Manelines Editorial

Wasteful Students Contribute to Disintegrating Planet

By Josh Sales

Challenge numero uno. Can students of Live Oak High School reduce and recalibrate, based on necessity, their reliance on motorized vehicles; therefore, in turn, cut back on three separate facets including financial implements, environmental contention  and personal health habits that lead to complications such as diabetes, obesity and heart problems?

Let me put this to you in a way that you can comprehend. The world is a twisted place that is decaying every single second we’re alive as human beings for the simple fact of the choices we make to ease our own burden without a second thought as to the impact upon the Earth that we live on. Who cares though? I mean, the world isn’t going to be entirely mulled over until we’re all long past dead and our corpses have been buried in the ground, decaying in the nuclear pollution leaking into the foundation next to some cryptic burial ground that some corporation used as a backdoor to dispose of unwanted waste.

And thus we come to the challenges. A way to bring the average Joe and Jane back to the old ages and take a step back to the way the ecology around us is being treated.

So let’s be specific about the problem as it relates to Live Oak High School.

The average upperclassman at LOHS drives a total of five miles a day, to school, to lunch, back from lunch, and then finally back home. Some may only drive a total of a mile, like me, and others may drive a total of 20 miles, as is the typical case of someone driving to Gridley for lunch.

LOHS student Hardeep Mandare says that he does, “at least six miles” a school day, between all of the places he drives. 

On the average of five miles a day, times the five school days, we find that the average student does a total of twenty-five miles a school week. Given even the most modest of fuel economy cars, that’s near the total of a gallon, and in some of the older vehicles that are driving around the school parking lot, a total of two gallons of gasoline per week spent by students going to and fro between sections of their daily activities (from Yuba City to Gridley and possibly beyond that). That means that the average driving student uses a total of a gallon and a half, under the assumption that their cars are below the fuel standard prestated. Multiply that by the total number of cars (let’s say sixty) and we get 90 gallons a week for the entire entity of the Live Oak campus. Let’s round that up to 100 gallons for factors not taken into account such as fluctuation in fuel economy and distances traveled.

Finally, we multiply that by the price of gas. The average price of gas in 2008 for California was $3.36 cents a gallon (It has since come down). Multiply that by the 100 gallons that students use while driving to Burger King in Gridley, or home for some properly cooked material, and we see that the students of Live Oak High dole out a total of $336 a week. Spread that over the entire school year, and you’re looking at the LOHS student body giving $12,096 to the oil industry. That’s enough money to send a student to college for a whole year at Chico State if they find themselves staying with a relative.

And that’s only the financial side of things. We’ve yet to look at what the carbon footprint of these figures impacts.

LOHS Biology and Chemistry teacher, Christopher Rowell, even acknowledges the eventual outcomes of gasoline run vehicles.

“We don’t want to stomp out our future generations with our carbon footprint,” he said, when asked about the effects on the ozone layers and climate shifting via the overuse and abuse of gasoline by its consumers.

Providing that a student drives five miles per school day and that they attend school twenty days out of the month, their mid-sized car (21 mpg) produces a total of one hundred and ten pounds of CO2 emissions a month, and requires a medium sized tree (think the trees outside of the English wing of Live Oak High School) to offset that production every three months.

Climate change is a startling issue that will drastically change the landscape of the planet, and cutting back on driving, even by a small amount, will alter the course the human race is currently taking for forthcoming generations. 

Is this still not enough incentive to get you to walk to school and out to lunch? How about a third issue? We’ve already covered the financial and environmental reasons, but what is there to say about the personal health reasons? Say you live half a mile from the school, and would want to walk to Subway for lunch. You’re looking at an extra two miles of walking a day, a small activity that may take some time out of your schedule, but it’ll also take a few pounds off of your weight and some inches off of your stomach. A 180 pound teenage boy walking 3 miles per hour, will burn 100 calories per mile walked. Keep that in mind when you start walking out to lunch and back, knowing that you can get those slices of bacon on that burger because you’d easily walk it off getting back to school.  

So maybe you can’t walk to school, maybe you live a good mile or two away and simply can’t do it. Carpool instead. Walk all the way down N street to Pennington and have your friend pick you up on the corner. While you aren’t cutting driving out completely, you’re doing your part by cutting it down as much as you can.

In the end, when we look at all the reasons why we drive, it’s merely for convenience and hardly for efficiency. Sure it’ll take some more work to walk, but you’re going to save money, help out your children by giving them a world to live in, and probably add on a few years of life when you’re retiring in Florida, giving that we don’t flood the whole peninsula with our carbon footprint before hand. So this is my (Hopefully first) challenge to you, Live Oak High, let’s try to walk more, and drive less. Put money back in your wallets, save the polar bears in the North, and prevent your own heart attack at the age of 37.