Last Friday, I attended a speaker on Institutionalizing Sustainability at Penn State, by Paul Shrivastava. He explained the issues and also posisitve possible outcomes of sustainability at this Penn State campus, all satellite campuses, and eventually in all of Pennsylvania. He began with showing the United Nation’s devlopemental goals for sustainability to be reached by 2030. The number one being to end poverty, and number 10 being reducing inequalities. I found this particularly interesting because a lot of times when people disucss climate change, the importance of poverty and inequality do no come up.
He begins a metaphor as comparing Penn State to a large complex ship. The money going into it is $6.5 billion dollars which he said it more the GOP of some small countries. There are 24 satelites campuses, 17,000 employees, and 100,000 students enrolled. (I was imagining a word problem from class stating how many changes with this amount of students would it take to make Pennsylvania a leading state in sustainabilty.) With all of these resources, Penn State is one of the leading PA factors in sustainability. Many colleges within just University Park are taking lead on sustainability projects. Smeal College is taking the lead, followed by the college and Enegineering and then the college of Arts and Architecture. Some leading satellite campuses in Sustainbility ae Altoona and Behrend.
University Park has a lot of leading projects done by student clubs as well, such as the living lab with the 70 Megwatt solar power plant, and the student farm and the sustuainablty food system. However, when the speaker asked the room how many students have ever taken a sustainability class, sadly only two studnents rose their hands. He then proceeded by saying as issue is that sustainability is not discussed enough. It should be taught in classes, and broughten up in disucussions. Specifically for the 2019 year, he talks about SDSN: Sustainability Development Solutions Network. On their site, you can see all of the research and projects that have been going on just this year. He belives the first step is to declare one specific action plan for the entire university to carry out, and follow on from there.
If you are interested in reading all of the development goals, you can look here.
Also if you are interested in getting more involved with sustainability projects are Penn State’s campus, you can find more information here. To be completely honest, I at first only attended these for extra credit, but both talks have been very interested and informative and now I definitely want to get more involved. Speaking of getting involved, sorry for all the links but I was very interested in the student farm organization, if you are too you can look check out more info on their website.
