At the Student Senate meeting Tuesday, I did not hear one accurate statement about the Environment Committee’s past operations. I was the only person who could have verified the presuppositions used against the committee because I ran the committee the previous two years and was a member for the previous three.

I’m not a Senate member anymore, and I had to beg student body officers to let me ask questions during designated Q&A periods. I certainly wasn’t asked a single question from the entire body to verify or repudiate either side’s claims as the only credible witness there.

I now know how climate-change scientists who work under the Bush administration feel.

If the R&R or Executive Committees were serious about Senate reform, you would think their first recommendations would point out ways to help struggling senate committees operate more effectively rather than writing them off. This “restructuring” gives the impression that the Senate is a cutthroat body that would rather abandon its committees out of mere convenience instead of helping them overcome problems.

However, in my three years in the Senate Environment Committee, the only thing it ever struggled with was convincing the Finance Committee to give it funding. What’s more, the R&R committee was never given the power to restructure the Senate according to the Senate bylaws, so what happened Tuesday was illegal according to Student Senate law. That was a dishonest and disgusting act of rule manipulation.

Take this from a person who has the experience and knows that a full committee of environmentally driven students, not a committee of students more concerned about parking tickets, is the only way that all of the initiatives that the Environment Committee is supposed to manage or maintain can stay alive. You can forget about the possibility of future initiatives being proposed by the Senate that would take advantage of the obvious current momentum behind efforts to make this a more “green” campus.

If it takes the Environment Committee plus some senators to contact enough financially hurting student organizations to fill the Boulevard recycling/Senate-funded spots for SMU’s home football games, how do you expect one vice chair to perform?

You won’t even expect them to try. If there isn’t an organization that applies for the opportunity to earn that $100, it means the person in charge (by default) has to do a five- or six-man job without a committee.

Because the backers of this risky change refused to even designate one of the two vice-chairs of the new committee an “Environment Vice Chair,” most of the initiatives that have been managed or maintained by the Environment Committee over the years will likely cease to exist, including the maintenance and promotion of the campus’ recycling program.

The backers of the new consolidated Student Concerns Committee claim to support the Boulevard and recycling programs. All eyes will be on them next fall to see if they live up to their rhetoric.

They say, “well if it doesn’t work well in practice…we’ll just go back to the way it was,” which would be after what has been built over the past 3 years is reduced to ashes, but they’re apparently willing to take that risk.

The Senate Environment Committee never really “fit” into the Senate “box model” to begin with, especially this exclusive new one, but that was what was so pure and empowering about the committee. This is probably why the Senate wanted it on a short leash.

The primary reason the Environment Committee was under attack was because its bylaws gave it the capability to do “programming” on campus to fulfill its stated purpose, which is the “environmental education of the campus”. Although they vilified the committee for this, the committee has never organized an environmental awareness event that met with disapproval from the Executive Committee. As if organizing events was the only thing the committee did, the opposition claimed that there was no need for the committee because such “programming” was already occurring on campus through the SMU Environmental Society and Students for a Better Society.

I don’t doubt the intentions or capability of those organizations’ leadership, but before last year, both societies either didn’t exist or never even held environmental events for Earth Day or Texas Recycles Day, while the committee has been around for more than 15 years. In fact, the Environmental Society is an academic group for students interested in professional careers in environmental management and engineering, not a university backed student group. Only the Senate Environment Committee is responsible for increasing the environmental awareness of the student body and for finding ways the university can operate in a more eco-friendly manner. Although Students for a Better Society has an environmental arm, it is involved with non-partisan political campaigns and cannot be forced by the Senate to be responsible for raising environmental awareness on campus about the former Environment Committee’s recycling initiatives, nor should the Environmental Society. The Environment Committee’s tasks cannot be outsourced to student organizations without their consent and should fall on the shoulders of the new Student Concerns Committee, which won’t happen from the looks of things.

Just last week, SMU was mentioned for the first time ever in a national college sustainability report, which in addition to MTV’s Break the Addiction Challenge Award is another massive accomplishment attributable to the Environment Committee’s work in recent years. The assessment, performed by the Sustainability Endowments Institute, gave SMU a C grade for its concordance to the study’s criteria for an environmentally conscious school.

However, with the Environment Committee gone, I get the feeling that SMU will not be so lucky the next time it is given a grade on environmental sustainability.

About the writer:

Joseph Grinnell is a 2006 SMU alum. He can be reached at [email protected].