My Work with Campus Greening Projects

With a grounding in sustainability based in international research, for the last five years I have been exploring teaching, research, and service activities that foster sustainability in western culture. I am increasingly interested in the cognitive aspects of western consumer culture. I am interested in how we, in western societies can we reduce greenhouse gas emissions when our population is addicted to a nonrenewable resource dependent way of being, how we can reground our priorities to be based in the quality of our lives in community rather than in competitive consumptive modes, and how our country can realize its rich potential as a leader in alternative energy and environmental stewardship.

One example of my service in this area is my work with campus sustainability. In the last years I have begun to realize my long-held commitment to the greening of campuses through the organization of the first Earth Day celebration on the George Mason campus in spring 2005. Beginning in Fall 2004, I facilitated a campus-wide initiative, a week of university-wide Earth Day activities geared towards raising local awareness and local responses to global climate change. I began by sending out a campus-wide call to faculty to solicit their involvement in organizing Earth Day activities to raise on-campus consciousness of climate change. We met regularly and held a successful two weeks of activities, highlighted with a day of presentations by Dr David Orr. We also held a 2006 Earth Day celebration featuring Bill McKibben. We now have a growing environmental movement on campus and have formed sub-groups to work on foci such as greening of the curriculum, green building and landscaping, improving the existing waste generation through reducing, reusing and recycling, and greening of our campus stores and food service. Our 2007 Earth Day speaker is Janisse Ray. Our group established an Environmental Task Force in January 2006 in order to work on campus sustainability issues across university sectors. To see the text of a Fall ’06 article in the university newspaper, go HERE. To access George Mason University's Environmental Task Force website, go here: http://green.gmu.edu/

Beyond the role I play as a key facilitator to the task force and Earth Day events, the sub-group I am working most closely with is the greening of the curriculum group. As teachers we are tasked with educating the citizens of the future. It only makes sense to teach about the issues that are most pertinent to the future—the issues of sustainability and global climate change. In response to my conviction in this area, I attended a “Sustainability Across the Curriculum” workshop in San Diego July 2006 in order to learn how to begin the process of bringing sustainability across the curriculum at GMU. Dave Kuebrich and I, who also attended the workshop, will lead our first workshop for GMU faculty in January 2007.