Light Up Durham brightens faces

The UNH campus has become a little bit brighter now that the 13th annual Light Up Durham celebration is under way.

Each year, the community holiday lighting competition between UNH fraternities, sororities and Durham businesses brings a bit more cheer to Durham.

Kenneth Barrows, assistant director of operations in the MUB, has been organizing Light Up Durham since its beginning.

“Light Up Durham is intended to benefit the entire Durham community, which includes UNH faculty, staff and students, Durham residents and Durham businesses,” Barrows said. “The Durham Business Association is the group that puts on Light Up Durham every year and is very grateful to everyone in Durham for their help.”

The committee that judges the lighting competition is made up of Barrows and a handful of students.

The winner of this year’s lighting competition for the fraternities is Alpha Sigma Phi, with Tau Kappa Epsilon coming in second. The judges gave two honorable mentions: one to Alpha Tau Omega for the most lights and one to Sigma Alpha Epsilon for most creative use of lights.
The winner between all the sororities was Kappa Delta, with Chi Omega coming in second.

Among Durham businesses, the Durham Book Exchange won first place and Village Pizza came in second. The judges gave Durham House of Pizza an honorable mention.

Along with the lighting competition is the Evergreen Crafts Fair, which has been an annual event in Durham for several years. The fair brought together craftspeople from all over New England to sell a wide range of items.

To make sure all crafts were of high quality, coordinators screened all the products before selling them at the fair last week.

The tree lighting ceremony took place on Friday, Dec. 5. After the ceremony, there was entertainment on the Main Street stage, as well as a bonfire and desserts at Mill Plaza.

UNH class searches for new ways to go green

There were eight President Huddlestons in the Wildcat Den on a recent afternoon. Most of them wore jeans and many were in sweatshirts, but they were all trying to brainstorm strategies for decreasing the university’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.

These eight presidents, each played by a different student in Cameron Wake’s Global and Environmental Change class, were joined by fellow classmates representing other significant players on campus, such as the vice president of finance, energy manager, campus housing planner and transportation specialist.

The purpose of the scenario was, after three negotiation periods, to find a way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 3 percent each year for the next decade.

The negotiation, a trademark experience of the class, comes at the end of a semester spent learning the details of global climate change. The predicted effects of rising temperatures on New England’s culture and local communities include the loss of sugar maple trees and less snow for winter sports.

The groups discussed increasing telecommunications in order to decrease faculty air travel, implementing a university biking program while providing incentives for biking, carpooling or taking the bus, installing light-sensors in dorm bathrooms whose lights are usually left on all night and replacing campus soda machines with energy-efficient equivalents.

These suggestions and many more were brought to the table on Tuesday and will be considered for the end proposal. The proposal will be organized by a student facilitator assigned to each group and will be presented to the class in a couple weeks.

The University of New Hampshire released about 76,000 metric tones of carbon dioxide in the 2006-2007 fiscal year, according to the UNH Greenhouse Gas Inventory, the first university inventory of its kind. The class’s strategies, which are grounded in cost of implementation, money saved and amount of greenhouse gases reduced, must combine to total a decrease of 15,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2020.