Lonnie Romero

Student

“You’ve just got to embrace the diversity at SMC. It really is amazing the kinds of people who are coming here.”

Trash. In Lonnie Romero's vocabulary, trash is a dirty word. “It annoys me so much," he fumes. “I mean, this college has a trashcan about every five feet, it seems. And yet people will just get up and leave their trash behind, assuming that someone else is going to clean up after them. They’re just lazy, and I don't understand them at all.” A cleaner SMC campus is obviously of great concern to Lonnie. And so is a cleaner world.

“I want to go into the environmental sciences, which is weird because I used to rag my friends about their hippie persuasions. But not any more. I want to be involved with taking good care of our natural resources. I haven’t yet decided on what area I’d like to specialize in,” he says. “And I’m in no hurry at all to leave SMC, because the science teachers here are just great. But for a while now, I’ve been planning on going into the Peace Corps and living in another culture, possibly in Asia or Africa. I just envision spending time in some country where the major technologies and corporations haven't beaten the life out of the land and people. And I certainly wouldn't go to a place like that to lecture people. I mean, what would I say? ‘I come from the country that wastes more resources than any other and I’m here to tell you how to clean up?’ No,” says Lonnie. “I just want to someday live a little more simplistic life and—if the opportunity comes—to make my mark in some small way to clean up the oceans and the earth for all of us.”

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