The Legacy of Slavery
The wealth gap and continued segregation of African Americans is the legacy of centuries of exploitation by white Americans.
Category: Student Life
Prize for Food Bike Big Idea: Low Capital, Low Footprint Alternative to Food Trucks
The Food Bikery seeks to prove that food bikes are a safe, legal, low-capital, and low-footprint alternative to food trucks.
ERG Talent Show 2014
Hosted by the 2013 cohort, this year’s ERG “Too Much” Talent Show features the Back of the Envelope skit, creative video making, dancing and sax playing, ERGie paper dolls, a ton of selfies and ends with a big, fat Bollywood finale.
How does one jump-start a movement?
…in a way, Professor Robert Reich has been trying to do so for his entire career.
Divestment: I call it Fossil Fuel Graduation
“If it’s wrong to wreck the climate, then it’s wrong to profit from that wreckage,” Bill McKibben Though I had been living in Berkeley for two years prior working at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, when I enrolled in the ERG Master’s program this fall, I looked for additional ways to get involved in the Berkeley community as a student, not as a scientist. Fossil Free Cal was one club that immediately…
Azadi
Last week, I went down the timeline on Facebook to check my first post ever. The three words I wrote to describe my feelings read ‘waiting for azadi’. Freedom in Urdu, azadi has come to signify the sum total of aspirations of millions of people in my homeland, Kashmir, a valley perched up in the western Himalayas near India and Pakistan. In my second post, I spell out some of…
Beauty in Numbers
I always liked math, but I didn’t start to love it until I moved from Mexico to the U.S. at the age of 9. I had been so used to excelling in every subject in Mexico that submerging in a new school with a new language that I was just beginning to understand left me feeling defeated. I clung to the safety of multiplication tables and long division like I…
What I Got From Lean In
I read “Lean In” by Sheryl Sandberg recently. It’s basically a collection of tips for women who work in male-dominated professions. I’ve always been in male dominated fields, and I could really relate to many of the situations she described. I’m glad that she brought up that in many cases, your own prejudices and insecurities work against you to make the experiences even more negative than they otherwise would have…
Where the Rubber meets the Road
This is a short story about riding bikes with kids, and more specifically about the challenges of making good transportation decisions as a parent. Being a professional energy geek makes me acutely aware of the resource implications of personal choices, and one of the most important is how you decide to travel around town. Over half the greenhouse gas emissions in Berkeley are from cars and trucks. We all want…
Future (Climate) Change Agents – What Inspired Me Most at EDF Climate Corps Training
A few weeks ago, I joined more than a hundred other students in San Francisco for the sixth annual EDF Climate Corps Training event. I had no idea what to expect over the five days of intensive energy efficiency training. What I found were hours of fascinating conversations with people who are just as passionate about energy efficiency and sustainability as I am — not to mention a group…