Share 'N' voice: GASO & Kirby Clean Air Act Tabling

Hi Dee Ho bloggers! What events can you attend this week to help out the environment? Theses events below are about 5 min from our classrooms, and can take less than 3 min of your time to make a difference.

With our busy life schedules of being a student, I figured that I would mention ways for everyone to get involved for environmental health on campus! Come join me in Kirby on these two separate dates listed below to show support by filling out a post card to be sent to Klobuchar, or win prizes at the Great American Smoke Out.

Wednesday the 16th
Who: MPIRG
What: getting people to call Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken with a proposed script on the Clean Air Act. 
Why: They are both have voted in favor to protect this act in preliminary voting, but they still have to vote on other measures regarding this. The battle isn't over yet, and we need to send them a clear message of what we as voters want; breaths of fresh air. I know I personally like cancer free lungs. Last week, I think we got something like 400 post cards signed? Don't quote me on that but it was a lot!

AGAIN...WE ARE HAVING PEOPLE CALL AMY KLOBUCHAR. YOU DON'T HAVE TO KNOW WHAT TO SAY....WE GIVE YOU A SCRIPT

Thursday Nov 17th is the Great American Smoke Out!
When: 11-2pm
Where: Kriby in front of book stores
Objectives:

• Get current smokers to trade in their tobacco products, quit cold turkey, and get a cold turkey sub in return.
• Educate all students about the new Campus Smoking Enforcement policy. If people are caught smoking on campus they have to pay a $25 fee and take an online moodle class on smoking and health issues. If they don't take this class they have a hold on their account. (I stopped at Doughnuts with the cops on campus today and asked them about this. They are dishing out the fees, so we're trying to spread the word to students so they can change before hand. 
• If you're not a smoker, enter your name in a drawing to win a $25 gift card to the UMD store.
• SMOKING CESSATION help!

By working with SHAC and the American Lung Association, I've learned that the people that continue to smoke on campus affect our environment more that we know. When people are smoking outside, where do they normally stand? They stand right outside the door, so the ventilation system sucks up the 4,000 chemicals they expel. They also bring in those chemicals on their clothing and skin because the chemicals don't just magically go away. They are dragging in things like arsenic, cyanide, tar, etc with them for us to breathe. As we sit in class, the people that smoke outside the door and that sit next to us are transferring chemicals to us whether we want them or not. Each time we inhale puffs of smoke or can smell the tobacco scent on someone else the toxins add up enough to count as if we were smoking cigarettes too! 

For health education, getting people to change doesn't help by getting our hate on towards the smokers. We need to motivate and encourage them to change since quitting smoking is harder to quit than heroine (proven). If they won't take the motivation they can take the fee, because 12% of students have asthma issues that get exacerbated by second hand smoke, and we all want to breathe air that doesn't have cancerous chemicals in them. 

Enforcing these policies will also cut down on pollution. When you walk outside, play the game how many cigarette butts are on the ground. If people are too afraid to smoke on campus due to fees, there's a less of a change to litter. That's the beauty of policy change.