Deforestization

Once again, this school commences deforestization.

It has occurred once before, back when I lived in James, when they were building a parking lot. One morning the forest was there, the next it was completely gone. The stench of freshly killed trees lingered for a week. Yes, even trees’ corpses have smells.

Here, in the Undergraduate Apartments, it begins again. The first telltale sign was when they posted up a sign on the front door, saying that any cars parked along a certain area would be towed. Spring Break came and went. I parked my car the night I came back, and noticed that there were a lot less trees where there used to be. I also saw lots of construction vehicles on top of flat areas that did not exist before. But it was only this morning, when I looked out the window and saw a few trees near the parking lot, a lot of trees very far off in the distance, and nothing in the middle, did I realize the magnitude of this massacre.

Yes, massacre. For this school to make more money, it destroys so many trees around here. For more students to be able to live here, so they can more conveniently be ripped off on their meal plans and books. Suddenly, all those earthworms, rabbits, sparrows, and stray cats have no place to live. They are forced to migrate to other parts because the human virus has spread.

It’s a disgusting fact — schools are not educational institutions, they are businesses. SUNY Stony Brook, for example, is gradually moving away from being a state university to being a private school so they can no longer be shackled by SUNY’s limits on how much they can charge students. Hence the gradual shift of their web site from being at sunysb.edu to stonybrook.edu, and their insistence on replacing all references of SUNY Stony Brook to Stony Brook University.

FIT’s scholarship money was used to pay for their president’s penthouse renovations. Meanwhile, FIT’s students suffer from high living expenses in New York City, having less scholarship money, and being forced to use worn-out supplies.