A Piece of History

Today it seems as if nothing remains the same for very long. We are always pushing forward, building new modernized buildings and tearing down the old, perhaps less desirable ones. Our world changes around us faster than we could ever expect, and in that rush of progress, we lose some important things along the way. By advancing our society so recklessly in an attempt to better ourselves, we lose a sense of history and hurt the environment that supports us.

In life, it is very important to know where we’re are headed, what the future holds for us. Yet, even more important than our future is our history. Sometimes we forget where we’ve come from, where we started our journey. We push forward often without taking a second to reflect on the past. The advancements we try to make in society are not always successful ones, and if we forget where we started from, how will we ever know how to get back to a better place when we screw up? The famous Spanish American philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The past holds endless power in the knowledge we can gain by remembering and learning from our mistakes. The past is wisdom. The quality of our lives can be greatly improved with a healthy knowledge of our past struggles and downfalls. We need to preserve any and all great reminders of our past, and the one such reminder is Washington and Jefferson College’s Old Main building.

Old Main the embodies Washington and Jefferson College entirely. It is a grand; an architectural masterpiece not unlike the masterful education the college bestows on its pupils. With its solid stone foundation, it has stood strong throughout the years, its two magnificent towers, representing Sirs Washington and Jefferson's namesake colleges that combined to form our illustrious hub of academia, overlook the city of Washington gracefully. The building is the centerpiece of the college itself. Those two magnanimous towers gracing the college’s logo, remain to be the most recognizable symbols on campus. The best part about Old Main is that the community of the college embraces it. Every student that attends the college will take at least one class in Old Main before they graduate. The building bursts at the joints of each wall with the history of every Washington and Jefferson student that has been there before us.

The marble floor greets me as I enter, beautiful spiraled stairways on both sides of I, and I examine the bust of Thomas Jefferson on the second floor that was the actual model for the head of the Jefferson memorial in our nation’s capital.

The great history of the building speaks to the quality of the people that have graced it as students, professors, and founders. As to our history as students, Old Main reminds us that we don’t need anything more than some desks and a chalkboard to learn. That’s all the first students here ever had to work with, but they were all successful. The process of bettering oneself relies more so on a strong desire to do so more than anything else. Old Main should be standing as long as nature will let it. Losing such a valuable piece of the college’s history would be devastating.

Fortunately, it appears that the communtiy here at W&J understands the value of Old Main and truly appreciates the building. No plans of demolishing the building have been discussed or even brought up by the college. However, renovations have been mad to the building. Although the updates that were made were relatively low scale and helped to ensure the functionality of the building, the fact that we did in fact make renovations means that there are probably more to come in the not so distant future. The prospect of such renovations or even at some point in time the destruction of Old Main, which would greatly hurt our value of history, as well as our environment, scares me. Taking down Old Main would stand to be a difficult process. The building is located right in the middle of the campus and sits directly across the street from the cafeteria and alongside both the business office and fitness center. Demolishing a building of that size would certainly cover the said adjacent buildings with a film of dust as well as possibly damage them with debris. Also, the amount of dust released into the air would greatly affect air quality on campus. The fossil fuels burned off by the machines that would be used to destroy the building, as well as those used to build the replacement buildings, would just add to the air pollution problem. Even renovations seem to be a bit troublesome. Working on a building as old as this is both costly and a bit dangerous because of the lower grade of structural standards that were held when it was built, and over time these renovations would change the look of the building and damage its historical value.



There appears to be no reason to change Old Main. Sure, the building is very old, but renovations can be made strictly for improving structural integrity of the building to increase safety, without damaging the historical value of the building. In addition, the college gets great use out of the building with the recent updates. Old Main houses numerous offices for professors and loads of Mathematics and English classes. Math and English require very little to no in class technology, so the building should be able to support such classes for years to come without any more updates or renovations. Even if a teacher decides they want to use computers for a specific activity for a class, there are always free rooms in the tech center, and there is even one computer lab in Old Main. Professors from those fields can easily get the job done on a regular basis with just a chalkboard and books. The building also serves as a home to the PAL program, a peer tutoring service for students. Old Main can serve today, and for a long time to come, as a fully functioning building, so why even think about undergoing major renovations or tearing it down.




Progress benefits our society greatly, but just like anything else of life, even though it is good, it can become a problem if we have too much of it. We tend to move forward as a society with no regard for the past, and that mindset must change if we want to survive. We need to always keep our past experiences in the back of our mind to use them as a guide for what we do in the future. The best way to do that is to keep around great reminders of our rich history, such as the shining example of Old Main. These are the types of losses that we could not afford to take as a community.

To Explain Sustain

The term “sustainability” might seem a bit long and intimidating for some people, but its meaning in itself is not all that complicated. Of course it has some connotational and ideological baggage to carry around, that may be lost or mixed up when checked, but it can all be sorted out with some patience and diligence. By simply looking it up in a dictionary, one would find that to sustain simply means to support, hold up, and/or provide for. Sustainability then refers to one thing’s ability to sustain another thing, but the problem with sustainability is that in its modern definition it is an impossible goal.

The word sustain originates from the period between 1250 and 1300 A.D. from the Archaic French word “sustenir” and the Latin word “sustinēre”, both of which mean to uphold or endure. This is still, more or less, the accepted basic definition of the word. However, in the midst of our environmental crisis the word sustainable has come to hold a much larger, grimmer meaning. In the light of our issues with fossil fuels, renewable resources and greenhouse gases, the term sustainability has arrived at its modern definition, which is a way of living that will preserve the ability of our future generations to live like we do. It is the sustaining, or upholding or enduring, of Earth and our environment in its present, fruitful state. It refers to our human society’s ability to sustain a safe way of living that will preserve the earth.

Although the environmental crisis at hand is certainly important, the word sustainability should not lose its identity to the cause. The word itself still means simply to uphold, endure, support, or provide for. When used in correlation to the environmental crisis, rather than saying just sustainability, we need to be more precise and rather specifically say environmental sustainability. Sure, it’s much longer, but it needs to be done to achieve the necessary clarity. Many times it is simple laziness that corrupts the true meaning of words. On the EPA’s website, this is how they describe sustainability: “The traditional definition of sustainability calls for polices and strategies that meet society’s present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” It should be obvious to anyone that that is in no way a “traditional” definition for sustainability. That is indeed a definition of environmental sustainability.

Unfortunately, the continued ambiguous association of the word with the environmental crisis has even given it a bad rap. Due of its close relation to the ideas of environmental damage and some other reasons I haven’t discussed yet, the concept has a rather ominous aura about it. However, one must realize that it should be exactly the opposite. Environmental sustainability is a solution, a positive stance on the environmental crisis. It is a way of living that ensures the safety of our beautiful planet, with its fully functioning, all nurturing ecosystems and natural resources. Here’s the catch. In order to completely sustain our earth in its pristine state, humans would have to live with the bare necessities our earth provides us. We would have to take only what we need and nothing more; there is no place for want and greed.

Herein lies the problem, because humans suck, and no matter what we do we will never be able to prevent people from behaving in such greedy, wasteful manners, no matter how big or small, that will eventually lead to the destruction of our environment. This simple fact is what leads to the impossible nature of perfect sustainability and in turn the negative feelings associated with it that I mentioned earlier. However, the realization that it is an ultimately unachievable goal is no reason to be so negative about it. It remains the only way to preserve our earth for as long as we can, so we need to make it a positive idea that people will support.

Fortunately, the effort to make people more aware of environmental sustainability and its benefits is being made daily by American government agencies like the EPA and other environmental groups. They actively work to educate people about the idea of environmental sustainability and work with scientists towards more efficient ways to use earth’s resources. According to the EPA, “The 1970 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) formally established as a national goal the creation and maintenance of conditions under which humans and nature ‘can exist in productive harmony, and fulfill the social, economic and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans’.”So the EPA has been working for 30 years now to spread the message of environmental sustainability to the American people in order to help us live less wastefully and help to preserve our environment.

The term sustainability has been turned into more than one concept by its close relationship with the global environmental crisis. It has become two different concepts, sustainability and environmental sustainability, which each require their own definition. Quite simply, sustainability is, and always has been, the ability of something to sustain, or uphold, endure, or support, something else. On the other hand, environmental sustainability is a strategy, policy, or way of living that is meant to preserve our ability to meet our needs, as well as future generation’s abilities to meet their needs through planet earth. It is a solution for our environmental crisis that, while ultimately imperfect, presents our best chance to preserve our earth for as long as we possibly can. As such it should carry a positive connotation, rather than the dismal undertone it carries now. Of course people associate it with environmental destruction and the end of world, but it is a way of preventing those things, or at least delaying them for a very, very long time. Environmental sustainability is our key to life.

O Beautiful for Spacious Skies…

America is beautiful, from the widespread, grassy plains of the Midwest, to the thick woodlands of the Northeast, and the vast canyons of the Southwest. There is so much natural wonder in our lands, yet most people don’t know that in our current times we are struggling to take care of it. Luckily, there are thousands of environmental groups across the nation helping to raise awareness about our environment. One of them is a locally based group, the Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds. This group works to help ensure the protection of healthy, natural water sources across the state, as well as nurse polluted waterways back to health.

The Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds (FPW) is a grant-making foundation that invests in environmental projects conducted by small and large environmental groups across the commonwealth. They currently service all projects from the Ohio border to the Susquehanna River in Eastern Pennsylvania. Essentially, they are given proposals for environmental projects by numerous organizations and then select a number of them to provide funding for. The organization has granted upwards of five million dollars directly to projects and leveraged another eighty million dollars indirectly for over 150 environmental groups working on nature conservation and pollution control projects all over Pennsylvania.

The task of keeping Pennsylvania’s watershed safe is certainly no walk in the park, considering Pennsylvania has the most miles of rivers and streams of any of the forty eight contiguous states. These environmental groups have to fight against pollution from numerous sources, including runoffs from numerous factories, refineries, waste treatment plants that produce fluids with varying levels of risk directly into natural water sources. In the United States as well as most other developed countries, these practices are regulated by the government; however, this doesn't entirely prevent pollutants from making their way into these waters. Other indirect sources of water pollution include toxins that penetrate the water supply from soil and groundwater systems that hold the remains of agriculturally used chemicals such as fertilizers and pesticides, as well as improperly disposed of industrial waste. Contaminants from the atmosphere, such as carbon emissions from vehicles, factories and even bakeries, all of which are created by human practices, enter the water sources by way of rain water.

With all these dangers that are presented to the health of the water sources in our state, we need more organizations like the FPW to step up and take action to care for our environment. No matter how big or small the effort, everyone can make a difference and help to protect the earth as we know it.