Department staff members step up, take on sustainability issues

By Rachel Zak

College students who are experiencing the effects of sustainability issues firsthand, not only on the climate but also the next generation’s future, can feel hopeless at times. Though it may seem as if small actions do not make a difference, they are far more important than we realize.

“Though it can be kind of overwhelming as a student to think ‘I'm 19 years old and the climate crisis is happening now,’ it's good for students to be able to band together and find a way to shoulder that burden together,” says Britni DeZerga, Graduate Program Coordinator for Florida State University’s English department. “I see the importance in individual actions, and I do feel like our actions truly mean something and have ripple effects.”

DeZerga and Victoria Hopkins, the English department’s Academic Support Assistant, recently attended FSU’s Global Conference on Sustainability in Higher Education. The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability organizes the annual conference, which took place online Oct. 18, Oct. 26, and Nov. 3. To read more about the conference, click here.

“The people who spoke had a lot of passion and had a lot of research behind what they were saying,” Hopkins says. “It was incredible. The variety, too—one of the speakers was an astrophysicist.”

Hopkins and DeZerga both became involved with the English department’s “green office team” through the invitation of Clare Harrison, the department’s former business manager and a Green Office Advocate. Sustainability issues have always been important to the three of them, but they struggled to fit making a bigger difference into their daily work schedule.

“I’ve always tried to have my own small ways of ‘being green,’ like reducing printing where I can and using FSU’s DocuSign system, but I never had time at work to dedicate to sustainability,” DeZerga says, discussing her effort in sustainability before joining the office’s team.

In the fall of 2019, the department earned a high enough grade from FSU’s Green Office Certification Program to qualify as a Gold office. The green team has continued to take on many initiatives over the past few years.

These activities include, among others, collecting plastic rings from cans and bottles and then mailing them to be recycled, reducing the amount of paper use in the English department, collecting batteries to recycle, and a clothing drive for the ProfessioNole clothing closet, which was tied to World Water Day on March 22.

“Because the clothing industry is such a huge water usage industry, and there's a lot of significant waste in the production of textiles, we collected clothing to donate to the professional closet on campus, which directly benefits students," DeZerga says.

Conference speakers discussed various issues surrounding sustainability. With the theme of “The Urgency is Now,” discussions covered topics on how students specifically can assist in the essential need for sustainability.

"There was a huge mix of topics that are also intersectional in their nature,” DeZerga says. “They were talking about environmentalism but also talking about how it affects people in different socioeconomic classes differently.”

Students are like the 'conscience of the university.' They've sort of got their fingers more on the issues that are affecting them—that are going to affect the rest of their lives.

— Victoria Hopkins

Both DeZerga and Hopkins says the issue of sustainability extends past just college campuses, and the real problem lies in holding big corporations accountable. In the past few years, students have taken the initiative to do this by withholding business from certain companies that are not sustainable or ethical.

Hopkins says that one aspect from attending the conference that stuck with her is how students are like the “conscience of the university.”

“They've sort of got their fingers more on the issues that are affecting them—that are going to affect the rest of their lives,” she says. “They're almost in a position to be able to take more risks and take part in more activism. The students are a really good way for staff members to be connected to the grassroots movement.”

The workshops she attended were informal, Hopkins adds, more like a round table of people talking about the challenges and the tensions that can come up when someone is doing sustainability work in an office.

“They had it set up very interactively using online tools where you could anonymously answer questions during the session,” Hopkins says.

Rachel Zak is an English major on the editing, writing, and media track, with a minor in humanities.

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