Office of Sustainability

The Sierra Club announces The Best Internship on Earth!

• Travel around the country hiking, rafting, and enjoying the outdoors as the Youth Ambassador Intern for the Sierra Club’s youth programs.
• Create an awesome video blog that documents the experience.
• Your home base office will be in beautiful San Francisco at the Sierra Club’s headquarters.
• Earn a $2,500 stipend for the 8-week internship, plus all expenses paid for travel.
• The Intern will be outfitted with $2,000 worth of gear from The North Face and Planet Explore.

More information is available at www.sierraclub.org/bestinternship.

The intern will also have a chance to promote their personal story and their college/university as well in their videoblog.

The application deadline is March 31st!

RecycleMania 2010 is now offering

Office Trash Talks!

From now until the end of the quarter (March 12th) we are offering to come and have a brief “Trash Talk” training session in your office.  Our RecycleMania Waste Management Technicians are top notch recyclers and composters, and they are eager to help you and your coworkers get up to speed on campus waste systems, compostable products and procedures, and answer all your burning recycling and composting questions!

Sessions will only last 10-15 minutes, and everyone who attends will be given a voucher for a free cup of coffee from the Sem II Cafe or The Market (but you must bring your own reusable cup of course!)   Help us keep up the Green in Evergreen and sign up today!

Contact Lindsay Raab @ raabl@evergreen.edu to schedule your training.

This is a very good article in SEED Magazine on urban resilience and sustainability in a changing world.

http://seedmagazine.com/content/print/urban_resilience/

The concept of resilience upends old ideas about “sustainability”: Instead of embracing stasis, resilience emphasizes volatility, flexibility, and de-centralization. Change, from a resilience perspective, has the potential to create opportunity for development, novelty, and innovation.

Efficiency per se isn’t the problem, says Barnett. But the way efficiency is conceived, and pursued, is often too narrow. Society strives for efficiency by trying to eliminate apparent redundancies, but things that seemed redundant in a stable climate turn out to be valuable when conditions change. “The quest for increasing efficiency tends to result in systems optimized towards single rather than multiple solutions, centralized rather than distributed organizational responses, all of which are counter to the fundamental concepts of resilience thinking—‘redundancy,’ ‘diversity,’ and ‘modularity,’” says Barnett.

Can we live our lives without creating large amounts of waste? Can we create lifestyle habits that make trash pick-up and landfills obsolete?

Many students, faculty, and staff around campus are asking these questions and working on ways to reach a zero-waste goal.

On Saturday, February 20th, 13 students and faculty joined together to clean up the campus forest. Planned and organized by the student zero-waste project group from “The Life of Things”, the forest cleanup was part of their study of trash on campus; where does it come from, what is it, and how much is there?

Is this yours?

On Monday the 22nd, the students dumped their forest gleanings on a tarp in Red Square. This pile of trash was dominated by empty drink containers and old clothes, though the record player and ‘art’ glass were what caught most people’s attention. The predominant question was “Where did it all come from?” Who leaves trash in the forest, and why?

Why buy bottled water?

Meanwhile, the student Recycle Mania and WashPIRG coordinators were conducting a water taste test and collecting signatures for a ‘ban the bottle/bottled water’ campaign. Bottled water consumes oil resources to manufacture the bottles and ship the water, privatizes public water supplies, and adds an enormous amount of waste to the waste stream.

Why are we spending our money to get something available from the tap for free? What if the money spent on bottling water and disposing of the empties was spent on maintaining clean and healthy local, public water supplies?

Interested in Zero-waste?

Join a Recycle Mania meeting, attend a meeting of the Waste Reduction and Sustainable Purchasing work group of the sustainability council, or contact your student WashPirg representative (will@washpirgstudents.org).

The 2010 Student Sustainability Film Festival is now encouraging and accepting entries from high school and college students across North America. Students create short films about programs, projects or “things” that their campus or community is doing to create sustainable solutions to environmental concerns.

The films should be inspired by real-life events, issues or solutions. For example, has your campus put up a wind turbine? Or, students could examine how and if their school is encouraging alternative modes of transportation, or could consider how their college’s food services has chosen to reduce waste.

The Film Festival will culminate in May 2010 with a weekend of screenings, seminars and an award ceremony in Portland, Oregon. Students will be awarded cash prizes for top-ranked submissions, as determined by an esteemed board of noted judges and filmmakers, including Curt Ellis, producer of “King Corn” and Matt Martin, editor for “No Impact Man.” Each winning film is awarded a $1000 cash prize.

All final selections will be screened at a public event in Portland, Oregon in late May 2010 and prizes will be awarded that evening for the following categories: “Best in Show” (high school and college categories; cash prize); Individual Judge’s Acknowledgement; and Audience Favorite.

More information is available here:

http://nwisc.com/programs/student_sustainability_film/

An innovative new LED streetlight is currently being tested on the entry way roundabout (on the south southwest side). This light, provided by Eco Street Lighting, uses significantly less energy than the existing street light fixtures. It also provides a different quality of light. LED street lights are currently being considered as cost effective energy conservation measures to reduce campus energy costs and our carbon footprint. So take a look as you’re driving through the roundabout and let us know what you think.

2010 METROPOLIS Next Generation Design Competition

CALL FOR ENTRIES

Good design determines how well products, spaces, and systems work from the beginning. We think that great design ideas can make things work even better. One Design Fix for the Future challenges you to prove us right—whether you are an architect, interior designer, product designer, landscape designer, graphic designer, communication designer. We’re looking for ONE design fix you can make now in your designed environment—the products you use, your home, your workplace, your city, or any commercial application—that, in scale or as inspiration, can improve our future.

To enter, provide one small (but brilliant and elegant) fix—leading to an incremental (or dramatic) change in sustainability. Your fix needn’t have anything to do with “environmentalist engineering” to make a difference. Concentrate on what you know best, are aching to improve in a way that deploys your training and imagination.

DEADLINE: January 29, 2010

http://www.metropolismag.com/nextgen/

This brief excerpt is from an interesting little paper titled Resilience: Accounting for the Noncomputable (see the reference below):

Unknown threats are masked by assumptions that frame the questions that are asked. The full complexity of the situation is not perceived because of two filters that constrain points of view:

First, there is a tendency to focus on the computable, despite our awareness of other non-computable aspects of complex problems.

Second, there is a tendency to believe in dominant models even though they are incomplete, and this belief may be strong enough to filter out signals that are inconsistent with the dominant model.

Thus, shortsightedness prevents us from seeing problems on the horizon. The obvious solution is to take varied signals from diverse thinkers seriously, even if they strike us as strange and irrelevant. This seems at odds with the need to have the best specialists lead the way in crucial issues.

Nevertheless, the consideration of a wide range of perspectives is a hallmark of resilient decision making in the face of unexpected change.

Carpenter, S. R., C. Folke, M. Scheffer, and F. R. Westley. 2009. Resilience: accounting for the noncomputable. Ecology and Society 14(1): 13. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss1/art13/

Experience our Highest Tide of the Year at “The Kiss” on Percival Landing.

Monday, January 4, 2010

8:15 am – 8:45 am

Bundle up and join members of the Olympia City Council and Thurston County Commission as we contemplate a normal high tide and speculate on sea level rise. A tide of 17+ feet is expected to occur at 8:37 am.

Attendees are invited for breakfast afterwards at a local restaurant.

Sponsored by Olympia Climate Action.

For more information, contact Barb Scavezze at 878-9901.

TUESDAY, Dec 8

1:00 – 3:00 PM

SEM II A2109

The Sustainable Prisons Project team will present an overview of their work and accomplishments.