Pioneer LogLewis & Clark College’s Student-Run Newspaper
Opinion and Editorial
Click the links below to read this week's editorials. Older issues can be found in the archive.
September 17I’m full of pet peeves like a dictionary is full of words, but you know what really grinds my gears? Professors who stress to me the importance of being on time to class and then follow that up by letting class out late.- September 17While what I witnessed this week has been much more reassuring than displeasing, I still believe that this new dormitory is likely to be a profoundly bad idea. I suspect that a large number of students would agree with me in this, but the administration only knows the opinions that students take the time to tell them.
September 10It used to be that students could pay an optional $20 annual fee toward offsetting Lewis & Clark’s carbon footprint. According to the LC website, about 95% of the student body at the College of Arts and Sciences opted to pay that fee. This year, however, the payment has been increased to $85 and is no longer voluntary, meaning that if one does not opt out of paying the fee, one will be charged automatically.
The green energy fee goes toward the purchase of Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), which allows electricity from renewable sources (wind, solar, etc.) to compete on the national grid with traditional energy sources like coal and nuclear. The problem with RECs is that purchasing them does not mean that the energy we use is 100% green, but rather that the energy we use is guaranteed to be resupplied into the grid in the form of green energy. So, though we pay an $85 fee, the electricity we use mostly comes from nonrenewable sources.
September 10I was walking around Portland the other day, when suddenly that craving for a cancer-stick blind-sided me right in the middle of the street. There I am, in downtown Portland, surrounded by hipsters and their American Spirits, hippies and their rollies, and all the other urban cultures of Portland sucking down smoke. My heart began to flutter as I realized that I saw no green umbrellas nearby, and had no place to smoke! The greater Portland area has not been warned that we need DSA’s! Where is the Dolphin Sex Afterparty?
September 10It’s almost as if all that oil down there in the Gulf has simply disappeared. Never mind the new reports of about three quarters of it having dissipated, been siphoned off or chemically remediated, or the assurances from the White House to Louisiana and other coastal states that there will probably be no long term damage; I’m thinking about the slick at its peak that embodied our panicked collective conscious during most of this summer. Quickly rising to the status of the worst environmental disaster in history, the Deepwater Horizon explosion of BP’s oil rig has consumed the media, our president, and a large swath of the Gulf of Mexico for a frenetic three-month glimpse into what could be our environmental future.- September 10Standing shoulder to shoulder, steadfast in purpose and song, the cast of the musical RENT invites the question: How do you measure, measure a year? Daylights and midnights? Sunsets or cups of coffee? Why not frequent and costly lawsuits brought forth against the Oregon Secretary of State? It is election season, and the office responsible for the acceptance or rejection of hard-fought petition sheets and ballot initiatives must certainly expect to see their name imprinted upon innumerable complaints of declaratory and injunctive relief. As one suit is dropped, so another materializes from the political periphery, this time concerning an ostensibly invidious rule change in the November election cycle. Whereas Oregon law stipulates that the “name” of candidates and political parties must be printed upon the ballot, only abbreviations of political parties will be printed next to the candidates names on the ballot this November.
- September 10Hello, New Student Orientation, did ya miss me? I’m back for orientation round two. Unfortunately, not much has changed. Don’t know anyone, couldn’t find my way to the student center if my life depended on it and I’m clutching my orientation schedule like it’s a life vest.
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