Ryan Nelson: Students should back plans for eco-friendly LA through voting, advocacy

In college, C’s get degrees.

When it comes to county governments though, a C tends to denote a lot less accomplishment.

Which is why it must have hurt about two weeks ago when the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability issued a report that gave Los Angeles County a big, fat C+. The report, which comprehensively studied Los Angeles’ water conservation, air quality, transportation and overall quality of life, among other things basically summed up the City of Angels and its surrounding county with one word: average.

But luckily for L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti – and middling college students everywhere – ambition tends to trump GPA. One day after UCLA released the report, Garcetti unveiled the “Sustainable City pLAn” – his road map to making Los Angeles a sustainable, responsible living environment by 2050.

For once, with the unveiling of this program, it seems that something cut and dry has finally occurred when it comes to city government and sustainability – a problem has met a potential solution, with concrete pathways to hold public officials accountable. Which is why L.A. voters and residents, as well as UCLA students, shouldn’t squander this opportunity to work with a functioning government. In fact, we should embrace Garcetti’s plan as a call to action and aspire to be more involved in moving Los Angeles forward.

The most effective way we can start to do this is by voting. For the city’s last round of elections, about 10 percent of eligible voters showed. In a city of over 3 million people, only around 300,000 people went to the polls.

It hardly needs saying that 300,000 people are not enough to hold our elected officials accountable to difficult and often inconvenient sustainability goals.

Garcetti’s plan calls for projects that would be concluded far beyond his term in office. He lays out plans to reduce Los Angeles’ greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent in 2025 and 80 percent in 2050. Additionally, he wants 50 percent of Los Angeles’ water to come from local sources by 2035 – primarily through cleaning up the San Fernando groundwater basin. If these goals aren’t met, we have to be able to hold city hall accountable in some way, and voting is the most sensible way to do that.

Voting doesn’t just have to be punitive though. This city, its demographics and, sadly, even its climate, will change drastically over the next couple decades. Priorities will shift. What’s necessary then is to not only vote people out of office that aren’t meeting these goals, but to vote people into office that we expect to make the necessary changes and compromises to make sure those goals and target figures are met.

Besides voting, there are more active ways to get involved as well. The mayor has a volunteer corps that can come with some pretty big benefits – like free tickets to a Steve Aoki concert – that come at the expense of just three obligatory days of service a year.

On top of that, there’s always advocacy. Petitions and phone calls to district representatives are both an effective and easy means of saying “fix this.”

The optimism surrounding Garcetti’s ideas doesn’t so much lie in that there is a plan in place – institutions make plans all the time. UCLA has a ton of them. It’s the specificity of the plan, with benchmarks that can be used to measure the efficacy of our elected individuals, that makes this different.

For UCLA students, many of whom view their stay in Los Angeles as only temporary, the effort might not seem worth it. There are plenty of reasons to think otherwise.

First, like it or not, coming to this university means you are tied to this city for at least four years. As such, students receive the direct benefits of expanded mass transit, cleaner air and a nicer city.

Second, there’s a strong chance that a student at UCLA will stay in Los Angeles, or at least the L.A. area, after he or she graduates. In fact, there are so many alumni living in the county that the UCLA alumni network website lists seven different alumni networks that are all within the county limits.

Third, college is a breeding ground for civil and political action, and there’s no better place to begin our formal education in upsetting the status quo than by doing work that matters. While many of the goals in Garcetti’s plan are long term, there are initiatives in place to reduce per capita potable water use by 20 percent, install 400 megawatts worth of solar panels, and decarbonize our electric grid by closing down some polluting plants – all by 2017. They’re ambitious initiatives ripe for ambitious students.

It’s understandable that a lot of people would feel disassociated from the political process here in Los Angeles – preceding Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa promised a subway to the sea and got swept up in cheating and corruption scandals, traffic continues to get worse and a lot of us just sat through a $1 billion freeway expansion that didn’t end up alleviating congestion.

But being that cynical is too easy. Garcetti, to his credit, has offered a litany of solutions to some very real environmental problems. It’s not something that seems to come around very often these days. So for once, it’s better to shake off some of that cynicism and actually give your district representative a call.