How do you celebrate Earth Day? You were slated to go to Beijing and Washington D.C., but couldn’t. How does your typical Earth Day play out?

[For] the typical Earth Day, I might go to a couple of college campuses where I’m invited to speak, write a couple of op-eds, do a few interviews, and like a great many people, … once it is over that day, to take stock and spend a couple of hours strategically thinking. What have we done that is working? What are we doing that’s failing? What things should we try? It is a day that has come for me to assess the movement.

How can students be a part of Earth Day, celebrate Earth Day and live more sustainably?

That has an answer on two levels. One, students are genuinely in training for the world after the university, and you do that by trying to change the university much as you will later try to change the neighborhood, city or nation you live in. So that’s one thing. At the university, you want to create a context where every building that is being built at the university is as green as possible. Do anything that you can to support the creation of the College of the Environment, which will be an enormous asset at the University of Washington. Green up the place where you have the possibility for making important change. Then the second broad field is that most of the major changes that have occurred in most societies have been led by the young. The antiwar movement during my time was utterly propelled by students. Opportunities like this are rare, but when they come along, seize them.

Now for the million dollar question: What is in store for the future, and how will students affect the outcome? Is the outlook good or bad?

These aren’t somebody else’s problems. These are your problems. They are increasingly going to come to stare at you in the face. In a world that is as interdependent as ours, this stuff isn’t remote anymore. Increasingly with environmental issues, you will see it as immediately relevant to you. With immediacy people put more time and effort into changing things.

What is one way students can do something on campus for Earth Day?

Experiment with something that you don’t normally do that you might wind up doing all the time. Experiment for a day with being vegetarian or not using automobiles. Ride your bike or take a bus if you don’t normally do it.