The Mission....

It was unsettling, descending for the first time into the dark world of the Grainger Basement. I didn't know what to expect. Sure, the staircase was still its jolly yellow color and the sconces mounted on the bright blue walls or inset into the ceiling did just as fine a job lighting my way as the daylight from 20-ft windows...and yet...it seemed darker, and my footsteps echoed on the narrowing, empty stairs. Tall, stern bookshelves arose in front of me, as did hallways bathed in twilight extending to either side.

On a whim, I chose the left fork, exploring tentative step by tentative step, until a bright light at the end of the hallway drew my eyes. "Engineering Workstations" proclaimed the sign bolted to the wall by a set of glass double-doors. Inside...

Inside, I found easily fifty dual-screen machines, over half of them in use by students. Upon logging in with my usual ID and password, I found them running GNOME and chock full of software--Firefox, Pidgin, Matlab, ProE, Mathematica...anything an engineering student could want!

Quickly and easily*, I accessed Gmail and printed my homework set. Mission accomplished!

(*actually, it initially got lost in a stack of someone else's printed papers, so I had to print it twice...and of course as soon as I printed the second, I found the first *roll eyes* but that wasn't really the lab's fault.)

Green Living!

After being in Champaign a week, I feel like I'm in one of those mythical "green towns." No, it's not perfect by any means, but in what I consider a "small" city (Champaign and Urbana have a joint population just over 100,000) it is amazing how many "green" developments there are.

The moment it hit me, I was biking into school when I passed under the train tracks with an Amtrak whooshing by overhead; how much stereotypical does it get?

Other signs include an efficient and widely used fleet of buses (some of them hybrids!), prolific farmer's markets, solar trash compactors at the university, and bike racks everywhere, for example by the supermarkets and apartment buildings.

Like I said, it's not perfect. There aren't many bike lanes, although on the smaller and less-used streets this isn't much of a problem. Many of the buildings--both campus and residential--are old and therefore did not consider resource efficiency in their design. There are no solar-panel or wind-turbine roof-mountings that I've seen; but there is a recycling program.

I also realize that "green-ness" isn't the reason most use public transportation. On the small streets near the university during rush hour...it's hell to navigate with a car, and if the time difference in your commute is around 5-10 minutes between driving and taking a bus...better save those $400 and not buy a parking pass. For many, a $100...even a $300 bike is cheaper than a $10,000 car. It's simple economics...

And yet...maybe the fact that it's easier to get around with bikes and buses than with a car in this town is a good sign? Maybe that's what we should aim for--not getting people to be green in spite of the competition, but because it's the easy or economical thing to do? That's a kind of "green" movement I can believe in.