Editor,

The article “‘Meatless Mondays’ educate students on vegetarianism” in the Feb. 24 edition of The California Aggie provides misleading information to students. It suggests appreciable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions can be achieved by not eating meat one day per week.

While this sounds like an excellent remedy, the science demonstrates that a California resident who reduces his or her consumption of animal products will have very little impact on climate change.

Much of the concern about consuming animal products comes from a UN report called “Livestock’s Long Shadow” that claimed 18 percent of global, human-caused greenhouse gas emissions came from animal agriculture. However, this was a global percentage and included land use change (e.g. cutting rainforest for grazing land) in its emissions calculations, which does not relate to U.S. agriculture.

UC Davis researchers recently published an article titled “Clearing the Air: Livestock’s Contribution to Climate Change” in the journal Advances in Agronomy. Comparing state, national and global greenhouse gas emissions data, the article concludes that all animal agriculture (beef, dairy, swine and poultry production) contributes about 3 percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. For comparison, the transportation sector contributes approximately 26 percent.

Of course, 3 percent of total U.S. emissions is still important and research is being conducted here at Davis and other universities around the country to reduce emissions, but reducing the consumption of animal products at UC Davis on the basis of lowering the campus’ carbon footprint is misguided.

A 1997 USDA report found that consumers waste at least 26 percent of edible food in the US annually. This means that for a quarter of the US food produced each year, the greenhouse gas emissions, labor and energy required to get food from the farm to the dinner plate is wasted, providing no nutritional benefit to human beings.

Once food waste ends up in a landfill, it will continue to produce greenhouse gas emissions in the form of methane. Therefore, reducing food waste at UC Davis and/or finding uses for food waste (e.g. a biomass digester to generate electricity) – rather than decreasing the consumption of animal products – are more effective options to improve the environmental sustainability of the UC Davis Dining Services.

We encourage UC Davis students and the university to keep thinking critically about the sustainability of our actions, but to always inform your decisions with science to ensure you are having the greatest positive impact on society.

SARA PLACE, MICHELLE CALVO, KIM STACKHOUSE, QIAN WANG, CLAYTON NEUMEIER and ROBERTA FRANCO contributed to this letter.

For the first time in California’s history, our state government spent more money on prisons than higher education.

It’s a shocking figure – but not a surprising one when you consider how much education is being cut: close to $800 million from the University of California and over $1 billion from the budgets of the California State University and California Community College systems combined.

As a result, tuition at our public universities has skyrocketed by over 30 percent – just as you and thousands of other students are forced to endure budget cuts, slashed enrollment, impossible waitlists and reduced course offerings.

My own parents worked as janitors so that I could be the first in my family to go to college. I know firsthand that the true spirit of California opportunity and optimism is nurtured in great schools.

That is why I am fighting to fund California colleges and universities by requiring Big Oil to pay their fair share for the oil they pump out of our state’s land and water. California can no longer afford to be the only major oil-producing state that doesn’t levy such a fee. Texas, for instance, generates $400 million for higher education through a similar fee.

My bill, AB 656, would raise up to $2 billion a year for UC, CSU and community colleges with a 12.5 percent tax on oil extracted within California. That’s considerably less than the 25 percent tax levied in Sarah Palin’s Alaska.

The fight to save higher education won’t be easy. The oil companies will tell you that they already pay enough taxes and that this bill will result in jobs lost. Yet oil companies have been experiencing record-breaking profits for the past several years. Exxon Mobile, for instance, raked in a $45.2 billion profit in 2008, the most ever by a publicly-traded U.S. company.

More money for higher education means more classes and more financial aid for you.

Momentum continues to build for AB 656. We are more than halfway to reaching our goal of organizing over 100,000 supporters, which will make it one of the most significant grassroots efforts in California’s legislative history. AB 656 has also garnered the support of the 700,000-member Courage Campaign – a powerful online network of progressive activists.

And you’ve made your voices heard by organizing some of the largest and most impassioned on-campus protests in memory. Keep putting the pressure on Sacramento by participating in one of many events taking place across the state today. Get involved – AB 656 is a simple and fair solution to funding our universities and colleges in California and it needs your support.

Please join me and over 8,500 Facebook supporters in fighting for higher education at Facebook.com/FairTuition, and join 60,000 other concerned Californians who have already signed a petition at AlbertoTorrico.com/Fair-Share-for-Fair-Tuition.

Recent hate crimes on UC campuses have evoked the need for a collective effort from our community.

Yet the initial efforts for unity have been met with some criticism from those who believe administrators and media have no business contributing to dialogue and support.

Nearly 400 members of the community attended Monday’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center (LGBTRC) town hall meeting to address the vandalism on the doors of the LGBTRC and of a Jewish resident in the dorms, in addition to hate crimes on other UC campuses.

While most of the dialogue allowed for those affected by the hate crimes to express their concerns and support their peers, several individuals felt inhibited by the presence of the media and offended by the presence administrators such as Chancellor Linda Katehi and Associate Executive Vice Chancellor Rahim Reed.

However, denouncing the media and administration contradicts the action our campus must take to prevent future hate crimes. Efforts by the media and administrators are attempts to unite and eliminate hate. They are positive, not oppositional. For example, the presence of media at the meeting enabled the constructive dialogue to reach an even larger community.

Also, the administrators present heard the concerns of those who felt underrepresented. Though simply attending was the least they could do, the discussions held may impact future policies, if not contribute to better communication between students and the university. If administrators hadn’t attended, their inaction would have been criticized as detrimental to the campus movement.

Those against the presence of administrators also felt that because of a decrease of funding to services such as the LGBTRC and the Cross Cultural Center, administrators do not have students’ best interests in mind.

However, every department is suffering from budget cuts. The LGBTRC and CCC experienced the smallest cuts of any units in the student affairs division. Both experienced a 5 percent cut from their base budgets, said Janet Gong, Associate Vice Chancellor for student affairs.

Lower cuts like this do not soften the blow of a decrease in service by any means. Indeed, these centers should be salvaged from the debilitating budget cuts, if at all possible. Yet claiming that the administration is discriminating against underrepresented groups by lowering funding is misdirected.

The majority of those active in eliminating discrimination on campus have done so by including the entire community. Their efforts help to spread an extremely encouraging message that will hopefully overshadow hate on campus. However, anger is not a component of an anti-hate movement. If an individual hopes to contribute and support those afflicted by hate crimes, that individual should not be sent away.

If you ask UC Davis student Sarah Raridon how she feels about the recent vandalism of the UC Davis LGBT Resource Center, she doesn’t mince words.

“Get fucking angry,” she advised the crowd of students at Monday’s anti-hate rally. When I asked for her input about fresh examples of bigotry on UC campuses over the last few weeks, she told me with exasperation about homophobia, “It’s not new.”

These most recent incidents may have been big enough to draw the attention of higher authorities – Chancellor Katehi, UC President Yudof and Gov. Schwarzenegger have all made statements to the effect of “plz advise: racism and homophobia are bad,” – but that does not mean they are unique. Yudof, et al, may have made their proclamations against hate, but these proclamations are in direct conflict with a system in the midst of privatizing education.

What I mean by that is, the administration has found a way to have its cake and eat it, too. By stating it has joined forces with student activist movements but allowing fees to crank up and resources to deplete, the UC administration (and the establishment itself) can say it’s on our side and still increase fees.

Vandalizing the LGBTRC is certainly shocking, but it’s not the only way to assault a community. By now you’ve heard of attempts by organizations and individuals to oppress marginalized groups with such tactics as the so-called “Compton Cookout” at UC San Diego, the appearance of a noose at the UCSD library, a swastika carved into the door of a UC Davis student and the destruction of ceramic pots in front of the Islamic Center of Davis (across Russell from campus), which happened Sunday morning.

A lot of talk about “intersectionality” has been taking place, most recently at the town hall meeting hosted Monday by the LGBTRC.

“This homophobia is very interconnected with other issues,” Raridon explained. “Systems of homophobia serve to hold up systems of racism,” and other methods of oppression, including sexism, that serve to disempower those who are not rich, white, heterosexual and male.

For all of the assurances of UC administrators and elected officials, and for all the lip service paid to such concepts as diversity, there are people who are suffering because they do not have access to the resources they need, especially in situations, like the aforementioned vandalism, that they are needed most.

The increase of fees and the cutting of programs limit everyone, but has special impact on people marginalized because of their ethnicity, sexual orientation, social class, citizenship status and financial resources.

President Yudof condemned the “Compton Cookout,” and displays like it, but what solutions has he offered? “[It’s] really an insult to everyone, especially for African American students and faculty … We just have to work harder. Some of it is working on admission, some of it is working on campus processes.”

Vague exhortations to “work harder” are not what we need; concrete promises and acts to the effect that programs and fees for the most disenfranchised will be supplied is what we need.

Hearty encouragement for the student activists is coming from every imaginable source, but the conservative nature of the establishment is not with us, as much as it claims to be. To preserve itself, it must continue to find ways to reinforce elitism, to deny access to education to marginalized populations, and to maintain the primacy of the patriarchy. While they do what they can to deflect criticism, they do little else to actually help. What are you going to do about it?

HALEY DAVIS can be reached at hrdavis@ucdavis.edu.

The arboretum. As you may know, it won two Best of Davis awards this year – most picturesque and best place to take a date, if memory serves me correctly. Right on.

Friday night found me and some friends strolling around in the arboretum with a few road sodas and a pleasant state of mind. We went out walking mainly because we weren’t feeling the bar scene, and we’d already logged a pretty good chunk of time sitting around watching Conan the Barbarian. (Props if you can tell me what is best in life.)

Anyway, we figured it’d do us good to get into the great outdoors and amble around, take in some of the crisp winter/spring night air.

We were on foot, as strolling and ambling suggests. Normally, I’m adamantly against going anywhere in Davis without my bike. I’ll turn down rides and bike to meet up with friends just in case I … I dunno, just in case I need to bike somewhere.

Maybe it’s my yearning to live in the Arizona Territory in 1881 so I can ride around with Doc Holiday, but I feel a man shouldn’t be caught without his bike or horse. (Don’t worry. I rarely carry a six-shooter.) Well, I’ll tell you now, it was a lot of fun walking along that lovely green cesspool of a river and wandering into the southern territories of the UC Davis campus.

I discovered that there are a lot of cool buildings around campus that I never see. The Mondavi Center looks awesome at night. So do the water towers – even the mathematics building. In fact, I was really impressed by the math building, and for a brief instant, I wondered if I should try to take a class there. I then remembered that I’m an English major and I have the math skills of a troglodyte. (Ask the guys I live with. I don’t do numbers.)

English majors are pretty much confined to Wellman and Olson. I spend a fair amount of time in Voorhies, too. Nice buildings, sure, but they’re nothing more than little concrete bunkers. Whenever I go into Olson, I wonder if I’m going in to try to learn something or to protect myself from an aerial raid. (I was about to make a joke about blackout curtains from WWII and the regular blacking out, but I got nothing.)

When I was in the arboretum, I was also without a cell phone. Let me take a second to describe my phone to you: It has no touch screen or keyboard, only some chipped plastic and a really short battery life. Honestly, every time I make a call longer than five minutes, I lose one of those little slices of battery power at the top of my screen.

Anyway, my phone died Friday night. I was incommunicado – and it was great, too. I know a lot of you out there have cool phones that can play Tetris and get to porn sites or whatever, but next time you’re out and about, turn your phone off or maybe leave it at home. I know that will be tough for all you CrackBerry addicts, but give it a try.

It’s quite liberating. You don’t have to worry about work, your douchebag friends or that girl you’re trying to get with calling. You don’t have to worry about anything. Not a call from the chief of police asking for your help in a sting operation or text message clues from crafty serial killers. No e-mails from the international space station reporting the approach of an apocalyptic extraterrestrial war party. Not having access to that broad universe that we’re always so plugged into puts you very much in the moment.

Give it a try. Run around Davis with some friends, howl at the moon, check out that math building and leave your cell phone at home. When I got home and plugged back in to the matrix, no one had called me anyway.

WILL LONG delivered some plants to the chancellor’s gig at the Conference Center on Tuesday. If you’re the girl from Freeborn he was talking to, hit him up at wclong@ucdavis.edu. He has something to tell you.

Everybody has that one little quirk (or six). One of my friends is convinced that high roofs will crash down and fall on her – and, therefore, is weirdly claustrophobic in food courts at malls. Another is completely freaked out by feet.

My thing is I don’t generally appreciate it when people ask what my ethnicity is upon or before even meeting me. I’m biracial – I’m like an early-generation Prius or a Brass Monkey because no one should have to choose between vodka and rum.

Maybe this hang-up sounds dumb, but the reason is it happens all the time. People can get pretty weird about it. Last year in the library, some random guy came over and more or less demanded to know what I am. He then stormed off, declaring that I was “hella rude” when I countered that it shouldn’t matter.

Another guy came over and asked my friend the same thing while she was literally on a treadmill at the ARC. The reason why they want to know is a large part of interpreting the intent behind such a question. It could be innocent curiosity, but if you’re ever so curious about someone you don’t know, at least try to exercise a little tact.

There are people out there who care more about a stranger’s heritage than their first name. Sad, but c’est la vie. It’s not that I’m immensely touchy about my ethnicity. As far as I’m concerned, I was born with just enough common sense to refrain from purchasing a Bump-it – and, thank God, a liver that will get me through the rest of college or at least houseboats. (Where I hopefully won’t be sliced and diced by the propeller under my boat like julienne fries).

Maybe people see ethnicity as vital information when drawing assumptions about you. If you knew what my parents look like, you might assume that I get good grades and roll like a boss on the badminton court. Neither of those things is true.

While ethnicity serves the purpose of providing people with a sense of identity, it also introduces the notion of segregation. Ethnic pride can be a good thing that can also, unfortunately, become a very bad thing when its ideas are taken too far. There is a fine line that must be walked between the two ends of the spectrum, and it’s often tricky.

Though most are probably aware of Obama’s multi-ethnic heritage, they choose to conveniently ignore it. He’s frequently categorized into a single race box based on the color of his skin. Pop culture would have you believing Jessica Alba is Mexican and Alexis Bledel is Caucasian. I’m sure there are a variety of reasons why people so often like to think of others in terms of race – it could be laziness or simple hesitation to defy what social constructs you were raised to echo.

That said, there’s no reason to act surprised when someone doesn’t fit into your preconceived notion of what they should be based on what you’ve been told or led to believe. I’ve encountered people in my life who refuse to believe that I am what I say I am. Oftentimes they’ll flat-out tell me that I don’t look like it. I don’t know what to say. Should I apologize for the fact that the old parental units didn’t manufacture me to look exactly like the girl from Smallville? It’s more or less inevitable that the production rate of mixed kids is only gonna go up, so those boxes asking you to “please check one” should disapparate like Bellatrix Lestrange. Because they’re stupid.

I can’t say I know what it feels like to be discriminated against, because as far as my observations carry me, I’ve always been given a fair enough turn in life. I’m not a fan of unnecessary bitching, but this is meant to be more of a reflective spiel than a frenzied soapbox rant.

Instead of trying to ethnically analyze people you don’t know, people should focus more on making the world a better place. Figure out how we can make sure every stray cat in Davis has a place to call home. Figure out how we can get that one girl in everyone’s communication class to stop trying to relate every lecture topic to her family’s 2004 fishing trip. Figure out how we can make sure Sean Paul is never heard on American radio again.

I leave you now with a quote from the one and only Derek Zoolander: “Who cares what color someone’s skin is, as long as they’re really, really, really good looking?”

MICHELLE RICK should have written this during Mixed Heritage Week, but she didn’t. She can be reached at marick@ucdavis.edu.