Last quarter, ASUCD passed Senate Bill #46, requiring that this year’s budget proposal will have to cut around $50,000 in anticipation of potential future deficits. On top of thinking of ways how to cut $50,000 from the budget, ASUCD also will need to come up with an additional $36,000 if it decides to restore a paid membership with the University of California Student Association (UCSA), as ASUCD president Mariah Watson has stated she will do to attempt to improve student representation at the state level.

UCSA is a coalition of student representatives from across the University of California system that advocates on behalf of all UC students to officials at the State Capital, UC Office of the President and UC Board of Regents. UC Davis has not been a member of UCSA since 2006 and is currently one of only two UC campus not to permanent members of the association, with UC Irvine being the other. However, this January, UCSA granted ASUCD a membership fee waiver that will expire in May, so UC Davis is currently a member of the organization.

Once the waiver period expires, if ASUCD decides to rejoin UCSA, our student government will be on the hook for $36,000 annually to fund its membership. Membership costs go to salaries of career UCSA staff, travel expenses and other logistical costs.

However, ASUCD cannot simply pass a fee initiative to explicitly cover UCSA costs, as designed by the ASUCD executives in 2006. That year, ASUCD senate voted to change the bylaws to state that the association may not pass fee initiatives to join external organizations. Therefore, the money would have to come from current ASUCD fees, likely at the expense of cutting units and/or their funding. There are 26 ASUCD units, including the CoHo, Unitrans and The Aggie.

The Editorial Board hopes that ASUCD rejoining UCSA will not come at the cost of cutting ASUCD units. Advocacy is necessary and important, but $36,000 is a lot of money, especially for an association already looking for funds, to spend just for a seat at the table.

We believe that ASUCD should first seek to serve its units, as we understand the many benefits that students reap from belonging to and working for units. ASUCD facilitates a learning experience for students that cannot be found elsewhere, allowing students to develop experience and skills in a multitude of fields.

UCSA does important work. It allows for UC student governments, who represent students across the cultural and socio-economic gamut at different campuses, to have a voice in UC and state politics. Because we also understand that ASUCD is fairly set on becoming a permanent member of UCSA, we beseech the ASUCD executive team and its advisors to be innovative with next year’s budget. We understand that units are the backbone and lifeline of the association, and we encourage the executive team and senate to find ways to effectively merge units and/or redistribute funds in order to efficiently and responsibly hold together ASUCD units and avoid unit cuts. Additionally, we believe that the UC Davis administration could also help subsidize the UCSA membership fee, validating the administration’s primary role to serve UC Davis students.

While the timing of the decision to rejoin UCSA is far from ideal from a fiscal standpoint, we understand ASUCD’s desire to give UC Davis representation and a voice in UC and state politics. Additionally, we trust Watson and ASUCD to be mindful and resourceful with the budget. Advocacy is important, yes, but not at the expense of student services that ASUCD currently provides. If UC Davis students can gain access to advocacy but also still keep access to the resources and opportunities that ASUCD allows students, the student body and community is better off. We hope that our student government can rise to the challenge.

Designed by Jennifer Wu

Growing up in the United States, you were more than likely taught and maybe even scolded by your parents, grandparents and other authority figures to drink milk. They all probably told you that milk has calcium and probably emphasized that milk consumption is necessary for building strong bones. But is milk really the best source of calcium? And does calcium really encourage bone strength and help to prevent osteoporosis? And if so, how much calcium do we really need to consume? These questions adequately encompass the common misconception that milk is the best source of calcium and prevents bone damage.

Spinach and Kale Have Calcium?

Calcium sources are out in nature and milk is merely one. Plant-based sources such as spinach, kale and other dark leafy greens as well as legumes also contain substantial amounts of calcium. Unfortunately, few people are actually aware of this information. Milk seems to dominate common calcium discourse. Perhaps this is because people tend to believe it is either the only source of calcium or that it is the best source of calcium. However, you can get your required intake of calcium from vegetables or fortified drinks such as orange juice or soy milk.

In addition to this, there are reasons that highly suggest milk might not be the best source of calcium. First of all, there are a number of individuals who are lactose intolerant, which means that the consumption of dairy products causes them problems like cramping, bloating and diarrhea. Milk is also not very heart-friendly because it is so high in saturated fats. Essentially, saturated fats compromise the proper functioning of your cardiovascular system by raising blood cholesterol levels, which increases your risk of heart complications. The majority of saturated fats consumed by the general population come from animal products such as red meat, cheese, milk, etc. One important thing to note is that calcium is not the be-all, end-all for bone strength. Vitamin D and regular exercise are just as important for building strong bones.

Where does milk even come from?

Along with the health concerns of milk consumption, there are also ethical concerns. That is, where the milk is actually coming from is hardly ever questioned. It is hidden, ignored or deemed unimportant. We know milk comes from cows, but that is usually about as much as people are aware of.

Generally, people don’t know how the cows are treated, how the cows are milked or how the cows are bred. The cows are not treated as carefully as we would like to imagine. They’re not groomed and fed nutritious food — they’re kept in small environments and are fed whatever hastily fattens them up. The cows are inseminated and then have their calves taken away at birth to either be raised to produce milk if they are female or to produce beef if they are male. They may “just be animals,” but so are the animals we keep as pets. Why should sentient beings be hierarchized? What makes a dog or a cat inherently better than a cow? It may be argued that it is the “circle of life,” and yet most people would cringe at the thought of butchering the meat they consume. The aesthetically pleasing packaging erases what actually occurs.

It is unclear why this information on milk is not widely dispersed. This information might not be in the favor of large corporations, which profit off of the widely held conception of milk as a vital source of calcium. Dairy farms and companies would lose money if more people were aware of other calcium sources and the ethics behind their practice.

Swap Milk For Veggies

You may be thinking so what. So what if milk is not that good for you—lots of things are not “good” for you, right? You would not be wrong in thinking that. However, the point of this is not to make individuals feel wrong for consuming milk nor is the goal necessarily to make readers feel obligated to give it up. The point, instead, is to encourage readers to be more conscious of the health information that is popularly accepted and practiced. Ultimately, I hope to leave readers questioning the objectivity of so-called facts. So ask yourself this, why do you consume milk? Is it to build strong bones? Is it because you heard it on the news, read it on some website, or because someone told you to? If your overall concern is receiving an adequate amount of calcium, then I suggest you look beyond the dairy aisle and open your horizons to the wide variety of plant-based foods that offer the same source minus the saturated fats and indigestion.

If debunking, debating and questioning the “man” is in your repertoire please feel  free to contact Tiffany Marquez at  tmmarquez@ucdavis.edu.

Graphic by Tiffany Choi.

With the growing trend of disgusting rapists, and the increasing movement to stop disgusting rapists, the Obama administration has made it it their mission to educate us about disgusting rapists. The articles of legislation, including the California Assembly Bill 1088 and the Federal Violence Against Women Act, require college campuses to teach incoming students about issues relating to sexual assault, consent, dating/domestic violence, risk reduction strategies, bystander intervention, reporting options and survivor resources. UC Davis, therefore, uses the Violence Intervention & Prevention (VIP) program, transferred to an online program this past year, to both follow legislative orders and ensure that all students attending UC Davis are educated on this topic. And within the past few weeks, freshmen received emails requesting feedback about the VIP program. Here’s mine:

“When I went through those required videos at the beginning of the school year, I personally found them extremely impactful. Those powerful words spoken – by my suitemate as she explained her outfit dilemma to me while my computer was on mute – really resonated with me. And those quizzes at the end, they truly put my Google searching abilities to the test.  I think I might have even accidentally read one of the questions as I was copy-pasting it into my search bar. Call me crazy, but I would even go so far as to say that with the VIP program, I learned as much about sexual assault as I learned about driving from Driver’s Ed.”

But in all seriousness, I knew squat about what was in those videos. My friends, neighbors and classmates knew squat about what was in those videos. Yet here we all are, walking around campus as “educated individuals” according to Davis, Obama and anyone else with a knack for lying to themselves.

How were we supposed to care about preventing ourselves from something too terrifying to seem realistic? If you made me watch a video called “Mosquito Bite Intervention and Prevention,” before I went camping, I’d probably take diligent notes. Because yes, I do want to prevent myself from getting a painfully itchy mosquito bite, and everybody talks about how easy it is to get bitten when you’re in nature.

But nobody talks about how easy it is to get raped when you’re in college. Nobody looked me in the eye and said, “This can happen to YOU.” So nobody cares about the Violence Intervention & Prevention program because nobody has been taught to understand rape as something that actually happens. It’s a terrifying thought, of course, but it’s not doing us any good to pretend that it doesn’t happen. It does happen and it happens here, at Davis – to my friends, my loved ones, to me. So I can tell you, from personal experience, that the emotional and physical trauma of rape stings a hell of a lot more than a mosquito bite.

When I went back to watch the VIP program this weekend, this time not on mute and not while simultaneously painting my nails, I learned a few things. I learned that “prevention” isn’t necessarily for the person getting raped. No, the real prevention lies in the hands of everybody else. It lies in our power, as a culture, to prevent ourselves from unknowingly invalidating a victim’s feelings about their devastating experience. It lies in our power to prevent ourselves from traumatizing somebody just as much as his/her rapist did. And this powerful prevention – it lies in the 10 minute video we were too lazy to watch.

The video addressed common phrases said to victims, like:  “Oh, it wasn’t THAT bad, I mean he did love you,” “Well, you were really drunk so it was kind of your fault,” “Are you sure you want to report him? It was only bad for you for one night. It’ll be bad for him for the rest of his life. How could you do that to him?” and, “You wanted to do things before, so how was he supposed to know you didn’t then?” I know these sound like stupid, overused examples, but when your own friend, your own suitemate says them to you – out of nothing but sheer ignorance – they don’t sound so stupid anymore.

By educating ourselves about rape, we’re not “protecting ourselves from getting raped.” Terrible things happen and, as much as we might try, we can’t hide from all of the monsters that live in our closets. But we can understand what behavior is and isn’t OK. We can learn to talk about rape more openly and learn to support those who need our help the most.

I don’t know how to make people aware of our rape problem any more then the VIP program does. If I did, I would be a genius. I’m not. I’m just a girl who once couldn’t help but laugh at the terrible acting in those mandatory videos, and now can’t help but cry at their painful reality. I’m a girl who needed a horrible experience to want to deal with the issue of rape in our campus and our world — but you can be a person who just needed an extremely blunt article to want to deal with it too.

Like her bluntness? Contact MADDY PETTIT at mepettit@ucdavis.edu.

Graphic by Jennifer Wu.

As the humble ambassador of the great outdoors, in this column I am compelled to break from my usual style to call attention to two significant occasions coming up. One is the 177th birthday of great American environmentalist John Muir on April 21 and the other is Earth Day on April 22. Both are crucial to American environmental history, and here I’d like to say a few words about that history and why we as the students of UC Davis should care.

John Muir, as many of you know, was a mountaineer and naturalist whose deep love of the Sierra Nevada led him to become the grand champion of the first American environmental movement.  After coming to California in the late 1860s, Muir spent decades in the Sierras exploring their mountainsides and studying their ecology. Amidst the snow-capped peaks and rushing waterfalls, he found glory and grace he couldn’t help but see as divine.  Through books and journals in which he infused ecological observations with religious passion, Muir became the prophet of a new understanding of our relationship with nature.  Land had until then been known only as a resource to be exploited, but the poetry and heartfelt emotion of Muir’s words inspired Americans to see it as something worthy of protection and respect. It was an awakening of our ability to care about the environment beyond our immediate self-interest; thus began environmentalism.

Over the decades that followed, this philosophy developed into two camps. Those who took a more pragmatic, sustainability-focused approach to natural resources called themselves conservationists, while those who like Muir saw the land as intrinsically valuable became known as preservationists. With the exception of things like the early national parks, both groups were largely unsuccessful as policy-makers; conservationist policies were too piecemeal to be very useful, and the idealistic preservationist goals were often too extreme to gain traction. As suburban and urban development brought environmental issues to a crisis in the ’60s, however, it was clear that the earth needed immediate help. Both sides rallied together, and the combination of conservationist practicality with preservationist vision soon began winning policy victories. In 1970 Earth Day was established to raise awareness for environmental matters, and the ensuing public concern led to the Clean Water, Clean Air and Endangered Species Acts, huge policy victories which remain keystones of environmental legislation to this day.

But what does all this history have to do with us? The answer to that begins with the little-known fact that Earth Day’s date was chosen for its suitability to college students. April 22 was deemed to be sufficiently distant from finals, midterms and holidays for educators to be able to hold teach-ins about the environment and have the largest possible impact on the student body. Implied in this prioritization is the idea that the power to effect change lies in the hearts and minds of young adults like us. I think this is right; we are the ones who the world hasn’t beaten, who still have in us the will to care.

Here in Davis today, we don’t use plastic bags, recycling bins abound and we love our bicycles. No one could accuse Davis of being a bad place to be an environmentalist. But in conversations with friends and in articles I read, I see that on the macro level, we environmentally-minded students face a crisis of confidence. While the global reality is arguably even direr than it was in the ’60s, our hope for comprehensive environmental legislation is constantly discouraged by oil-controlled politics and congressional gridlock. It’s hard to imagine major changes coming when we, the changers, are confronted with a system that threatens to deny and defeat us at every turn.

I would like to submit, however, that our chief obstacle is our pragmatism. Like the conservationists, we are preoccupied with small victories; what is likely, what is politic, what is safe. But this preoccupation comes from the fact that although we know intellectually what we’re fighting for, we don’t know it.  We’ve forgotten the impetus, the root of our passion. To truly know our purpose, we have to listen as John Muir did to the sweet, wild call of the mountains. Truly caring about the environment comes from connecting with it and finding what it really means to us. Through this, we can rediscover what grounds our environmentalism and put our souls back into what we believe in.

So just as it can help restore balance to our understanding of ourselves, our connection with nature can help restore balance to our understanding of the world in which we live. When we try to help in the world, we don’t have to be enslaved to pure pragmatism; there is a living spirit that can give us hope and help us fight if we let it. From the time of John Muir to the ’60s to now, the environment has been and will always be something worth caring about; this Earth Day, I hope all of you can go outside and remember why.

Look up, look out, look around; caring is in our nature.

If you have any questions or comments, want to get more in touch with nature, or just want a down-to-earth chat (I promise I don’t always talk like this!), feel free to contact me, Nick Jensen, at njensen@ucdavis.edu.

Graphic by Sandra Bae.