Why I Hunt
by Rick Bass
I was a hunter before I came far up into northwest Montana, but
not to the degree I am now. It
astounds me sometimes to step back, particularly at the end of
autumn, the end of the hunting
season, and take both mental and physical inventory of all that
was hunted and all that was gathered
from this life in the mountains. The woodshed groaning tight,
full of firewood. The fruits and herbs and
vegetables from the garden, canned or dried or frozen; the wild
mushrooms, huckleberries,
thimbleberries, and strawberries. And most precious of all, the
flesh of the wild things that share with
us these mountains and the plains to the east--the elk, the
whitetail and mule deer; the ducks and
geese, grouse and pheasant and Hungarian partridge and dove
and chukar and wild turkey; the trout
and whitefish. Each year the cumulative bounty seems
unbelievable. What heaven is this into which
we’ve fallen?
How my wife and I got to this valley--the Yaak--15 years ago is
a mystery, a move that I’ve only
recently come to accept as having been inevitable. We got in the
truck one day feeling strangely

2. restless in Mississippi, and we drove. What did I know? Only
that I missed the West’s terrain of space.
Young and healthy, and not coincidentally new-in-love, we hit
that huge and rugged landscape in full
stride. We drove north until we ran out of country--until the
road ended, and we reached Canada’s
thick blue woods--and then we turned west and traveled until we
ran almost out of mountains: the
backside of the Rockies, to the wet, west-slope rainforest.
We came over a little mountain pass--it was August and winter
was already fast approaching--and
looked down on the soft hills, the dense purples of the spruce
and fir forests, the ivory crests of the
ice-capped peaks, and the slender ribbons of gray thread rising
from the chimneys of the few cabins
nudged close to the winding river below, and we fell in love
with the Yaak Valley and the hard-logged
Kootenai National Forest--the way people in movies fall with
each other, star and starlet, as if a trap
door has been pulled out from beneath them: tumbling through
the air, arms windmilling furiously,
and suddenly no other world but each other, no other world but
this one, and eyes for no one, or no
place, else.
Right from the beginning, I could see that there was
extraordinary bounty in this low-elevation forest,
resting as it does in a magical seam between the Pacific
Northwest and the northern Rockies. Some
landscapes these days have been reduced to nothing but
dandelions and fire ants, knapweed and
thistle, where the only remaining wildlife are sparrows,

3. squirrels, and starlings. In the blessed Yaak,
however, not a single mammal has gone extinct since the end of
the Ice Age. This forest sustains
more types of hunters--carnivores--than any valley in North
America. It is a predator’s showcase,
home not just to wolves and grizzlies, but wolverines, lynx,
bobcat, marten, fisher, black bear,
mountain lion, golden eagle, bald eagle, coyote, fox, weasel. In
the Yaak, everything is in motion,
either seeking its quarry, or seeking to avoid becoming quarry.
The people who have chosen to live in this remote valley--few
phones, very little electricity, and long,
dark winters--possess a hardness and a dreaminess both. They--
we--can live a life of deprivation, and
yet are willing to enter the comfort of daydreams and
imagination.There is something mysterious
happening here between the landscape and the people, a thing
that stimulates our imagination, and
causes many of us to set off deep into the woods in search of
the unknown, and sustenance--not just
metaphorical or spiritual sustenance, but the real thing.
Only about 5 percent of the nation and 15 to 20 percent of
Montanans are hunters. But in this one
valley, almost everyone is a hunter. It is not the peer pressure of
the local culture that recruits us into
hunting, nor even necessarily the economic boon of a few
hundred pounds of meat in a cash-poor
society. Rather, it is the terrain itself, and one’s gradual
integration into it, that summons the hunter.
Nearly everyone who has lived here for any length of time has
ended up--sometimes almost against
one’s conscious wishes--becoming a hunter. This wild and
powerful landscape sculpts us like clay. I

4. don’t find such sculpting an affront to the human spirit, but
instead, wonderful testimony to our
pliability, our ability to adapt to a place.
I myself love to hunt the deer, the elk, and the grouse--to follow
them into the mouth of the forest, to
disappear in their pursuit--to get lost following their snowy
tracks up one mountain and down the
next. One sets out after one’s quarry with senses fully engaged,
wildly alert: entranced, nearly
hypnotized. The tiniest of factors can possess the largest
significance--the crack of a twig, the shift of
a breeze, a single stray hair caught on a piece of bark, a fresh-
bent blade of grass.
Each year during such pursuits, I am struck more and more by
the conceit that people in a hunter-
gatherer culture might have richer imaginations than those who
dwell more fully in an agricultural or
even post-agricultural environment. What else is the hunt but a
stirring of the imagination, with the
quarry, or goal, or treasure lying just around the corner or over
the next rise? A hunter’s imagination
has no choice but to become deeply engaged, for it is never the
hunter who is in control, but always
the hunted, in that the prey directs the predator’s movements.
The hunted shapes the hunter; the pursuit and evasion of
predator and prey are but shadows of the
same desire. The thrush wants to remain a thrush. The goshawk

5. wants to consume the thrush and in
doing so, partly become the thrush--to take its flesh into its
flesh. They weave through the tangled
branches of the forest, zigging and zagging, the goshawk right
on the thrush’s tail, like a shadow. Or
perhaps it is the thrush that is the shadow thrown by the light of
the goshawk’s fiery desire.
Either way, the escape maneuvers of the thrush help carve and
shape and direct the muscles of the
goshawk. Even when you are walking through the woods seeing
nothing but trees, you can feel the
unseen passage of pursuits that might have occurred earlier that
morning, precisely where you are
standing--pursuits that will doubtless, after you are gone, sweep
right back across that same spot
again and again.
As does the goshawk, so too do human hunters imagine where
their prey might be, or where it might
go. They follow tracks hinting at not only distance and direction
traveled, but also pace and gait and
the general state of mind of the animal that is evading them.
They plead to the mountain to deliver to
them a deer, an elk. They imagine and hope that they are
moving toward their goal of obtaining
game.
When you plant a row of corn, there is not so much unknown.
You can be fairly sure that, if the rains
come, the corn is going to sprout. The corn is not seeking to
elude you. But when you step into the
woods, looking for a deer--well, there’s nothing in your mind,
or in your blood, or in the world, but

6. imagination.
Most Americans neither hunt nor gather nor even grow their
own food, nor make, with their own
hands, any of their other necessities. In this post-agricultural
society, too often we confuse
anticipation with imagination. When we wander down the aisle
of the supermarket searching for a
chunk of frozen chicken, or cruise into Dillard’s department
store looking for a sweater, we can be
fairly confident that grayish wad of chicken or that sweater is
going to be there, thanks to the vigor
and efficiency of a supply-and-demand marketplace. The
imagination never quite hits second gear.
Does the imagination atrophy, from such chronic inactivity? I
suspect that it does.
All I know is that hunting--beyond being a thing I like to do--
helps keep my imagination vital. I would
hope never to be so blind as to offer it as prescription; I offer it
only as testimony to my love of the
landscape where I live--a place that is still, against all odds, its
own place, quite unlike any other. I
don’t think I would be able to sustain myself as a dreamer in
this strange landscape if I did not take
off three months each year to wander the mountains in search of
game; to hunt, stretching and
exercising not just my imagination, but my spirit. And to
wander the mountains, too, in all the other
seasons. And to be nourished by the river of spirit that flows,
shifting and winding, between me and
the land.

7. Rick Bass is author of 16 books, including the novel Where the
Sea Used to Be and the essay
collection The Book of Yaak. Next spring Houghton Mifflin
will publish a new volume of his fiction, The
Hermit’s Story. He is a member of the Yaak Valley Forest
Council, which seeks to protect the last
roadless areas in the Kootenai National Forest.
1
THE GREENEST CAMPUSES: AN IDIOSYNCRATIC GUIDE
By Noel Perrin
Brown and Yale have found a country way of dealing with tons
of food waste. Pigs
About 1,100 American colleges and cities run at least a token
environ-mental-studies program, and
many hundreds of those programs offer well-designed and
useful courses. But only a drastically
smaller number practice even a portion of what they teach. The
one exception is recycling. Nearly
every institution that has so much as one lonely environmental-
studies course also does a little
halfhearted recycling. Paper and glass, usually.
There are some glorious exceptions to those rather churlish
observations, I'm glad to say. How many?

8. Nobody knows. No one has yet done the necessary research
(though the National Wildlife Federation's
Campus Ecology program is planning a survey).
Certainly U.S. News & World Report hasn't. Look at the
rankings in their annual college issue. The
magazine uses a complex formula something like this:
Institution's reputation, 25 percent; student-
retention rate, 20 percent; faculty resources, 20 percent; and so
on, down to alumni giving, 5 percent.
The lead criterion may help explain why Harvard, Yale, and
Princeton Universities so frequently do a
little dance at the top of the list.
But U.S. News has nothing at all to say about the degree to
which a college or university attempts to
behave sustainably -- that is, to manage its campus and
activities in ways that promote the long-term
health of the planet. The magazine is equally mum about which
of the institutions it is ranking can
serve as models to society in a threatened world.
And, of course, the world is threatened. When the Royal Society
in London and the National Academy
of Sciences in Washington issued their first-ever joint
statement, it ended like this: "The future of our
planet is in the balance. Sustainable development can be
achieved, but only if irreversible degradation
of the environment can be halted in time. The next 30 years may
be crucial." They said that in 1992.
If all those top scientists are right, we have a little more than 20
years left in which to make major
changes in how we live.
All this affects colleges. I have one environ-mentalist friend

9. who loves to point out to the deans and
trustees she meets that if we don't make such changes, and if the
irreversible degradation of earth
does occur, Harvard's huge endowment and Yale's lofty
reputation will count for nothing.
But though U.S. News has nothing to say, fortunately there is a
fairly good grapevine in the green
world. I have spent considerable time in the past two years
using it like an organic cell phone. By that
means I have come up with a short, idiosyncratic list of green
colleges, consisting of six that are a
healthy green, two that are greener still, and three that I believe
are the greenest in the United
States.
Which approved surveying techniques have I used? None at all.
Some of my evidence is anecdotal,
and some of my conclusions are affected by my personal
beliefs, such as that electric and hybrid cars
are not just a good idea, but instruments of salvation.
Obviously I did not examine, even casually, all 1,100
institutions. I'm sure I have missed some
outstanding performers. I hope I have missed a great many.
Now, here are the 11, starting with Brown University.
It is generally harder for a large urban university to move
toward sustainable behavior than it is for a
small-town college with maybe a thousand students. But it's not
impossible. Both Brown, in the heart
of Providence, R.I., and Yale University (by no means an
environmental leader in other respects), in

10. the heart of New Haven, Conn.), have found a country way of
dealing with food waste. Pigs. Both rely
on pigs.
2
For the past 10 years, Brown has been shipping nearly all of its
food waste to a Rhode Island piggery.
Actually, not shipping it -- just leaving it out at dawn each
morning. The farmer comes to the campus
and gets it. Not since Ralph Waldo Emerson took food scraps
out to the family pig have these
creatures enjoyed such a high intellectual connection.
But there is a big difference in scale. Where Emerson might
have one pail of slops now and then,
Brown generates 700 tons of edible garbage each year. Haulage
fee: $0. Tipping fee: $0. (That's the
cost of dumping the garbage into huge cookers, where it is
heated for the pigs.) Annual savings to
Brown: about $50,000. Addition to the American food supply:
many tons of ham and bacon each year.
Of course, Brown does far more than feed a balanced diet to a
lot of pigs. That's just the most exotic
(for an urban institution) of its green actions. "Brown is Green"
became the official motto of the
university in August 1990. It was accurate then, and it remains
accurate now.
Yale is the only other urban institution I'm aware of that

11. supports a pig population. Much of the credit
goes to Cyril May, the university's environmental coordinator,
just as much of the credit at Brown
goes to its environmental coordinator, Kurt Teichert.
May has managed to locate two Connecticut piggeries. The one
to which he sends garbage presents
problems. The farmer has demanded -- and received -- a
collection fee. And he has developed an
antagonistic relationship with some of Yale's food-service
people. (There are a lot of them: The
campus has 16 dining facilities.) May is working on an
arrangement with the second piggery. But if it
falls through, he says, "I may go back on semi bended knee to
the other."
Yale does not make the list as a green college, for reasons you
will learn later in this essay. But it
might in a few more years.
Carleton College is an interesting example of an institution
turning green almost overnight. No pig
slops here; the dining halls are catered by Marriott. But change
is coming fast.
In the summer of 1999, Carleton appointed its first-ever
environmental coordinator, a brand-new
graduate named Rachel Smit. The one-year appointment was an
experiment, with a cobbled-together
salary and the humble title of "fifth-year intern." The
experiment worked beyond anyone's
expectation.
Smit began publishing an environmental newsletter called The

12. Green Bean and organized a small
committee of undergraduates to explore the feasibility of
composting the college's food waste, an
effort that will soon begin. A surprised Marriott has already
found itself serving organic dinners on
Earth Day.
Better yet, the college set up an environmental-advisory
committee of three administrators, three
faculty members, and three students to review all campus
projects from a green perspective.
Naturally, many of those projects will be buildings, and to
evaluate them, Carleton is using the
Minnesota Sustainable Design Guide, itself cowritten by
Richard Strong, director of facilities.
The position of fifth-year intern is now a permanent one-year
position, and its salary is a regular part
of the budget.
What's next? If Carleton gets a grant it has applied for, there
will be a massive increase in
environmental-studies courses and faculty seminars and, says
the dean of budgets, "a whole range of
green campus projects under the rubric of 'participatory
learning.' "
And if Carleton doesn't get the grant? Same plans, slower pace.
Twenty years ago, Dartmouth College would have been a
contender for the title of greenest college in
America, had such a title existed. It's still fairly green. It has a
large and distinguished group of faculty
members who teach environmental studies, good recycling, an
organic farm that was used last

13. 3
summer in six courses, years of experience with solar panels,
and a fair number of midlevel
administrators (including three in the purchasing office) who
are ardent believers in sustainability.
But the college has lost ground. Most troubling is its new $50-
million library, which has an actual anti-
environmental twist: A portion of the roof requires steam from
the power plant to melt snow off of it.
The architect, Robert Venturi, may be famous, but he's no
environmentalist.
Dartmouth is a striking example of what I shall modestly call
Perrin's Law: No college or university can
move far toward sustainability without the active support of at
least two senior administrators.
Dartmouth has no such committed senior administrators at all. It
used to. James Hornig, a former
dean of sciences, and Frank Smallwood, a former provost, were
instrumental in creating the
environmental-studies program, back in 1970. They are now
emeriti. The current senior
administrators are not in the least hostile to sustainability; they
just give a very low priority to the
college's practicing what it preaches.
Emory University is probably further into the use of
nonpolluting and low-polluting motor vehicles than

14. any other college in the country. According to Eric Gaither,
senior associate vice president for business
affairs, 60 percent of Emory's fleet is powered by alternative
fuels. The facilities-management office
has 40 electric carts, which maintenance workers use for getting
around campus. The community-
service office (security and parking) has its own electric carts
and an electric patrol vehicle. There are
five electric shuttle buses and 14 compressed-natural-gas buses
on order, plus one natural-gas bus in
service.
Bill Chace, Emory's president, has a battery-charging station for
electric cars in his garage, and until
recently an electric car to charge. Georgia Power, which lent the
car, has recalled it, but Chace hopes
to get it back. Meanwhile, he rides his bike to work most of the
time.
How has Emory made such giant strides? "It's easy to do," says
Gaither, "when your president wants
you to."
If Carleton is a model of how a small college turns green, the
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor is a
model of how a big university does. Carleton is changing pretty
much as an entity, while Michigan is
more like the Electoral College -- 50 separate entities. The
School of Natural Resources casts its six
votes for sustainability, the English department casts its 12 for
humanistic studies, the recycling
coordinator casts her 1, the electric-vehicle program casts its 2,
and so on. An institution of Michigan's

15. size changes in bits and pieces.
Some of the bits show true leadership. For example, the
university is within weeks of buying a modest
amount of green power. It makes about half of its own
electricity (at its heating plant) and buys the
other half. Five percent of that other half soon will come from
renewable sources: hydro (water
power) and biomass (so-called fuel crops, which are grown
specifically to be burned for power).
The supporters of sustainability at Michigan would like to see
the university adopt a version of what is
known as the Kyoto Protocol. The agreement, which the United
States so far has refused to sign,
requires that by 2012 each nation reduce its emission of
greenhouse gases to 7 percent below its
1990 figure. Michigan's version of the protocol, at present a
pipe dream, would require the university
to do what the government won't -- accept that reduction as a
goal.
The immediate goal of "sustainabilists" at Ann Arbor is the
creation of a universitywide environmental
coordinator, who would work either in the president's or the
provost's office.
Giants are slow, but they are also strong.
Tulane University has the usual programs, among green
institutions, in recycling, composting, and
energy efficiency. But what sets it apart is the Tulane
Environmental Law Clinic, which is staffed by
third-year law students. The director is a faculty member, and

16. there are three law "fellows," all
lawyers, who work with the students. The clinic does legal work
for environmental organizations
4
across Louisiana and "most likely has had a greater
environmental impact than all our other efforts
combined," says Elizabeth Davey, Tulane's first-ever
environmental coordinator.
At least two campuses of the University of California (Berkeley
is not among them) have taken a first
and even a second step toward sustainable behavior. First step:
symbolic action, like installing a few
solar panels, to produce clean energy and to help educate
students. With luck, one of those little solar
arrays might produce as much as a 20th of a percent of the
electricity the university uses. It's a start.
The two campuses are Davis and Santa Cruz, and I think Davis
nudges ahead of Santa Cruz. That is
primarily because Davis the city and Davis the university have
done something almost miraculous.
They have brought car culture at least partially under control,
greatly reducing air pollution as a
result.
The city has a population of about 58,000, which includes
24,000 students. According to reliable
estimates, there are something over 50,000 bikes in town or on
the campus, all but a few hundred

17. owned by their riders. Most of the bikes are used regularly on
the city's 45 miles of bike paths (closed
to cars) and the 47 miles of bike lanes (cars permitted in the
other lanes). The university maintains an
additional 14 miles of bike paths on its large campus.
What happens on rainy days? "A surprising number continue to
bike," says David Takemoto-Weerts,
coordinator of Davis's bicycle program.
If every American college in a suitable climate were to behave
like Davis, we could close a medium-
sized oil refinery. Maybe we could even get rid of one coal-
fired power plant, and thus seriously
improve air quality.
The University of New Hampshire is trying to jump straight
from symbolic gestures, like installing a
handful of solar panels, to the hardest task of all for an
institution trying to become green --
establishing a completely new mind-set among students,
administrators, and faculty and staff
members. It may well succeed.
Campuses that have managed to change attitudes are rare.
Prescott College, in Prescott, Ariz., and
Sterling College, in Craftsbury Common, Vt., are rumored to
have done so, and there may be two or
three others. They're not on my list -- because they're so small,
because their students tend to be
bright green even before they arrive, and because I have limited
space.
New Hampshire has several token green projects, including a

18. tiny solar array, able to produce one
kilowatt at noon on a good day. And last April it inaugurated
the Yellow Bike Cooperative. It is much
smaller than anything that happens at Davis, where a bike rack
might be a hundred yards long. But
it's also more original and more communitarian. Anyone in
Durham -- student, burger flipper,
associate dean -- can join the Yellow Bike program by paying a
$5 fee.
What you get right away is a key that unlocks all 50 bikes
owned by the cooperative. (They are
repaired and painted by student volunteers.) Want to cross
campus? Just go to the nearest bike rack,
unlock a Yellow, and pedal off. The goal, says Julie Newman,
of the Office of Sustainability Programs,
is "to greatly decrease one-person car trips on campus."
But the main thrust at New Hampshire is consciousness-raising.
When the subject of composting food
waste came up, the university held a seminar for its food
workers.
New Hampshire's striking vigor is partly the result of a special
endowment -- about $12.8-million --
exclusively for the sustainability office. Tom Kelly, the
director, refuses to equate sustainability with
greenness. Being green, in the sense of avoiding pollution and
promoting reuse, is just one aspect of
living sustainably, which involves "the balancing of economic
viability with ecological health and
human well-being," he says.

19. 5
Oberlin College is an exception to Perrin's Law. The college has
gotten deeply into environmental
behavior without the active support of two or, indeed, any
senior administrators. As at Dartmouth, the
top people are not hostile; they just have other priorities.
Apparently, until this year, Oberlin's environmental-studies
program was housed in a dreary cellar.
Now it's in the $8.2-million Adam Joseph Lewis Environmental
Studies Center, which is one of the
most environmentally benign college buildings in the world.
The money for it was raised as a result of
a deal that the department chairman, David Orr, made with the
administration: He could raise money
for his own program, provided that he approached only people
and foundations that had never shown
the faintest interest in Oberlin.
It's too soon for a full report on the building. It is loaded with
solar panels -- 690 of them, covering
the roof (for a diagram of the building,
seehttp://www.oberlin.edu/newserv/esc/escabout.html). In
about a year, data will be available on how much energy the
panels have saved and whether, as Orr
hopes, the center will not only make all its own power, but even
export some.
Northland College, in Wisconsin, also goes way beyond
tokenism. Its McLean Environmental Living and

20. Learning Center, a two-year-old residence hall for 114 students,
is topped by a 120-foot wind tower
that, with a good breeze coming off Lake Superior, can generate
20 kilowatts of electricity. The
building also includes three arrays of solar panels. They are
only token-size, generating a total of 3.2
kilowatts at most. But one array does heat most of the water for
one wing of McLean, while the other
three form a test project.
One test array is fixed in place -- it can't be aimed. Another is
like the sunflower in Blake's poem -- it
countest the steps of the sun. Put more prosaically, it tracks the
sun across the sky each day. The
third array does that and can also be tilted to get the best angle
for each season of the year.
Inside the dorm is a pair of composting toilets -- an experiment,
to see if students will use them.
Because no one is forced to try the new ones if they don't want
to -- plenty of conventional toilets are
close by --it means something when James Miller, vice
president and dean of student development
and enrollment, reports, "Students almost always choose the
composting bathrooms."
From the start, the college's goal has been to have McLean
operate so efficiently that it consumes 40
percent less outside energy than would a conventional dormitory
of the same dimensions. The building
didn't reach that goal in its first year; energy use dropped only
34.2 percent. But anyone dealing with
a new system knows to expect bugs at the beginning. There
were some at Northland, including the
wind generator's being down for three months. (As I write, it's

21. turning busily.) Dean Miller is confident
that the building will meet or exceed the college's energy-
efficiency goal.
There is no room here to talk about the octagonal classroom
structure made of bales of straw, built
largely by students. Or about the fact that Northland's grounds
are pesticide- and herbicide-free.
If Oberlin is a flagrant exception to Perrin's Law, Middlebury
College is a strong confirmation.
Middlebury is unique, as far as I know, in having not only
senior administrators who strongly back
environmentalism, but one senior administrator right inside the
program. What Michigan wants,
Middlebury has.
Nan Jenks-Jay, director of environmental affairs, reports
directly to the provost. She is responsible for
both the teaching side and the living-sustainably side of
environmentalism. Under her are an
environmental coordinator, Amy Seif, and an academic-program
coordinator, Janet Wiseman.
The program has powerful backers, including the president,
John M. McCardell Jr.; the provost and
executive vice president, Ronald D. Liebowitz; and the
executive vice president for facilities planning,
David W. Ginevan. But everyone I talked with at Middlebury,
except for the occasional student who
didn't want to trouble his mind with things like returnable
bottles -- to say nothing of acid rain --
seemed at least somewhat committed to sustainable living.

22. 6
Middlebury has what I think is the oldest environmental-studies
program in the country; it began back
in 1965. It has the best composting program I've ever seen. And,
like Northland, it is pesticide- and
herbicide-free.
Let me end as I began, with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. And
with U.S. News's consistently ranking
them in the top five, accompanied from time to time by the
California Institute of Technology,
Stanford University, and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
What if U.S. News did a green ranking? What if it based the
listings on one of the few bits of hard data
that can be widely compared: the percentage of waste that a
college recycles?
Harvard would come out okay, though hardly at the top. The
university recycled 24 percent of its
waste last year, thanks in considerable part to the presence of
Rob Gogan, the waste manager. He
hopes to achieve 28 percent this year. That's feeble compared
with Brown's 35 percent, and downright
puny against Middlebury's 64 percent.
But compared with Yale and Princeton, it's magnificent. Most of
the information I could get from
Princeton is sadly dated. It comes from the 1995 report of the

23. Princeton Environmental Reform
Committee, whose primary recommendation was that he
university hire a full-time waste manager.
The university has not yet done so. Any administrators on the
campus know the current recycling
percentage, they're not telling.
And Yale -- poor Yale! It does have a figure. Among the
performances of the 20 or so other colleges
and universities whose percentages I'm aware of, only Carnegie
Mellon's is worse. Yale: 19 percent.
Carnegie Mellon: 11 percent.
What should universities -- and society -- be shooting for? How
can you ask? One-hundred-percent
retrieval of everything retrievable, of course.
~~~~~~~~
Noel Perrin is an emeritus professor of English at Dartmouth
College.