Half-full green carts in the cafeteria and courtyard already speak to the program’s impact. Before the arrival of the composting program, all that organic material would have been sent to the landfill to rot unproductively for eternity. Now it will help produce new life.

Months of intensive coordination brought the “green cart” system to campus. But all this effort will go to waste if students don’t recognize the importance of composting, according to SF Environment education manager Tamar Hurwitz. “It’s not going to work just because I show up,” she said. “It’s going to work because students choose to do the right thing.”

Composting is just one of many everyday choices individual students can make to help alleviate problems like world hunger and global warming. (See story on the last page for more ideas.) Global population is expected to increase by a third in just 25 years, creating that many more undernourished families in the world’s poorest countries. At the same time, viable cropland is shrinking because of soil depletion and erosion.

Composting helps restore the planet’s natural recycling system, which human interference has damaged over the years. A seedling that will grow into a healthy fruit or vegetable and make it into your lunch borrows nutrients from the Earth. But when thousands of acres of produce are uprooted and shipped away, the plants cannot return nourishment back to the soil when they decompose. Eventually the soil may become so depleted that it can no longer sustain life. Rich in vital life-sustaining ingredients, compost can be used as topsoil or an organic fertilizer to replenish overworked soil and improve crop yields.

San Francisco currently has an impressive waste diversion rate of 67 percent — 67 out of every 100 tons of waste are being recycled or composted instead of dumped into the landfill. The city’s resolution to reach 75-percent diversion by 2010 seems feasible, considering that the rate was 52 percent in 2001. Students can help the city meet and exceed this goal. “It’s important for each student to realize that everyone has the power to make a difference,” Hurwitz said. We have to alter our habits if we want to live in the same world 100 years from now. Seemingly insignificant everyday choices, taken together, will define what kind of future we head into. “It’s up to all of us to make good choices and know we have the power to protect our world,” Hurwitz said. As the botanist Hugh H. Iltis once said, “If we love our children, we must love the earth with tender care and pass it on, diverse and beautiful, so that on a warm spring day 10,000 years hence they can feel peace in sea of grass, can watch a bee visit a flower, can hear a sandpiper call in the sky and can find joy in being alive.”

By bringing composting to the campus, Lowell has accepted the role of steward to the environment and taken an important step — hopefully one of many — toward passing on a sustainable, beautiful future.