Hi Everyone,
Welcome to the Sustainability Office’s first ever blog post. We at the office though it would be a good idea to keep the student body and faculty updated on the going ons of what we are doing to help make Bard College a more sustainable campus (side note if this is your first time hearing about the Sustainability Office, don’t feel too badly I am sure there are other people in the same boat).
Before I launch into what exactly we are doing around campus it would probably help if I defined one of the most overused words in “green language”, sustainability. This will make sure that we are all on the same page, and it never hurts to know the definition of a word that we use so often. To us at Bard we have decided that Sustainability is…
“Ensuring that human opportunities for self-realization do not decline over time. Sustaining these opportunities depends on sustaining both a healthy environment and a healthy economic system.”
Keeping this in mind we have made some pretty amazing strides with becoming a more sustainable college. From joining the AASHE STARS, to starting a green building and purchasing policy, from calculating (with the hope of reducing!) our campus carbon footprint, to working to kick bottled water-coolers off campus(more on this later), bringing zip cars to campus, and much, much more. I don’t want to give all of our upcoming/current projects away right at this moment (there has to be some incentive to keep you guys reading). However, I will say that there are many other projects happening now, and we will be tackling new ones as the year rolls on.
We have an amazing team of individuals working here, Laurie Husted the head of the office, to Bard CEP’s very own Dan Smith, to a handful of dedicated interns (whose names I cannot remember right now), and me (Sebastian Pillitteri a graduate student at Bard Center for Environmental Policy), all working on issues that we are not only passionate about but also that will put us on the path to a sustainable college, country, planet, and future.
Check back soon for current issues we are working on as well as updates about events we are hosting on campus!
Also if anyone would like to get more involved with sustainability on campus in any way, shape, or form please do not hesitate to get in contact with the Office of Sustainability. We are always open to new ideas and initiatives.
-Sebastian