I’m going to preface this by admitting that maybe I just came on a bad day, hour, whatever. But in all actuality, I had a thought while finding a place to sit, eat my lunch, and get caught up in life a bit. It took me ~5 minutes just to find an open seat-and it’s NOT finals week! Now sure, we’re the biggest university in the country, yada-yada, I get it. But when you look closer, the issue isn’t with number of seats-it’s with how the users of those seats take them. Sure, there are the single tweeters/facebookers sitting on their laptops, looking like they’re doing something important, but they usually keep to themselves in the individual seats to the sides of a given floor. Usually.

Then there are those that motivate this post-those that have nothing more than a laptop, maybe some snacks, sitting at a prime location for a group to sit at (think a square table)-yet they make it awkward and difficult for anyone else to take a seat at the table. Count: -3 chairs per situation like this.

So what does this have to do with sustainability? Look at the way Americans, at least, use the earth. There’s never enough of something good, and we’ll always have the resources to make those things…right? Obviously that’s not the case, but we as a country ignore this issue and instead go about our lives without a care for what’s happening. We take more than what we need, and when those that come to take what should be theirs have difficulty finding any left…well, our response is “sucks to suck.”

So like I said, maybe I’m just here at a bad time. It must be time for a class change, because the bros in sweatpants and Beats headphones and the leggings-as-pants, Starbucks-sipping sisters are filing out of this place they assumedly visit once a month out of guilt. But maybe this place could use a touch-up like the rest of the country in how to economically use what’s theirs, be it table space or natural resources.