Latin America has a love-hate relationship with the United States. The people in Latin America argue that the United States has both directly caused their poverty and backed up some of the most violent and unlawful regimes in the history of the region. Although some of these accusations are true, the people that make them are often socialist dictators trying to blame the United States for their failures as leaders.

The educational systems in Latin America also describe the United States as a bad country that controls the world. In schools, students are taught that the United States caused misery in Latin America with its numerous interventions. In my opinion, the United States has caused many bad things to happen in Latin America, but the opinion most Latin Americans have against this country is biased.

Let’s first talk about how the Latin American educational system teaches people to reject foreigners. When I was growing up, I was taught that the United States unfairly made up a war to take half of Mexico’s territory and that American companies later took over the whole continent. In Latin America, the educational systems are very patriotic. At some point, they teach you to reject or distrust foreigners. The books Latin American students read in school tell them that everything is better when it is managed by the government.

In Latin America, socialist governments have taken advantage of this idea to expropriate numerous industries. The government of Argentina recently expropriated its oil and gas sectors. In Venezuela, the government under Hugo Chavez began to nationalize numerous industries, from construction contractors to golf courses. Chavez closed golf courses and American hotels and built houses for poor people in their places. In the minds of most people, this was vengeance — the poor taking back the things that the rich Americans took from them.

But is this right? Usually the government does a terrible job taking on private industries. Corruption grows and union leaders take control of everything. The problem is that Latin Americans do not judge the actions of their governments because for them, kicking foreigners out of the country is good.

Latin Americans dislike the United States because Americans supported the dictatorships of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Fulgencio Batista in Cuba and many others. From the 1970s to the 1980s, the United States provided help to South American governments to destroy communist organizations. Thousands of people were arrested. After what happened in those years, it is easy to understand why people resent the United States so much.

Yet socialist leaders use xenophobia to hide their own errors. Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela accused the United States of organizing protests against his government. However, the situation in Venezuela is terrible, and blaming the United States for the economic mistakes Venezuela has made is ridiculous. Today in Venezuela you cannot buy more than a certain amount of goods at a time. Supermarkets literally carry no products. Opponents of the government are imprisoned. All these things have been caused by the Venezuelan government destruction of democracy and the economy with expropriations and taxes.

There are many reasons why the Latin Americans still distrust the United States, but they need to realize that they have benefitted from cooperating with them. One example is the North Atlantic Free Trade Association (NAFTA), an economic agreement between Mexico, Canada and the United States. Before NAFTA, Mexico had a trade deficit with the United States, but after the agreement Mexico had a trade surplus and exported more goods to the United States than it imported. The economy of Mexico flourished, and Mexican businesses expanded American markets.

Latin Americans will not forgive the United States just because of free trade agreements, but they should at least try to cooperate with them and ask for advice in things like education and infrastructure. If the United States helps some Latin American governments in areas like these, the country might have a chance to improve its image in Latin America.

Wearing masks made from locally-grown hemp fibers, members of the Whitman Campus Climate Challenge stormed the administrative offices in Memorial Hall yesterday, defenestrating President Jorge Ponts and declaring the establishment of the People’s Divestocracy of Walla Walla.

“As of this morning, we secede from the United States and establish our own sovereign Divestocratic nation,” said newly-titled Divestista Duce Smitty Collins in a prepared statement. “The P-D-double-W will expand and engulf the fossil-fuel loving scum of the world. We’re super excited about its forward momentum.”

Following their seizure of Mem, the Divestistas separated into several breakout groups to spraypaint “Now Is The Time” on cars, encourage students to spy on their neighbors and report them for owning ExxonMobil stock, and organize a mandatory potluck for citizens of the PDWW. Collins helpfully reminded everyone that signing up to bring “a drink” is punishable by imprisonment without trial.

“We don’t want to scare anyone by making a bunch of huge changes around here,” said Duce Collins, as Divestistas behind him toppled the bust of Chester Maxey and replaced it with a life-size bronze of Bill McKibben triumphantly riding a cavalry horse. “You’ll be taking classes as usual, only now they’ll be more divestment-focused. For example, Physics will now be Divestment Physics. You’ll study how to model the forces that lead the money out of the accounts of dirty-energy fat-cat supervillains. There’s a lot of interesting scientific questions.”

“And divestment history,” he added. “Did you know the Guanche of the Canary Islands were the first historical people to divest? They removed all their money from Christopher Columbus’s merchant ships after he burned down their island.”

The coup originally took shape during a marathon brainstorming session at the GAC, when Collins and other Divestistas filled a whiteboard with publicity ideas including “documentary screening,” “block some stairs again,” and “secede from union.” Resistance by campus security was overcome with the help of CCC Weaponsmaster Al Henry.

“Yeah, man, I got some shit in here that makes C4 look like party poppers,” said Henry, speaking to the Pioneer from inside a tank. “Got this stuff from a crazy Kazakh fucker I met in prison. Swear to Jesus, only four words of English this dude knew were ‘blow you up nice.’”

The Divestistas wasted no time in stringing barbed wire around the tennis courts to create a re-education camp for their political enemies. This reporter managed to record an interrogation:

DIVESTISTA: What is the future of energy on Earth?

PRISONER 981: Shell…is leading the way…to new clean energy technologies…

DIVESTISTA: Wrong! (turns up shock machine)

PRISONER 981: Aaah! I’ll be sustainable! I’ll be sustainable!

As VIP hostages, members of the Board of Trustees were imprisoned in a spring afternoon lecture, where it is expected time will move so slowly as to render them effectively neutralized.

So far, student reactions to the PDWW have been mixed. Sophomore Katie Soapstone says she is most worried about whether her tuition costs will go up now that she is an international student.

“Also, the borders are closed to everything but bicycles and longboards, which means going home to New Hampshire for my cat’s graduation is gonna suck,” Soapstone said. “Plus I just came from my Divesting from the Gender Binary lecture, and I’m pretty sure Joan of Arc didn’t advocate divesting from England to win the Hundred Years War.”

“But who knows?” she added. “Bill McKibben is kinda quiet on the subject.”

I’m stealing a bit from my thesis-in-progress to begin making this point. Beloved “Lord of the Rings” author J.R.R. Tolkien has often been accused of racism, due to his unfortunate tendency to characterize his players based on their ancestry: elves like forests, dwarves like beer, orcs like human flesh. It’s the “human flesh” part that concerns me today, as I have lately discovered I am very uncomfortable with the depiction of any segment of human society as, for lack of a better phrase, a bunch of orcs.

This belief, deeply rooted, has put me in the awkward position of defending ISIS, convicted child murderers and the Charlie Hebdo shooters. So I wanted to use this column space to explain myself.

Radical Islam is the news story that has put this debate in my mind, so it’s the place to begin. I’ve observed enough events seemingly fueled by Islam to know there is a certain progression of responses they tend to evoke. Most will stand in solidarity with the victims, interested in recovery and not in blame. But some, driven by a natural desire to understand, will condemn Islam itself for allegedly inspiring violence and hatred due to its very nature.

Here is where it becomes more predictable: There will be a defence, partly along the lines that none of the pillars of Islam reward violence, partly that a large and diverse group of people has no obligation to defend itself against its worst associates, and partly that other religions have inspired just as many evil deeds, from the Crusades and Inquisition to the Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate suicides.

All of these are natural and understandable, but the last one is the most interesting to me because it’s what finally takes this out of the realm of religion, which, as it goes, takes with it the dynamic of orcs and elves. To make evil universal makes it at the same time personal: Instead of thinking that anybody who would join ISIS or commit rape is so evil they do not deserve the usual human dues of mercy and pity, I am forced to deal with the presence of darkness in my own soul.

To do the opposite — to declare any subset of man to be a cancer on the species — is comforting, but wrong. It is easy to declare what I will never do. It is harder to face the potential that I could murder or rape or abuse power, but that confrontation is the only reliable way to keep evil at bay.

I hold this belief deeply, and it sounds very broad, but it has policy implications as well. For a long time I have opposed the death penalty because “we must not sink to the murderer’s level” is in fact another way of phrasing what I stated above. But this goes further. It is the right of a state to fight actions, and actions alone; we must never go to war against people.

Unity, like that which has flourished in the wake of the Paris killings, is the other equally powerful side of this coin. But we have to remember that it is not the unity of a side in a clash. To steal again from my thesis, Smeagol is present in “The Lord of the Rings” for a reason: He cautions us against imputing susceptibility to corruption only to subhuman groups of which we could never be members. Being good requires a stronger basis than the hatred of miserable slinking things.

In the midst of the ongoing discussion surrounding the college’s accessibility, we have a point that we would like to be very clear about: Fossil fuel divestment is not at odds with economic diversity.

While Divest Whitman is concerned with issues of climate change and environmental justice, the campaign and students within it simultaneously seek to hold our institution accountable for its budgetary and investment practices at large. Divestment campaigners here and everywhere in the U.S. are waking up to the fact that many — if not all — of our colleges and universities have become corporatized and thus compromised.

Recent attention toward our college’s admissions and investment processes has situated Whitman as a pertinent example of this dilemma. We have found that promoted institutional ideals consistently clash with our financial policies and practices. Despite advertising a commitment to sustainability, we profit off of investments in the fossil fuel industry. In terms of demonstrating values, the truth is in the budget for colleges. Why don’t our spending choices and investment practices reflect the values we promote?

Divestment has started answering this with another question: Why can’t our finances reflect our values and moral mission? The shift toward corporatization of our college has subsequently prioritized business interests before realization of institutional values.

The reality of running as a business is also behind much of the economic diversity rhetoric. Aligning with contradictions between sustainability ideals and investment practices, the demographics of our institution do not reflect a supposed dedication to diversity and accessibility. Many students have expressed keen frustration with the way administrators and others have framed issues of accessibility on an ultra-practical continuum. It seems we’re being made to believe that we can only be accessible in times of great prosperity. And yet, like divestment, promoting economic diversity is much more of an explicit choice than a set of maneuvers within the market.

Much of the “Accessing Whitman” forum was spent outlining Whitman’s struggle to brand itself in order to keep up with the Joneses (in this instance more prosperous peer colleges). This reasoning suggested that our institution must grow our endowment and increase our collegiate rankings in order to have capital to spare on underprivileged students.

Our administration responds to appeals from students, faculty and alumni asking for financial policies that reflect institutional ideals with rhetoric that feels condescending and dismissive by positing these requests as economically unfeasible. This frame masks the political nature behind spending practices and inhibits a critical examination of financial priorities.

Weeks ago, a statistic set the Whitman campus on fire. Day after day, we witnessed new and imaginative student protests: a mass walkout, an art installation on the steps of Memorial Hall, students inscribing dollar signs on their faces to accuse the college of worshipping the symbols. Online, all of this was amplified, with alumni and off-campus students joining the conversation as well. It was hard to ignore.

President Bridges and the Board of Trustees agreed, releasing multiple statements that acknowledged the challenges Whitman faces in increasing economic diversity. But they were also careful to emphasize college affordability as a nationwide problem, and spent considerable effort downplaying Whitman’s low ranking in economic diversity on a New York Times list. ASWC organized a community forum in which administrator and faculty panelists identified and refuted specific inaccuracies in media coverage of Whitman’s financial aid policy.

President Bridges’ financial-aid blog, purportedly created for the benefit of concerned students, faculty and alumni, contains one post at the time of this writing in which he observes that “trustees and overseers … wrestle with tuition pricing and the levels of financial aid we set each year.” He promises they will be taking student concerns into account in their next meetings in November and February, yet there is no accompanying promise of transparency, no means for students or faculty to hold trustees accountable to a meaningful change in policy.

These responses did not absolve the college from the need for reform. With all their diversion and defensiveness, all they proved — in case the response to the divestment movement left any doubt — was that we can never rely on change to come from the top down. Instead, we the students must devise a method of meaningful reform and campaign for its implementation.

Every time controversy arises on campus — from inadequacies in our Title IX reporting process, to last year’s Facebook/Whitman Encounters incident, to the earlier student outrage at the inaccessible tenure process — the people who make up the face of the college display the same troubling patterns. The first of these to reveal itself is a studied refusal to see the broader implications of the problem; therefore, we get a response from the president and the board that dissects a list in the New York Times while ignoring what it represents.

Once a fire has caught, the spark that lit it becomes irrelevant. The Board of Trustees needs to contribute something meaningful to a discussion of economic stratification and stop pretending this is all about Whitman’s name being on the wrong end of a list. Up until now, we’ve had nothing from them but unproductive defensiveness, with an occasional aside to confuse different kinds of diversity. It’s fantastic that our school is achieving higher percentages of students of color and of international backgrounds, but that isn’t the whole problem here.

The sad part is that it’s the board that has the power to start this conversation, and all they’d have to do is admit in a meaningful way that student concerns are legitimate. That’s what we’ve never seen them do for any other controversy, and it circumscribes the other pattern that typifies the “fad” issues that arise on campus every year. The administration never truly engages because they know that rendering the conversation one-sided all but ensures it will die out, and this time, the presidential transition will make this easier than ever.

This is an effective strategy, and we can’t expect any sense of responsibility to prevent the trustees from adopting it. What students have to realize is that it also determines the cards we have to play when pursuing change. If President Bridges and Chairman McMurchie aren’t going to be receptive to our concerns, the responsibility for keeping the fire going falls to us.

Next week the Trustees will be on campus for the first of their bi-annual meetings — if we want them to take student concerns seriously, we need to have the same visibility and student mobilization we had at the beginning of the semester. ASWC’s recent resolution regarding test-optional admissions is a good start, since standardized testing indeed favors the wealthy, but there is far more work to do. Several of Whitman’s peer colleges manage to meet their requirements on need-blind admissions; the Pioneer board calls for a study of those school’s finances to create a plan for Whitman to emulate them. At this moment, new ideas are the best fuel to keep the fire going.

At Whitman, ideals are one thing you can always count on finding somewhere. There is no shortage of people who believe strongly in something—in the end of rape culture, the abolition of modern slavery, the inadvisability of GM crops—and assert that the only way to get it is to fight for it.

This semester, with the Now is the Time campaign to divest from fossil fuels, environmental issues have taken center stage. However, wherever there are young activists, there are claims that their activism stems directly from their youth—that their desire to defend their beliefs will die out as they get older and are forced to deal with the “real world.”

The Circuit was curious if this was true and decided to track down alumni who had been involved in environmentalism during their time at Whitman. Camila Thorndike, who graduated in 2010 with a degree in environmental humanities, says that she initially got involved with the Campus Climate Challenge (CCC) because she is “a humanist.”

“I work on climate change because in its full realization, it threatens the human species and its well-being as much as that of any other,” said Thorndike.

In addition to being part of CCC for four years and serving as president for one, Thorndike worked for an indirect sustainability effort called Network for Young Walla Walla, which got local students involved in environmental initiatives. She described this as one of her first encounters with community organizing, and had particularly fond memories of a three-day summit at Walla Walla Community College.

“It was an incredible networking experience, getting to know each other and bridging socioeconomic divides,” said Thorndike. “It reflected my evolution towards community development that creates the links to place—if you have a strong ‘sense of place,’ you are less likely to abuse it.”

Though the Network is now defunct, Thorndike’s experience led her into a series of environmental jobs that encompass a broad cross-section of the green movement. Among other things, she has worked in Tuscon, Ariz., as an urban planner, and in Vermont, connecting racially diverse conservation movements. Currently she serves as director of engagement for “Coal: The Musical and Movement,” a musical storytelling project.

In one way or another, all of Thorndike’s post-college jobs connected with the human side of the environmental movement. As she has grown professionally, she has begun to think of organizing people as something that must be positive, not reactive.

“It’s not assuming people don’t care, it’s assuming that they do,” she said. “If you want to build the chorus of voices that will sing us in the direction of sustainability, you don’t start with the world. You start with them as individual[s].”

Elena Gustafson ’10 and Lisa Curtis ’10, who graduated with Thorndike, also attended the three-day WWCC summit. Though they shared some of her ideals in college, their differing conceptions of environmentalism led their paths to diverge. However, they have had some similar experiences—particularly in discovering that changing the world does not need to begin with resistance or accusation.

Since college, Gustafson has believed in the potential of outdoor leadership to educate the next generation that will inherit the Earth.

“I was definitely active in climate and went to Powershift one year, but my main passion was environmental education,” she said. “If we don’t set up the next generation to care for the earth, we won’t have the next generation of environmentalists in place.”

While in Walla Walla, Gustafson founded the Youth Adventure Program to lead day trips with local schools and organizations such as the YWCA. Since then, she has worked several other outdoor leadership jobs. Recently, she has been working with youth again as the director of the children’s program at a domestic violence shelter in Alaska. She said that the things she has seen there have run contrary to the way she saw the world as a college activist.

“I’m working right now with families and kids who are in such difficult situations that if someone tries to talk to them about climate change or recycling, they won’t care,” she said. “Families are dealing with such internal trauma that there’s no extra energy for them to engage in an environmental ideal.”

Though Gustafson is no longer working an environmentalist job, she shares Thorndike’s belief that the green movement is ultimately about individuals. She said that she now has a better understanding of something which frustrated her in college—the reason why not everyone cared about her cause as much as she did.

“I think it’s important to be able to step back and think about the issues that might be going on in these people’s lives,” she said. “As environmentalists, it’s important to meet them at their level.”

Curtis, who served as sustainibility coordinator in her senior year, had a successful career as an activist while at Whitman. As a member of CCC and a Pioneer journalist all four years, she was able to secure funding for five separate green projects, as well as attend a United Nations conference as an environmental lobbyist.

Curtis (left) during her Peace Corps service in Niger. All photos contributed by interviewees.

“You can’t go to a U.N. conference and not be frustrated by how little our policymakers are doing to address this issue,” said Curtis. “You also can’t not be awed by all these people around the world who are working so intently on making our planet a better place. Talking to people from Africa or small islands like the Maldives inspired me to remember why I was doing what I was doing.”

After graduation, Curtis joined the Peace Corps, which sent her to Niger. Unfortunately, a terrorist attack forced her to evacuate only seven months into her service, and she went to India instead. There, she took a job at an impact investing firm, which inspired her to put her trust in market forces to save the world’s ecology.

Curtis organizes a display of her Kuli Kuli products.

Upon returning to the United States, Curtis settled in the Bay Area and turned her attention towards the malnutrition she had witnessed in Africa. Her startup company, Kuli Kuli, aims to promote a nutrient-rich grain to fight hunger while funding its effort by selling bars made of the same grain in the United States.

“Starting a company is way harder than I imagined,” she said. “We’ve been working on it for two years, and we’re starting to see some progress. One thing that was hard for me to learn was that to maintain a sustainable business model, we had to create a product in the U.S. before working in West Africa.”

Unlike Curtis, Thorndike and Gustafson, Sarah Gilman ’04 did not consider herself an environmentalist in college. A double major in art and biology, Gilman developed an interest in nature writing after participating in Semester in the West. Rather than an activist, she considers herself a journalist telling the stories of people.

“I’m not an environmental activist,” said Gilman. “I am not out there putting pressure on the government to, for example, not approve Keystone XL. My sort of environmentalism is more philosophical. My personal brand of environmentalism is to be involved in the processes that exist and to examine people’s relationship with energy resource use and the landscape itself.”

Gilman’s senior art thesis

Gilman is the associate editor of High Country News magazine, based out of Montana. At Whitman, she used her artistic ability to inspire people to think of themselves and the landscape they inhabited as unified rather than dichotomous. For her art thesis, she created a quilt that doubled as a topographic map of eastern Montana.

“I was trying to convey how the landscape and the body were the same thing,” she said. “I didn’t have an action in mind for people to take. I wanted a sense of the world as one thing changing form.”

As a journalist, Gilman still writes to inspire her readers to think differently about issues of the land, resources and humanity. While her attitude towards environmentalism—that we should consider the best information available to us, rather than rushing to blame others or ourselves—remains consistent, she said she has become more literal in the way she approaches it. She recalled one instance in which she found herself disagreeing with the mainstream environmental movement in her home lands.

“I wrote for HCN about a lease proposal for 30,000 acres of land for oil and gas development,” she said. “I [ran] across the argument from environmentalists that it wasn’t about resource extraction being bad; it was about it not being the right place to drill, or not responsible development. I’ve always wondered, where, then? If you acknowlege the necessity to your own life, what is to be done? You have to look at yourself and ask how much you are willing to give up.”

Since college, Curtis has stood firm in her commitment to her causes of clean energy and an end to malnutrition; however, she has also reevaluated her approach to these causes in a way that might make Gilman proud. Instead of fighting against the system, Curtis now takes control of it to effect positive change.

“[At Whitman] I felt very anti-government, anti-business—more of an activist in the stereotypical sense than I am now,” said Curtis. “I was almost an econ major—I switched to politics at the last minute—but I’ve always been interested in the potential for the markets to make change on a broader scale than you can do with just donations and grants.”

Kuli Kuli, Curtis’ energy bar company, is operating a campaign on finance website Kickstarter to get its product into American grocery stores. Curtis has used her economics-based approach to solving world issues to great effect, gathering investors for the project.

“It’s amazing to see how much more people like that plan when there’s something in it for them,” she said. “That has reinforced my idea that to make gains on a broader scale, we have to show people what’s in it for them.”

While working on “Coal: The Musical and Movement,” Thorndike also organized an artistic action near Medford, Ore., in the Willamette Valley along with Colorado College graduate Hannah Sohl. More than 13,000 participants came together to create a giant painted salmon on which they answered the question of why they love their home in the valley.

Thorndike helped organize this art project.

Using the concept of a sense of place, Thorndike united a diverse group of people in defense of the home they shared. Her explanation recalled Curtis’ idea that people will help the planet if there is something in it for them; however, that something need not necessarily be money—it could be health, family or a place to call home.

“We’re taking that big salmon up to the capital and convening a statewide day of citizen-driven climate action,” she said. “The region is actually quite conservative and diverse in terms of culture. One of the best practices in organizing work is to meet people where they are.”

Thorndike characterized herself as far more of a psychologist, therapist and community organizer than she once was, and said that the change is in line with her humanist way of thinking. Like Gustafson, she discovered since graduating that people will never unite behind an environmental cause if activists only tell them what they are doing wrong.

“You try to elevate people to the level of consciousness and of care and of integrity in actions that align with their values,” she said. “It’s about listening to what they care about and about how to make the link that we both care about the same thing. If you are driven to increase your family’s welfare, well, you can’t do that without clean air, water that your kids can drink and biodiversity on the planet.”

As Gustafson progressed in her professional life, she too gained a greater understanding of the psychology that determines whether or not a person will care about the state of the planet. She said that she too has learned that environmentalism won’t succeed if its activists draw too distinct lines between right and wrong.

“Psychologically, it’s difficult to get people to engage outside their local level just because we can’t understand the numbers that are being thrown around,” said Gustafson. “There’s only a handful of people who will work on a national campaign, but you can get a lot of people involved in a local campaign—even people who initially wouldn’t support environmental work.”

At her job in Alaska, Gustafson has seen firsthand the power of a community issue to bring people together who will work in the best interests of their home. She cautioned the environmental movement not to lose sight of this power, reminding us that even people who might disagree politically will unite to defend something they all care about.

“I can still support the national campaigns in limited ways, but I can’t forget the importance of diving into local issues and not thinking they’re too small to matter,” she said.

Whitman College’s divestment campaign is building momentum, heading into further meetings with the Associated Students of Whitman College and administration about where the school’s endowment can go from here. The collective sentiment of the people to whom The Circuit spoke—insofar as their diverse stories and viewpoints agreed—seemed to indicate that the 350 effort will not succeed without focusing on positivity, demonstrating specifically how we can use the college’s money for good instead of harm.

Gilman, the environmental journalist, asked us all to consider our true contribution to what Thorndike called “an absolute explosion of problems.” For her part, Gilman puts her faith as she always has in the constancy of the planet Earth. Her artistic quilt, which included bones made out of sheeting material, was intended to make death less scary by placing it as part of a cycle. In the same way, Gilman’s brand of environmentalism teaches that the Earth will not be destroyed if we can’t win every battle.

“The goal is to inform more than anything else, but I do still write essays. I still express those ideas pretty regularly,” said Gilman. “I wrote an essay about the beauty of a blasted place in Montana—it’s beautiful because it’s not destroyed. The world is not a breakable thing … it will persist no matter what we do to it.”

I find it hard to recall the moment I first became an environmentalist. It’s not as defined as the instant I became a writer (after reading “The Amber Spyglass” at the age of 11) or an environmental humanities major (about the fifth week of organic chem lab). What I do remember is that when my tender young self first cognized the idea of global warming, my instinct was selfish: I felt threatened. I wanted to save the world, but only so that I could have a chance to grow old.

In recent years, particularly in college, I finally began to add people into the equation. I understood how climate change would begin by devastating the blameless, the people closest to the land, and only at the end of its rampage turn its ire against those who set it loose. I discovered that what I most despised had not one name but a myriad: ExxonMobil, TransCanada, Peabody. Their CEOs, who reaped grotesque profits from selling fuel that vandalized the atmosphere, had to either be in total denial or pure evil. I learned that the fight for the planet was an issue of morality, a question of righting wrongs by turning back an industrial clock.

It’s only now that I begin to realize I may have been wrong about some things up until this very day. I’ve written column after column about what an environmentalist is not: not wealthy, not timid, not John Muir. I’ve never stopped to consider what one is. Perhaps this is because there are so few traits all of them share, or because they are so numerous, but I think I know the true answer. The reality is that I am unqualified to describe or define any environmentalist besides myself; so, long overdue, that’s what I’m going to attempt. Is it apathy that keeps me from throwing myself into divestment, or is it resignation? Some of both, but in the end, neither.

This self-evaluation began when I realized how often I asserted that I was not “that kind” of environmentalist—that kind being the Al Gore sort, green because they use incandescent bulbs and do large loads of laundry and inflate the tires of their hybrids. I find these solutions, up to and including President Obama’s first-term tightening of emissions standards, more than ineffectual—I find them condescending. They blame the problem on individuals who don’t understand that they cannot continue the exact same lifestyles indefinitely without consequences. This type of “movement” is a diversion from the truth.

I can’t identify with the small change environmentalists, but neither can I identify with most of the people I meet at Whitman—people who, I want to make clear, are fighting for their beliefs and for the planet in a way I cannot. I find it difficult to take part in the divestment movement because I see it as resistance where progress is due instead. In other words, we will no longer win this fight by turning back the clock. We’ve created our own bottleneck, and now we need to push through.

This is going to happen on a personal battlefield. In a way, then, I’m back to how I was at the beginning, with one minor difference: The Earth does not need saving. We do. It was easy to hate energy CEOs until I realized I was the one paying their salary. When I realized there was no way I could stop—not with the world as it is—is the moment I became restless at CCC meetings. If we manage to stop a fossil fuel company, another will take its place; if we manage to divest, it doesn’t matter—Exxon still has customers.

The world is going to change, drastically and soon. So, going forward as an environmentalist, this is the question I’m going to ask myself: What kind of world do I want it to change into, and how can I help usher it in? When this transformation makes our modern society infeasible—as it inevitably will—I am the kind of environmentalist who hopes to determine what will take its place. I believe action is required, but not in the way we’re applying it now: Instead of trying to wrest the world from the grasp of fossil fuel, environmentalists must ensure something worse does not take its place.

The image conjured by the word “environmentalist”—a vague and overlong term I still hate—is similar to the vision of the typical Whittie: a semi-outdoorsy, dirty-blonde post-hippie who jogs in sandals, feels very deeply about only the trendiest of issues, and is, in all likelihood, financially well-off. If this is what you saw, don’t feel bad: The perception of the environmentalist as Caucasian and upper-middle-class is pervasive in our generation.

It is also untrue. The stereotype relies on the perception that those who have time to worry about pollution, conservation and greenhouse gases must be rich enough that they lack “real problems.” It’s true that people in higher tax brackets frequently turn to the environment when looking for a cause, but the green movement—diverse and decentralized as it is—does not have its genesis in luxury. The true green movement is a response of the downtrodden of all demographics, which the wealthy may choose to either aid or ignore.

At the Qatar climate summit last year, a number of countries forgotten by globalization demonstrated this point perfectly. After a battle against blinkered obstruction by the United States, low-lying island nations such as the Maldives, Seychelles and Fiji won a decisive victory when delegates resolved that polluting nations should compensate the nations that suffer from rising sea levels. None of the members of the Alliance of Small Island States—Nauru, Mauritius, Cuba—are known to be overflowing with wealthy citizens. Nobody who heard their delegates’ voices quaking with frustration as they tried to explain that the United States was weighing its economy against their lives could ever again subscribe to the cliché of the environmentalist who argues his case over a seven-dollar cup of coffee.

The plight of the Alliance is a perfect illustration of the concept of environmental justice, which acknowledges that the degradation of the planet has a way of disproportionately affecting disadvantaged populations. As I’ve written, we can look at this globally—burning coal in the United States and China will sink the Maldives, not the United States and China—but we must also acknowledge it locally. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a poor and historically black county chosen as North Carolina’s major toxic waste dump or Oregon’s fuel station attendants exposed to carcinogens on the job; when you’re poor, not only do rich and powerful people believe they can harm you without consequences, but you are sometimes forced to put yourself in harm’s way because you’ve got no other choice to survive.

The economically downcast take the environmental movement into their own hands more than any other segment of society; it has belonged to them since the first progressives fought for clean cities and safe workplaces at the turn of the last century. The first Earth Day, based on the grassroots tactics of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Cesar Chavez, succeeded by bringing out communities that ordinarily wouldn’t have had the resources to demonstrate. In British Columbia, First Nation activists killed the Northern Gateway Pipeline. There is a reason that the Keystone XL has united environmentalists and Tea Partiers against it: When a corporation comes to bully a rural farmer off her land with the sanction of the government, she is going to fight back whether or not she’s got the time and money—not because it’s cool, but because it’s her land, and it may be all she has.

I don’t mean to exclude wealthy people from the movement; not only is that wrong, but we can’t afford to exclude anybody. I only mean to break down a stereotype, to demonstrate that while we may be annoyed by some privileged environmentalists, we have a moral responsibility to others. Fighting for the future of the earth is not something we do because we are bored, or want to impress our classmates. The real environmentalist campaigns out of a conviction that we must save the planet one way or another, and there is no other way.

As you might suspect, my friends and I talk politics a lot. Because I am a green activist and an Environmental Humanities major, I can’t resist bringing up climate change frequently; because a lot of them are hard science majors, they can’t resist offering technological as opposed to social solutions. I’ve found this divide to be rather sharp. Some people believe that the answer to a warming planet is to put our finest minds on the case and determine a way to prevent dire consequences—this is known as geoengineering. Others are diametrically opposed to this, and in some cases even scared of it.

I’ve always considered myself in the latter camp, but if there’s one thing we can know for certain about the science of climate change, it’s that it’s going to keep getting hotter without much regard for our values or principles. Therefore, though my trepidation remains, I believe the time has come to embrace geoengineering. It’s not the answer, but it is the first part of one.

My initial objections to the technological fix were both philosophical and sociological. On the philosophical front, I am skeptical of technology. It is an amoral entity among civilizations that is too often held up as the ultimate good; this causes people to ignore its drawbacks and eternally pursue its expansion, leaving future generations to clean up what mess may come. In particular, using technology to remedy the problems caused by the previous technological revolution is the very definition of a vicious cycle.

Sociologically, I know humans too well to be convinced geoengineering is without consequences. Economics has taught me that people respond to incentives; as I’ve written previously, a limit on the amount a plant can pollute only convinces the plant’s managers to pollute right up to that limit. A geoengineering fix without a social component would teach people that it’s fine to befoul the Earth, because the scientists will fix it sooner or later. It’s an incentive towards the wrong kind of behavior.

So, in the face of these objections, why am I now advocating for geoengineering? The answer is easy: social change is only so powerful, and the problem with the climate has gone beyond its grasp. The consensus of climatologists is that global average temperatures would rise by 0.6 degrees Celsius even if 100% of emissions stopped today. We can’t stop runaway temparatures now, particularly not with emissions still booming; political action to curb carbon is no longer capable of keeping us below the critical 2 degrees.

If we want a hope of maintaining Earth as the Earth we understand, something more is needed. Specifically, what we need is what has been called a Manhattan Project for the environment. What I mean by this is that we need a gathering of the world’s greatest experts, all focused on the common goal of how to get greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere before they become unmanagable. Unlike the previous Manhattan project, this would be international—for peace and the future, not for war.

This is not all we need to do, though. Geoengineering, as I said, is the first half of an answer: it is a stopgap measure to buy us time. It may in fact buy us a lot of time, but in the end, we would once again begin to bump up against global deadlines. The reason we need a technological solution is so that we have the freedom to effect social change without a direct threat hanging over our heads. We can stop global warming, or we can convince Earth’s nations to give up the toxic economies that interfere with the climate, but we cannot do one of each with both hands.

So let the scientists do what they do best. It’s our responsibility—as thinkers and as Earthlings—to ensure their work is not in vain.

Infographic by McNulty and Peterson

TRIGGER WARNING: This article discusses self-harm and suicide, which may be traumatic for some readers.

A mental disorder can be almost as difficult to spot as it is to live with. Many students who suffer from depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other conditions are doing so in silence, at Whitman and at schools across the country. These conditions can arise from a multitude of causes—some biological, some from experience, some compounded from other disorders—but all have one thing in common: When people realize they are struggling, their first instinct is to fight the battle alone.

The 2009 National Survey of Counseling Center Directors, collected by the University of Pittsburgh, recorded that 60 percent of college students have at least once felt too depressed or anxious to function. According to a recent Pioneer survey of 272 students, over one in four Whitman students has been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, PTSD or a panic disorder in their lives, and as many as two out of three believe that they have suffered from one of these but not sought medical attention. Out of 272 respondents, 39 percent report having had a panic attack, 22 percent have engaged in self-harm and 18 percent have suffered from an eating disorder. While these percentages may not be representative of the student body as a whole, the fact remains that mental health is a concern for a significant number of Whitman students.

A susceptible population

Junior Tara Mah has suffered from PTSD, bipolar disorder and bulimia since before arriving at Whitman. She said starting college made her more susceptible to mental health issues because the unfamiliarity of her surroundings and the pervasive silence about mental problems caused her to regress from the therapy she received in high school. 

“Individual therapy was helpful for a long time, but it stopped being helpful in college when I was separated from my support network,” said Mah. “When I got to college it felt like many people were completely silent. So few people were willing to even acknowledge their struggles unless I opened up first.”

Mah continued her behaviors, including self-harm, in secrecy. She said that her downward spiral was exacerbated because she berated herself for not being able to defeat her disorders on her own.

“You suddenly are overcome with these feelings that you can’t do it and are not good enough,” she said. “You tell yourself you are a failure, you can’t do anything, you’re weak. Those thoughts are not only what cause the depression, they are what keep you there.”

Another leading cause of depression among college students is stress. The typical student lives under several simultaneous pressures: to keep up with an academic workload, to remain social and to prepare for his or her future. Of all these, none is so difficult as the pressure to make all of the other tasks look easy.

“I was one of those overachievers in high school. I was a perfectionist. I worked myself too hard, and the stress didn’t go away when I expected it to,” said first-year Arden Robinette, who has received counseling for stress-induced depression.

The stress eventually led to a breakdown.

“It was my junior year of high school. I thought I’d get through it and the stress would go away, but weeks before my senior year started, I freaked out and told my mother I couldn’t go back,” she said.

In other cases, students carry trauma with them from home and suffer as a result. Sophomore Emma Nye has been diagnosed with PTSD from a childhood trauma, and found the symptoms more difficult to bear when around people who weren’t familiar with her history.

“I’m very open about it, but there’s a difference between being open and being able to accurately convey what it’s like. Part of being depressed was feeling like nobody understood. I think it’s not that nobody actually understood, but I didn’t expect anyone to understand. My friends here are super sympathetic, but when you’ve only known people a year, it’s harder to explain,” she said.

Robinette, who describes herself as a private person, said that a different problem kept her from opening up to others. She believes that there is stigma surrounding those with mental health issues, especially those who seek counseling.

“It’s not something that’s socially accepted. It’s like if you go to counseling, you’re admitting you’re crazy. It’s sad because it could really help people, but it’s ingrained in our collective mentality.”

According to statistics from the Welty Counseling Center, 93 percent of college counseling center directors said in 2009 that students have been coming to them in greater numbers with more severe problems. Dr. Tracee Anderson, who works at the center, said that an increase in their number of clients reflects this trend.

“I’ve been here for 20 years, and every year we have had an increase in the demand for services,” said Anderson. “For example, last year, we saw 27.5 percent of the student body; in 2006, five or six years before, we saw 22 percent. This year, without a doubt, we’re seeing more than 27.5 percent.”

Silence

Almost all of the students with mental health conditions who responded to the survey described having hidden feelings from everyone or nearly everyone in their lives. While some said that trusted individuals are privy to these experiences, others said that they have gone through things about which nobody knows.

Even when people are able to be candid about their feelings, the struggle may not end. Although friends who hear somebody’s story are usually supportive, several misconceptions have become part of the common view of mental illness, even among Whitman students. Chief among these is the response that their issues are all in their head and that they should “buck up.”

Junior Matt Alder* has received this answer several times after opening up about his depression. He has had intermittent symptoms for around five years, and claims he has been depressed continually since arriving at college.

“I feel like, in the instances where I have opened up, people just have the same things to say in different ways. ‘Stop being depressed. Just act happy. Get over it.’ It drives me insane. I can’t act happy because I’m depressed,” he said.

Simply reverting to a scientific explanation for depression also bothers him.

“Another thing I hear a lot is that depression is simply a chemical imbalance in the brain. This one comes from counselors. I understand that they’re correct, but it’s not like the sudden realization that chemicals are screwing me over makes me feel any better.”

Alder has tried counseling and medication but has never been able to continue with either for very long. In his sophomore year, he began to contemplate suicide. He said that his claims that he thinks of killing himself have also not always been taken seriously.

“I think most people assume that I’m only using the word ‘suicide’ for attention. I’m not,” he said. “I’ve created so many plans and evaluated each and every single one for its possible lethality that I’ve developed a theoretical hierarchy of which method would be the best. I’ve evaluated the cost of some plans as well as the difficulty in executing others.”

Mah also said that she has heard things from other people that parallel the negative lines of reasoning she has said to herself in her darkest moments. A transfer student to Whitman, she spent a year at the University of North Carolina, where she opened up to friends about her history of self-harm. One day, a peer took her aside.

“She said, ‘I’m sorry, I want to help, but I can’t be around you because you’re so negative. You couldn’t possibly have tried everything. You need to work harder.’ That’s a really common message. I’ve had people claim I was just doing it for attention or that I should just choose to be happy. Some people honestly think that by being sad, you are choosing it, and that makes you weak,” said Mah.

Sara Williams* finds it almost impossible to share her experiences with loved ones because she is afraid they will treat her differently once they know. Williams deals with both chronic germophobia and PTSD from an abusive relationship. She said that people who have not gone through trauma or lived with phobias can never truly understand the sensation of something interfering with living your life the way you want to.

“I’ve grown up in a society that says it’s not okay to have these things or be affected by them,” she said. “Sure, I get a little more leeway with the trauma because you’re supposed to respect that, but basically, it’s almost like if I talk about them, I’m afraid that the person I’m talking to will treat me as subhuman. They’ll treat me in a way that they think they’re supposed to treat me, rather than as the person I am and they’ve known me to be.”

Some students choose to remain silent for reasons other than a fear they will be misinterpreted. Senior Walter Leitz, who suffered from anxiety and depression in elementary and middle school, has not required counseling or medication since eighth grade. He said he doesn’t talk much about it because he very rarely has days in which he is unable to function.

“My depression ties in with sleep deprivation, so I’m careful to get enough sleep,” said Leitz. “There are occasions where I don’t feel like doing anything because I feel really down and apathetic, but I rarely feel like it’s so bad that it starts screwing up my work habits.”

The students on the survey who said they elected not to seek counseling gave a variety of reasons. Of these, the most common were a belief that it wouldn’t be helpful or that their condition was not serious enough to merit counseling, as well as a fear of social judgment.

Leaves of absence

If students decide that their mental health problems are interfering with their ability to function in college, they can take a medical leave of absence. According to Dean of Students Chuck Cleveland, the procedure for this is similar to a medical leave for a physical illness or a major surgery.

“Students have a right to take a leave as long as they’re in good standing,” said Cleveland. “The board of review approves virtually all of them. If they’re on probation, they’re not supposed to take a leave, but mental health reasons are a mitigating factor. Often there is a relationship between psychological health and academic trouble, and the board understands that.”

He stressed that the college never sends students away as a disciplinary action, but can grant them leave if they are “not acting as a student” by not attending class or by disrupting their residence hall. In some cases, the administration requires clearance from a medical professional to allow a student to return; this is usually asked in response to concern from the student’s parents.

Depression is the condition most commonly cited by students looking to take leave. In a survey conducted by the Office of Institutional Research of the incoming freshman class in 2012, 47.1 percent said they had felt depressed occasionally in the past year. 6.7 percent said they felt depressed frequently in that time span. This is significantly higher than the percentage of working adults with the same problem: In a 2010 survey done by the National Institute of Mental Health, only 9.5 percent responded that depression had kept them from functioning.

“There’s nothing inherent in being a student that causes depression, but being depressed makes it difficult to be a student,” said Cleveland. “Medications enable students to come to college who couldn’t have 15 or 20 years ago. Sometimes students stop medication because it interferes with how they want to live.”

The difficulty of reconciling academic life while fighting mental illness on the inside led sophomore Kristen Wiseman to request a medical leave last semester. Like Robinette, Wiseman found that the emphasis on achievement in high school and college engendered depression by forcing her to put herself second to her efforts.

“I didn’t want to bring depression with me, and the way I decided to do that was to not talk about it. But the things that triggered me as a senior triggered me again freshman year,” said Wiseman. “It can be paralyzing. Writing papers was really triggering for me because it was part of me—my thoughts on paper. If you’re constantly putting down your academics and how you’re thinking and your abilities, writing a paper is not easy.”

At last, Wiseman decided that she needed to take time off from school if she was ever going to put her mental health before her work. At spring break last year, her doctor told her that her depression would become harder to manage if she returned to school. Due to the administration’s clearance policy, her doctor’s approval was required for Wiseman to be able to return, and her doctor ended up making the decision that she should remain on leave for the rest of 2012.

“I’m changing 18 years of habits and thinking. A couple months of practice helped, but it wouldn’t be super effective,” Wiseman said. “I took a semester off to focus in on coping skills and DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, a type of psychotherapy that incorporates meditative techniques). I did as much as I could at home, but I knew I had to come back.”

Despite the fact that taking leave wasn’t originally her decision, Wiseman ultimately found the time she took off helpful to her well-being. Senior Jessica Asmus, however, took her leave of absence under rougher circumstances. Before her leave, Asmus developed a habit of using anxiety medication to sleep for days on end. She was sometimes rushed to the hospital because friends were unable to wake her up.

“I know that a lot of other students were worried and others had talked to the administration about being worried,” she said. “Their reaction was asking me to leave so I wasn’t disrupting other students.”

However, Asmus’s circumstances were complicated: She grew up in foster care, and did not have a home to go back to. Despite knowing this, the administration insisted she take a leave anyway. Asmus recalled being escorted to her room by security and given 20 minutes to gather her belongings.

“I left campus with literally nowhere to go, and that made everything so much worse,” she said. “That definitely made it worse and ultimately is what made me enter an inpatient facility. At the University of Washington Medical Center, I did a lot of behavioral therapy. It taught me how to deal with things better on my own instead of trying to get angry or self-harm.”

After three weeks at the inpatient hospital, Asmus lived for the rest of the semester with a couple who worked with one of the programs that helped pay for her education. Even after undergoing effective treatment and counseling during that time, she said that the college was reluctant to let her return.

“The school required me to get medically cleared by a doctor. I was cleared at UW before I was discharged,” she said. “When I gave them that paperwork, they required me to be psychiatrically cleared. Margaret and Greg (the couple she stayed with) took me to a counselor, and I was psychiatrically cleared. Then the school said it wasn’t a good idea. Margaret and Greg said they didn’t have that authority.”

Cleveland said that a leave of absence has never been worked out between only the student and administration. In situations in which a student does not have parents, the terms of leaving and returning are discussed with a relative, guardian or significant other. He stressed that the college is not exercising power over students trying to return to campus, but is involving them and their support networks in a cooperative endeavor.

“I’m not comfortable categorizing what’s going on as a power relationship,” he said. “The goal is to help the student face whatever issues there are and come back strong. There’s all kinds of people involved, including significant others, the student themselves, sometimes the counseling center and sometimes the health center.”

With Margaret and Greg advocating on her behalf, Asmus was permitted to return to campus. Since then, things have dramatically improved: She now sees a counselor once every six weeks, accepts more help from her friends and no longer requires medication.

Recovery

About half of survey respondents have sought counseling at some point in their lives, and one-fifth have been prescribed psychiatric drugs. A vast majority, 75 percent, of those who sought counseling described it as “effective,” and 65 percent of those who took medication said the same. However, there are some exceptions.

Asmus’s current therapist works off campus, and she acknowledged that she still has trouble with the counseling center at Whitman.

“I sought counseling off campus because I was embarrassed walking into the counseling center. I was stressed going there and stressed leaving. I think that’s why I didn’t get better with that help,” Asmus said. “Sometimes there are other students there and you think, ‘you are also here because you have issues.’ It’s a really awkward atmosphere, especially because you see them later.”

While some students avoid on-campus counseling, others have had positive experiences. Nye said that the counseling center has “helped her a lot.” In particular, visiting new director Thacher Carter, whose specialty is therapy that teaches patients to accept and overcome trauma, has aided Nye in her dealings with PTSD.

Though Robinette has never sought counseling on campus, choosing instead to take advantage of a program in her hometown in Oregon, she was effusive about the boon that a therapist can be to one’s mental health.

“Usually, I have to reach a critical level before I feel like I have to go back. It’s when it gets to the point where I feel I can’t handle it on my own anymore,” she said. “Over the summer, a couple weeks before I came to Whitman, I was really stressed about it. I was worrying about every little thing that could go wrong. So I went back to counseling and sat down for half an hour and cleared everything up.”

Mah, too, got to a point at which she had to seek intensive psychiatric help. She joined a partial-day group program and a week-long treatment program which focused on the role of family and birth order in the development of disorders. For the first time, she began to feel like she was not alone.

After that, she checked into residential treatment in Chicago for a 30-day stay. While there, she witnessed the state of the American mental healthcare system firsthand, as one-third of the 36 patients on the ward were sent home when their insurance companies withdrew coverage.

Since attending group treatment, Mah has continued to participate in 12-step programs. She has been clean of self-harm for nine months, and of bulimia for six; she is also currently taking medication for bipolar disorder. She said that the view of the American public parallels the view on college campuses.

“The reality is that a good chunk of us are faking being happy, doing well and feeling fulfilled. It creates an atmosphere that isn’t real,” she said. “What our campus needs to acknowledge is that a lot of our students are struggling with mental health issues, here and everywhere.”

In order to expose the illusion, Mah, Robinette, Wiseman, Nye and others are attempting to open a local chapter of a national organization called Active Minds. The purpose of an Active Minds support group is to open conversation and alleviate the pain of suffering in silence with a mental disorder.

“I’m hoping to work on the feeling of not having anyone who’s been through the same situation or who really understands how dark your life can look,” said Nye. “Bipolar made it harder to get up, literally and figuratively. Just knowing you have people that completely understand what you are going through is such a motivating thought.”

Wiseman, who said that her life at Whitman is gradually improving and teaching her not to isolate herself, is involved in the club to foster connections between individuals who went through the same things she did.

“It surprises students that they’re not alone,” she said. “There are so many people coming out of the woodwork, people I’d never have expected to have mental problems. No matter how much you think you can do this by yourself, you can’t.”

*Names have been changed