The Council for Sustainability at SCAD

Mayor Otis Johnson will headline the next Dump the Pump event on Friday, Oct. 3, when he leads a group bicycle commute into downtown Savannah.

The first ever Dump the Pump Convoy will depart from the Habersham Village shopping center and end at the corner of Bull and Broughton streets, where the Mayor will dedicate the first in a series of bicycle racks the City is installing throughout downtown Savannah.

With high gas prices and continued supply uncertainties, more and more people are turning to alternative forms of transportation. Anyone can join the Bike Convoy, which will be guided by experienced cyclists from the Savannah Bicycle Campaign. The group event is a way to introduce bicycle commuting to people who might be interested in riding to work but unsure of routes or intimidated to start out alone.

The Convoy will leave Habersham Village at 8:15 a.m., and meet up with a second group led by the Mayor gathering at Baldwin Park at Atlantic and 41st streets. The Convoy will then ride north on Lincoln Street, ending at Bull and Broughton streets, where free coffee and bagels will be served.

Mayor Johnson will lead the press conference there beginning about 9 a.m. He will highlight a plan to roll out a series of bicycle racks through downtown — part of a broader strategy to ease traffic and parking congestion downtown, as well as promote the Mayor’s Thrive initiative, which promotes environmental sustainability, and Healthy Savannah 2012, which promotes healthy living.

This will be the fourth “Dump the Pump: Leave Your Car at Home Day” held in Savannah since April. The events are intended to raise awareness about the benefits of using alternative modes of transportation and to encourage residents to commute by carpooling, mass transit, bicycling and walking.

Dump the Pump is sponsored by the Savannah Development and Renewal Authority, the City of Savannah, Coastal Commuters, the Savannah Bicycle Campaign, Chatham Area Transit, and Pedestrian Advocates of the Coastal Empire.

Area residents can find carpool partners through Coastal Commuters or learn more about local transportation options at www.savannahtransit.com or bicyclecampaign.org.

For more information, contact the City of Savannah Public Information Office at 651-6410.

If you are serious about sustainable transportation, your vehicle of choice is a bicycle. In his “City Talk” column in the Sept. 21 Savannah Morning News, Bill Dawers points out another positive benefit to going by bike: Every person who arrives under pedal power frees up parking spaces for those who can’t or won’t leave their cars at home. Dawers made this observation of SCAD’s recently opened Arnold Hall:

“Why isn’t the parking crunch worse if there are so many courses offered? Many students are obviously taking the student shuttle, and when I dropped by one afternoon last week, there were 93 bicycles and three mopeds locked in front of the school.”

To read all of Dawers’ column, click here and scroll down to “Art students, parking, 93 bicycles.”

The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s second biennale conference and expo will be held in Raleigh, NC in November. More than 1,000 participants are expected with more than 400 presentations and we will be among them!
Check out: http://aashe.org/conf2008/

“Breaking Sustainability Ground in Art and Design”

Is the title of the presentation I will be giving at the upcoming conference. I will have exactly 10 minutes (including Q&A) to talk about the sustainability related work we are doing here at SCAD. Due to the time constraint the focus will be on the Sustainability and Eco-Practices Council, its accomplishments during the first year of existence and the plans for the time ahead, such as the next Teach-In coming up February 5th, 2009.

The second topic will be the new graduate program and undergraduate minor, Design for Sustainability, including new courses, which I proposed to the Curriculum Council in Spring and Summer Quarter 2008. It is looking good so far, the first classes could be offered as early as Fall 2009, BUT the final word is not spoken yet. We made it over the first hurdles, the final approval is anxiously awaited.

So fall will be an exciting quarter. If you are a student and want to get involved in sustainability join one of the student groups, e.g. ‘ECOlogic’ at the Gulfstream Center for Design, or ‘Project Green’ at Eichberg Hall, or enroll into IDUS 384, Design for Sustainability. If you are staff or faculty and want to actively participate in the council, contact our new staff liaison John Bennett or myself.

Keep up the green work and have a great quarter!

A group of SCAD Historic Preservation students urged shoppers to spend their money locally over the Labor Day Weekend with a Web site and merchant outreach program that garnered plenty of attention from local media. A Savannah Morning News story described the sustainability angle at work in Savannah’s Shop Local Challenge:

“The benefits of shopping in locally owned stores are highlighted in the student campaign and include local character and well-being, environmental sustainability by providing walkable town centers that reduce automobile use and suburban sprawl.”

A second Savannah Morning News story is here.

Photo credit: Elizabeth Patterson