Thanksgiving Day 2000. While most ISU students salivated over a turkey dinner, one ISU student chose to fast instead. Rachel Hein, senior in graphic design, was the sole ISU student in Greenpeace’s U.S. Student Climate Summit. Together with 222 other participants, Hein protested at the United Nations convention on climate change in The Hague, Netherlands. Hein said it was a bizarre mix of corporate lobbyists, senators, environmental groups and student protesters.From carbon sinks to Clean Developmental Mechanism, Hein talked to representatives from the European Union and Africa, urging them to get results out of the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 agreement intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.Hein’s activities at the conference ranged from bird-dogging — following around corporate representatives and asking them tough questions they didn’t want to answer — to distributing information to the media. Although there was a lot of media at the summit, Hein said she was disappointed with the lack of U.S. media coverage.”There were news channels from all around the world, but there was maybe one U.S. news channel,” she said. “We’re basically tuning it out. Our main media sources are owned by corporations, so a lot of those [environmental] issues don’t get into the media as often as we would like them to.”Hein said she wants to spread the message that profit is not the bottom line. In October 1999, Hein was one of 16 arrested for protesting outside a Des Moines Menards lumber store. They were protesting the use of wood from old-growth forests — forests that are not under commercial logging. She said some of the forests have trees older than Christianity.”I was scared when the handcuffs were put on,” Hein said. “In the car [the police officer] was yelling at me, ‘This is not a game, this is not a game.'”Hein said she likes the idea of “leading by example.” By recycling and reusing, she said she is hoping others will follow. Sometimes, she may go searching through dumpsters, and she’ll come out with things such as shovels, paints and CD racks — all completely usable.”I’ve taken bags of clothes that I found to Goodwill,” said Hein. “Furniture, canned foods — you name it. Just a whole range of items. We consume everything at astronomical rate, we drive huge vehicles. We don’t need everything huge and big.”Hein said she credits her environmental awareness to her childhood. Growing up playing at the fields outside Cedar Rapids, she witnessed the woods being chopped down and the creeks eroding. In the summer of 1998, Hein worked under the Student Conservation Association in Hovenweep National Monument and Natural Bridges National Monument in Utah, where she got interested in environmental protection, she said.”I got a real understanding of how our resources were managed,” Hein said. “Coming back, I couldn’t just sit back and let these things happen. We’re hurting ourselves by polluting and destroying our environment.”Steven Herrnstadt, associate professor of art and design who taught Hein in some classes, said he is pleased to have a student who is not learning to “fit the proper cubicle.””Everything we learn and teach here is not without the context of greater experience,” Herrnstadt said. “Everything has an interconnection to … a ripple effect on everything else.”Herrnstadt said universities need to have a social obligation to explain these concepts to students.”The workings of our society and the world are not understood well enough by us to cast aside what the environmentalists and humanists have to say as merely ‘tree hugging’ nonsense,” he said.While many complement Hein on what she is doing, Hein thinks everyone else can do it too.”It is easy to put the slant on crazy activists,” she said. “At the same time, those crazy activists are talking about solid facts and problems.”Hein said she hopes to instill environmental awareness through education.. “I think in the beginning, I had the wrong approach to activism,” she said. “I’ve seen how multidimensional the problems are … how it’s not just we’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys. It’s just people trying to make a living.”