A Thursday G-chat:

Bro 1: Bro what spot we hittin’ tonight? Hula Hanks or Alchemy?

Bro 2: No clue man. I’m gettin’ my drink on in Bass tho—got some pops vod chillin in my Nalgene up in here.

Bro 1: Sick! Let’s do Hanks. Not only are beers only like two bones, but they also have organic pretzels, compostable wristbands, and their urinals are flushless.

Bro 2: Deal sealed…oh, have I added you to my new panlist yet, GreenBrosForHotChicks?

Bro 1: Dude, seriously: I might as well be the Listmaster.

Bro 2: Haha, g2g verde hombre—the babe at Claire’s just finished roastin’ my pumpkin seeds.

Truth: Another bro goes green every hour. And an even broader truth: No one knows, or really cares, what it means to “go green” anymore.

Despite its best efforts—the STEP program, Office of Sustainability, YCEI, websites, pamphlets, newsletters, speaker series, you name it—Yale still leaves students in a bit of a cloud regarding how to lead a sustainable lifestyle. Yale students are more creative in their contention than in their action on this issue. I was a STEP Coordinator for years and was often presented with the somewhat compelling argument, “Well, isn’t it your job to do that for me?” as I tried to force CFL bulbs or recycling bins. Indeed, Yale paid me 13 bucks an hour to address issues of campus sustainability that we believed could be solved through pleading emails and bribes of pizza.

A truly sustainable lifestyle will reflect value judgments far more substantial than adherence to a paper-recycling program or the proliferation of reusable mugs. The Office of Sustainability launched a program last year to help the athletics program develop and implement sustainable practices. A blurb in their newsletter last April touted a better understanding of energy usage by athletic facilities and green athletic event guidelines. They’ll use a little less water on the fields, accept slightly browner grass, and maybe plant a few recycling bins next to the dumpsters in case the throng of wasted students feels enlightened as they ditch empty handles of Dubra. I asked a football-playing friend of mine if he had heard anything about this partnership between the Athletics Department and the Office of Sustainability, and he hadn’t. Huge surprise.

One might expect that an environmental overhaul of the Athletics Department would include educating the players, effectively embedding their perspective in these decisions as the ones capable of conveying progressive action to other Yalies. Varsity athletes make up a significant percentage of the Yale population and are in intimate and respectful contact with adult authority—most significantly, their coaches. If any of the coaches are as vested in this initiative as the Office of Sustainability suggests, then they should to bring the dialogue to the student-level. Athletes are, after all, the beneficiaries of immense sums of Yale’s budget. Hipsters get the Eli-exchange bin and soccer players now cope with slightly “greener” pastures. People should know about these efforts if they are actually real.

Proper education on progressive issues empowers students to make their own decisions. Considering the overwhelming amount of information (despite mixed signals) available to Yale students, the biggest issue of campus sustainability should be getting people on campus to make the right choices. If a majority of students actually took this information to heart, they could incite real change.

With enough student support, the administration might even eliminate the hockey rink, playing fields, away games, tailgates, pools, or virtually everything about the Athletic Department that fails a cost-benefit analysis of concrete benefit to the University against environmental cost. University Athletics, however, represents cultural capital that will not likely be outplayed by environmental concerns in our lifetime, if ever. For environmentalists, the cost of cooling a hockey rink in the heat of summer is just one of those concerns.

Instead, if it is to fit into a growing discourse of environmentalism, much of what goes on at Yale must be mitigated with respect to its carbon footprint. Frankly, any “green initiative” such as the STEP program will never substantively counter the footprint of an urban research university with a 10-figure endowment. It is safe to say that the bro who goes green has spent more quality time with Thomas Friedman than his STEP Coordinator anyway.

I’m not saying that all athletes are bros. I’m also not suggesting that a bro, for whatever reason, needs to be unilaterally guided in the value judgments that inform his lifestyle choices. I’m not even suggesting that a bro is invariably a male.

I just really like the idea of a bro as a Yalie who is here to learn but also to have a good time (read: to grow as a person). As a STEP Coordinator, I was constantly reminded that not everybody wants to take the first 10 minutes of their day considering the meat they will consume, the wrapper they will chuck, the computer they open, and the essay they print—the notion that every step of one’s life here represents a fork in his or her environmentalist road.

With more media attention and resources for guidance than ever before, the reassuring fact is that taking an introspective look at your environmental impact has never been more realistic. In Amsterdam, you actually have clubs that offer organic pretzels, have solar panels, flushless urinals, and even generate electricity from springs installed below the dance floor. Enough signatures from Kappa/Q-Pac, and maybe Hula Hanks could do the same.