Know someone who might qualify for the award? Submit the person's name by the 15^th of each month of the academic year to environment@columbia.edu.

And what does the "Green Lion" look like? Another contest, also sponsored by the Office of Environmental Stewardship, is seeking student renderings of the Green Lion – the best of which will be used as the logo for the Green Lion Award. Deadline for entries is April 22 – Earth Day! The prize: $25 for the winner's Flex account. Send your contest entry to environment@columbia.edu.

Meet Columbia's Green Lions

From Death Valley to Morningside

Hannah Lee, co-leader with Ariel Zucker of this semester’s EcoReps, says her interest in the environment and commitment to its preservation started in college.

In other words, right here at Columbia in “Frontiers of Science,” a Core Curriculum requirement that Lee, EEE ’09, says introduced her to key scientific issues.

Then, during spring break 2006, Lee participated in the Geological Excursion to Death Valley, CA, under the leadership of Nicholas Christie-Blick, professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences. “Christie-Blick is an inspiration to me,” she says. Lee describes the excursion as her first real field experience, one that expanded her sense of scientists’ involvement in the world of research.

“I was eager to bring this message to other students, especially being in the city,” Lee says.

Motivated by her relatively new environmental insights, Lee says she found information about the Eco-Reps program online and knew right away she wanted to be involved.

Lee, whose home is San Jose, CA, says she tries hard “to live sustainably instead of only working with facts and numbers.” Among her efforts, she says she takes a reusable tote bag on shopping trips and uses Tupperware instead of disposable food containers.

“I’ve also become light-conscious crazy,” she says.

When family members and close friends travel, Lee says she makes a carbon emission-offsetting contribution to Climate Care, an organization that uses the donations for sustainable energy projects. Climate Care helps a donor compute the amount of carbon emitted in a given car or plane trip, along with the amount of money needed to offset those emissions. Carbon emissions from a plane trip from New York to San Francisco and back, for example, would be offset by a donation of about $17.

Lee also spends at least four to five hours a week working with the Eco-Rep project. This semester she and co-leader Ariel Zucker are working on new educational materials.

Lee’s conviction: Environmental stewardship is “less a matter of maintenance than it is a way of life. Being environmentally sustainable has to become a default.”

Showing AND Telling

On Saturday mornings you'll often find Ariel Zucker, CC '09, on the No.1 train, a bag of composted banana peels, carrot tops and bell pepper cores in hand. Zucker's destination is the Union Square Greenmarket, where she says she delivers her bag "to a guy who collects compost from anybody."

Although her mother is a full-time volunteer who restores creeks in the San Francisco Bay area, Zucker says she "never fully realized the importance of the environment till I came to college." Like her Eco-Rep co-leader Hannah Lee, Zucker credits her growing awareness of environmental issues partly to "Frontiers of Science," a requirement of the Core Curriculum.

Because of "Frontiers of Science" and an overseas trip soon thereafter, Zucker says "I realized I really care about nature" and that poverty was often rooted in people's inability to grow food.

Her Eco-Rep involvement started just a year ago, when she says, "I was fishing around for anything environmental." She accurately describes last semester's Green Living Challenge in Wallach and Hartley as "my idea" – and a successful one it was.

The GLC was a reduce/reuse/recycle competition among the suites in the two LLC residences that was designed and monitored by the Eco-Reps with help from RAs, and sponsored by Housing & Dining.

This semester Zucker says the Eco-Reps are primarily focused on their own education on environmental issues. She and Lee have started a monthly class whose topics include water, energy and food. The class content then becomes a new chapter in an evolving training manual for Eco-Reps that Zucker says she hopes will be ready no later than next semester.

Her other activities include an effort to include graduate students and those in off-campus housing in this year's Give + Go Green project during Move Out, and collaboration with the campus environmental group EarthCo in next month's Earth Week activities.

In assessing the results of the Eco-Reps' work in 2006-2007, Zucker says "they have been very positive. People are really excited about what we're doing." But in order to progress, she says, we've got to work more on "a strong foundation by educating ourselves and then setting better and better example."