Professor of Law Peter Appel, of the University of Georgia, “has been invited to train federal wilderness managers at the Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center, a facility in Missoula, Mont., run jointly by all federal agencies responsible for wilderness management.” Appel specializes in environmental law, and knows something about managing wildernesses in particular.
UD thinks Appel should take a hard look at the wilderness right outside his window — the seventy tons of broken glass and human shit in front of the University of Georgia law school — and think about how to manage that. Think globally, act locally. This wilderness stares Appel and his fellow law professors right in the face … right in the nose … after every football game on campus.
The university has no idea what to do about it. It gets worse every year, and this year, with the opening game, it’s so bad that it’s become a very big scandal.
UD‘s been studying the problem, reading lots of news articles, blog entries, and comment threads about it. The University of Georgia Law School Wilderness Area, it turns out, has a number of interesting features.
For instance, the wilderness is created not merely by thousands of drunk tailgaters hurling bottles at each other and shitting in the doorways of Professor Appel’s law school building. The drunks begin the process, to be sure; but after they leave, the derelict of Athens show up to loot the place. Whatever trash has managed to find a bin is now overturned in search of valuables that the drunks may have left behind.
Once we know these sorts of details, once we understand the rhythms of this ecosystem, perhaps we can do something to manage it. Contraceptives in the beer, so tailgaters don’t reproduce? UD‘s not an expert; she doesn’t really know. But there must be professors, in the law school and elsewhere at the University of Georgia, interested in studying the wilderness just outside their doors.
September 21st, 2009 at 9:51PM
This is a random detail to latch on, but where are you getting the info about "shitting"? You mention it twice, so I’m assuming you mean it literally, but the articles I’ve read just mention trash.
September 21st, 2009 at 9:54PM
Nevermind, I found the article and Adams’s quotes.
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:19AM
You have to really respect a university where football is so important that they have to close the libraries down to keep the drunk hangers-on out of them.
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:41AM
It’s an exquisite dilemma, superdestroyer — lock the buildings to keep the drunks out, and the drunks will crap outside; open the buildings so the drunks can use them, and the drunks will trash the buildings.
Not exactly the sort of university problem Cardinal Newman had in mind, eh?
September 23rd, 2009 at 4:21PM
"UGA officials said over 70 tons of trash were left in the area, including signs of public urination and defecation."
http://www.myfoxatlanta.com/dpp/sports/Tailgaters_Trash_UGA_Campus_091709