Unfriendly beans: In the February 19, 2001 issue of Nexus, writer Aaron Karapinka wrote about the negative effects coffee can have and the massive industry behind it built on exploitative labour practices. Fair trade coffee is a good alternative, but that gets expensive fast and few people are willing to pay more for something that’s cheap and readily available. An initiative was started to get campuses across Canada to use fair trade coffee, but no such luck. What’s a broke, tired college student supposed to do? I guess I’ll just have to stick to my Red Bull and Monster Energy drinks.
BIG garden, big opportunities: The format of traditional schooling made up of lectures and tests doesn’t work well for everyone. Sometimes you long to escape the classroom and dive into nature instead. Camosun’s Interurban campus was previously home to the Garden of Eden, which is not to be confused for the adult store downtown. It was a small garden tended to by individuals in the Basic Instruction in Gardening Skills (BIGS) program, which provided a unique approach to adult special education. The students learned a lot of hands-on skills that helped them find employment later on, primarily in greenhouses, landscaping, or with the Capital Regional District.
Digital piracy: Long before Spotify and even YouTube, people had no inexpensive ways to get music onto their phones, so some decided to illegally download MP3 files to their devices rather than buy albums or CDs. Napster was a site people turned to for pirated music, and it was in danger of being shut down; people were furious. Nexus writer Jonathan Kimak wrote “We hear about this new CD, pay $20 to get two good songs and ten low quality songs that are usually skipped over, and then feel ripped off.” Kimak continued to argue that with piracy, people get only the high-quality songs they want, which is a net positive for everyone (musicians would likely disagree). I’m just grateful that music is available and affordable now, because I’m never buying a whole CD for one song again.