The Need for a Sustainable Student Center

“The new center will be situated on the current location of Merrill and McGuire,” reads an Oct. 30 email sent by President Biddy Martin to the college community. To many, this line of the email probably wasn’t noteworthy. However, it filled me with distress. We have known that the college plans to convert the former Merrill Science Building into a student center. What troubled me was the assumption that McGuire needs to go too. Without student input or sharing the rationale behind tearing down M

Let’s Talk Trash at Amherst

Every day, our campus community disposes of thousands of single-use items from dining services, according to Director of Dining Services Joe Flueckiger. Although we don’t see the genetically modified corn that goes into our compostable Grab ‘n Go containers, or the mountains of our recycled plastic bottles exported to communities across the globe, we are implicated in these processes. As a community, it is time that we recognize our complicity in an ecologically and socially harmful global wast