4/20/07 — When freshman Sam Rigotti arrived on the Allegheny College campus last fall, he expected to spend his undergraduate career studying political science. That, however, isn’t the way things have turned out. Less than a year later, he’s majoring in environmental studies and president of the campus Environmental Science Club.

It was an introductory class in environmental science — as well as Al Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth” — that changed the way he looks at the world, Rigotti recalled Thursday. “The world of environmental science is so broad,” he said. “Anything you can think of ties back to it.” After all, he added, “without an environment, where would we be?”

Saturday morning, Rigotti will be putting environmental theory into practice, joining a crew of almost 20 student volunteers installing up to 150 compact fluorescent light bulbs in properties owned by Crawford County Coalition on Housing Needs. Any bulbs not installed in the Liberty House transitional facility, the coalition’s emergency shelter or the apartments directly above the shelter will be donated to food boxes distributed to needy families in the community, according to Caryl Waggett, an assistant professor of environmental science at Allegheny and one of the organizers of Saturday’s event.

According to coalition director Hollie Rose, both the coalition and its residents will see some savings. Residents of Liberty House, for example, have a utility allowance, with the coalition paying the electric bill for residents up to the amount of the allowance. Residents of the apartments above the emergency shelter are responsible for their own utility bills, while the coalition picks up the utility tab for the shelter itself.

While the bulbs are already in place in common areas and offices at Liberty House, Saturday’s effort will give traditional bulbs currently in use in the apartments an efficiency upgrade.

The project marks the culmination of a year-long effort called the Allegheny College Climate Change Initiative. Formed during the summer of 2006 to increase public awareness of issues surrounding climate change and promote private and institutional efforts to reduce the human impact on the climate, the initiative brings together a long list of campus and nonprofit organizations.

The bulbs were purchased with money raised during a week-long pre-Valentine’s Day sales extravaganza featuring goodies purchased from local vendors at Meadville’s historic Market House.

Saturday’s bulbs were part of a 1,000-bulb shipment that has been distributed to several area churches by students in the religion and the environment class taught by Allegheny chaplain Jane Ellen Nickell. “The focus of the class has been on what motivates people of faith to make changes in the environment — and what concrete actions people can take,” she explained Thursday. “Installing these bulbs are relatively simple; they’re cost-effective as well as energy-saving.” The college’s Office of Religious Life is a sponsor of the ACCCI program.

According to Kathy Greeley, director of Commonwealth Community Energy Project and a key player in ACCCI, Saturday’s efforts will definitely make a difference.

Each fluorescent light installed will use only 20 watts of electricity to produce the same amount of light as a standard 75-watt incandescent bulb. Designed to burn eight times as long as a standard bulb, each bulb installed Saturday is expected to save the coalition or its residents $35 in electricity costs and prevent 500 pounds of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere over its lifetime, according to Greeley’s estimate. Altogether, savings from all 150 bulbs are expected to total $5,280 and reduce Meadville’s carbon dioxide emissions by more than 70,000 pounds. On an individual basis, replacing five standard bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs would save the average American household $60 each year.

On the Allegheny campus, energy is an idea whose time has definitely come. During this semester’s version of the intro to environmental science class Rigotti took last fall, for example, students are circulating petitions calling on the college to finance a transition to wind power by imposing a $100-per-student tuition hike. “After a week, they had 400 signatures,” professor Eric Pallant said Thursday, adding that an additional 300 students had signed up at an online site. Wind energy, by the way, already accounts for 10 percent of the college’s power usage.

“I give credit to Allegheny students for taking environmental issues so seriously — and for being so remarkably creative in developing solutions to environmental problems,” Pallant said. “We give them ideas and they go off and run with it.”

They aren’t the only ones. The college’s president, Richard J. Cook, recently signed the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, a challenge to colleges and universities to develop comprehensive plans to eliminate emissions and expand educational resources for students in both sustainability and the environment.

The involvement, however, isn’t new. In 1972, for example, Allegheny’s environmental science program became one of the first undergraduate programs of its kind in the nation.