The Council for Sustainability at SCAD

What a conference! Top keynote speakers, such as Lester Brown, Van Jones, and Peter Senge with more than 400 presenters from across the disciplines in a wonderful positive atmosphere.

Imagine this, you are sharing the room with close to 2,000 people and ALL are working on one thing: saving our planet. Now that might sound somewhat pathetic, but in essence this is how it was. All attendees with no exception, and I am sure I can say this, understand the urgency of the need to change the way we live. If we keep exhausting non-renewable resources, wasting valuable materials in landfills, polluting through buildings and transportation, manufacturing and food production, to just name a few, we will be able to watch the world go down during our life-time and we won’t be able to stop it if WE DON’T START IMMIDIATELY!! Which means now! (more…)

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!