The university at which I’m now in my second week of attendance held its annual Green Day Fair this week, so I stopped by the student union to see what kind of action was underway. Days earlier, I had spent a little time online researching my school’s reputation in fields other than my own. It’s apparently a worldwide leader in environmental science, one of the earliest and most forward-thinking in climate studies, and basically a poster-child for one of my most recent Queercents posts by way of its active role as an institution with a complex relationship to both the environment and its students.

The university is actively changing its demands within the energy economy. There was some interesting information available at the fair, both about the school and the responsibility of the individual.

The energy emitted by a traditional incandescent tungsten light bulb is about 5% light and 95% heat. So, if you live in a climate where the summer months boil and are still using the archaic bulbs, your light bulbs are affecting the portion of your electric bill attributed to air conditioning in addition to your lighting. The newer energy-efficient bulbs are definitely more expensive initially but last anywhere from 8 to 15 times the length of the old school bulbs, creating an obvious long term savings. Greenpeace was of course on campus with a Seize the Light Brigade Campaign.

Last week, the UK’s Environment Secretary announced a plan (although still categorized as voluntary) to gradually remove all high-energy bulbs from the market by 2012. Other countries have proposed similar measures, and the U.S. senate joined the fight this month with a bill that proposes a phase-out of the old bulbs by 2014 that could potentially save Americans $6 billion a year in electricity costs. The house has passed something similar.The weight of the responsibility is, however, for the present time, being left to the individual. A BBC reporter, Matt Prescott, has launched a campaign to “save money and help the environment by using energy efficient light bulbs.” His website, http://www.banthebulb.org/, lists campaign goals and tracks worldwide progress.

The University of East Anglia already has one self-sustaining building on campus, one in all the energy used in the building is created in the building. Still in the planning stages, the university has designed one of the greenest power plants in the UK which will implement the gasification process for its electricity and heat generation. This basically means that the campus could be run on woodchip biomass within the next decade, inducing a carbon emissions savings of 42%.

One Green Day booth that caught my attention was the Campus Sustainability Initiative which has established the “Sustainability Initiative Fund” which aims to provide “interest free capital for projects that will make the university campus more sustainable.”

The initiative was modeled after a similar one at the University of California in Santa Barbara and is currently working as an organization toward making the University of East Anglia into a Transition Town. Transition Towns are apparently springing up worldwide and are indicative of a movement at city and even smaller institutional levels to take on the climate change challenge regardless of national movements and legislation.

Also at Green Day — and probably the booth I spent the most time at – was a very enthusiastic and demonstrative promotion for the Mooncup, the ever-more-popular reusable, silicone menstrual cup. Now, I’m not yet sold on this item. I understand that, ideally, I should be. It makes the greatest of environmental sense, and it’s seems like it might be better for the body in theory. I was grateful for the opportunity to take one step closer to actually accepting it as a feasible alternative. The woman at the booth did assure me that tampons, despite their long list of potentially dangerous ingredients, may be safe to use; but then she brought up dollar signs. A menstruating person really only needs to own one Mooncup (by the way, horrible name) — or the latex alternateve The Keeper — but the average female-bodied person will buy a minimum of 10,000 tampons and/or pads in a lifetime. The waste is obvious. The Mooncup (I can barely type it, it’s such an ugly name) or Keeper costs around $40. Ten thousand tampons will cost around $1500, depending on your brand and absorbency preferences. That’s an enormous savings. Invest that instead of buying tampons, and it could turn into much more over the course of a menstrual lifetime. I almost have my mind wrapped around it.

So, although I had to borrow a plastic bag from the bookstore to carry all of my Green Day literature home on my bicycle, I was extremely pleased to discover the work that one community could offer to the necessary and massive worldwide shift in the energy economy.