Editor, Daily Nexus,

Like many students here at UCSB, I wake up each day bleary-eyed and groggy, rolling out of bed only to roll off to class. I hate my early morning lectures, but I get by. You might ask why. Well, because of the Daily Nexus, that’s why.

Before I enter my class, I grab a copy of our wonderful student newspaper and thumb through it. I am finished by the time the professor comes in, and, like everybody else with a copy, I throw it on the ground, take out my notebook, and prepare myself for the grueling hour that is about to ensue.

Once the class ends, we begin to head out like a herd of cows in a stampede. I lift my eyes up from the ground and notice a guy still holding his Nexus. Flabbergasted that anyone would hang on to a copy for longer than 20 minutes, I begin to wonder what he could possibly be doing with it. I watch, and to my surprise, he does the most simple and downright logical thing to do: He puts it back on top of the stack that it came from for another Santa Barbarian to read, enjoy and reuse.

We should all follow the example of this fine outstanding gentleman. If we all heeded to the three R’s – reduce, reuse, and recycle – a little more, we could really make a difference. After all, Earth Day is coming up soon, but that doesn’t mean we can’t care now.

So, the next time you are finished reading the Nexus, fold it back up and hand it to a friend. If you don’t have any friends, just put it back on the stack outside the classroom. If you want to earn bonus points, you could even pick up the three or four copies sitting next to you on the ground right now and put them back on the shelf, too. At the least, we could save the custodians a lot of time, but who knows – maybe we could also save the Earth a lot of trees if we each just do our part.