Category: Blog

Green Bag Lunch Series: Resiliency and Vulnerable Communities

In this, our fourth Green Bag Lunch, the Office of Sustainability hosts panelists to discuss issues surrounding resiliency within communities and the concept of vulnerable communities, more generally.

We are all familiar with cities such as New Orleans as a vulnerable community, and we have seen it as a case study in the obstacles to resiliency in its recovery from hurricane Katrina. But Charleston, too, represents one of the most vulnerable cities in the United States, and addressing our vulnerability is critical to fostering a healthier, more resilient community.

On the panel will be:

Dr. Arthur Felts – Professor of Political Science
Dr. Norman Levine – Professor of Geology and Environmental Geosciences

All students, faculty, staff and members of the Charleston community are welcome! Invite your friends!

Snacks will be provided, but bringing a bagged lunch is encouraged.

Please email any questions to sustainability@cofc.edu

Post from Eliza Blades on Occupy Earth Greenbag Lunch Series

This discussion panel was not calling for us to agree to R-E-C-Y-C-L-E and save the polar bears. It was a conversation that addressed the question of how environmental change can happen in a broken Washington, a question that conveniently was asked by an enormous social movement that started on Wall Street. The Occupy Movement is a movement to wake up American Politicians. It consists of the American citizen’s desire to make their nation and their earth a better place.

So how do we make this happen? The panel members along with other audience members voiced that if environmental progress is going to be made it must start with the individual just as the occupy movement did. Progress starts with us doing things like taking initiatives to carpool, teaching our children the importance of composting, and most importantly embracing globalization so that Americans finally understand the vastness of our carbon footprint. Other panel members believed that government in conjunction with personal change is a more viable solution. For example the government could provide incentives for businesses that “Go Green”. How, though, do we get the government to care when many of its members have their hands in the pockets of the very companies against the environmental push?  The discussion panel answered this question by approaching it from an economic standard point saying that embracing the environmental movement is not only beneficial to the health of the world but also to the health of our economy. For example it can create jobs, eliminate unnecessary government spending, as well as encourage active citizenship. By highlighting the monetary benefits of environmental policy, we can draw Congress’ attention.

Still, in the current political sphere where corporations are people and the environment is not taken into consideration when making policy for the future it is easy to get discouraged. This panel, however, was inspiring and caused me to realize the power that I possess as an individual. The earth is a huge place and to have to take care of it on your own is daunting. It is not so scary, though, when you are surrounded in place like Zuccotti Park by people with the same objective.

 

 

 

3rd Greenbag Lunch Series: Occupy Earth

  • When: Wednesday, January 25th at 12pm
  • Where: Stern Ballroom

This third Green Bag Lunch Series, Occupy Earth: Lessons from the Occupy Movement for Individual Environmentalism, will look at the issues surrounding individualism and individual action in environmentalism and the sustainability movement.

Do individual actions make a …difference?  Is a collectivist mindset necessary for structural, global change?  How do we make a substantive impact?  These and other questions that affect all social movements are being tested on the ground right now by the various Occupy groups around the world.  What can we learn from their experiences and how can we apply them to other social movements, like environmentalism and sustainability?

On the panel will be:

  • Dr. George Hopkins, Emeritus Professor of History
  • Dr. Timothy Callahan, Director of the Masters in Environmental Studies Program
  • Dr. P. Brian Fisher, Director of the Office of Sustainability
  • Nick Rubin, Occupy Charleston Representative

This informal panel will give a brief presentation to be followed by a discussion and Q&A period. All faculty, staff, students and Charleston community members are welcome!  Invite your friends! Drinks and snacks will be provided, but bringing a bagged lunch is strongly encouraged.

Email any questions to Sustainability@cofc.edu

Link to the event : https://www.facebook.com/events/207650702644882/

Post from Prentice Brower

This project has been exciting. We have done a lot. We have thought of creative ideas and plans for our roof top garden. However our project will not come to life as of now. This is because of the challenges we have faced in trying to realize a rooftop garden. Or initial challenge was gaining access to the first site on top of Liberty.  We had plans ready but we were never able to make it up a second time. Another big challenge we faced was the time. Designing, building, and organizing a rooftop garden is a lot to do with a short amount of time, especially once we lost our first sight of Liberty.  If we had time to continue, I’m confident that we would be able to design and build a great project. Our third challenge was not getting funded. This of course was a result of the short amount of time we had to design a new garden after we had to change locations.

We have learned a lot from this project. There are challenges, but of course there are ways around and past these challenges. I’m confident that if we were to have more time, we could develop a very useful and successful rooftop garden.

Posts from Meg Scruggs and Erich Hellstrom

My role in the overall project was contributing ideas for the App since it was a conceptual project. I gave useful and creative ideas to be incorporated like some of the mapping features along with the Yellow Pages concept for sustainable restaurants and businesses. Our group as a whole was very hands on with the project, and everyone contributed great ideas that we thought would be worthwhile for users of the App.  Our project leader, Josh was extremely helpful and really motivated us to come up with a great concept.

The most rewarding thing about this project, for me, is that I got a great experience working with other people who are excited about learning more about sustainability and what it really means for the community and for our future.  I also feel more accomplished after finishing out final proposal. I think we have come up with a really great idea that has good potential for use for not only the College of Charleston but for other universities and institutes to utilize.

~Meg

 

I really enjoyed being a part of this group in starting the process to create a smart-phone app for Sustainability at the College of Charleston.  My initial contribution to the group was working on the events feature of the app.  We decided in our brainstorming sessions that we should have a sustainable events feature.  I looked up local events such as farmers markets, Green CofC meetings, and Office of Sustainability events.  There are also local events, such as the Green Fair, which could be
integrated into the app. We decided to make the events integrated into the interactive map, so users can see where and when the events happen on the map.  With our interactive map feature users can not only find bike racks and recycling bins, they can see what sustainable projects are happening on campus.

I also came up with the initial setup of the graphic user interface (GUI).  I thought it would be visual pleasing for the main menu to be in the image of a tree.  Each branch would have a different section of the map.  When the user taps on the end of the branch it will take them to the respective part of the app.  At the top of the tree would be the name of the app.  Some ideas for the name were CofC Sustain-a-app, and iSustain CofC.

It is my hope that this app will also keep students involved on campus.  The Office is putting on more and more events each semester and this app can help bring students to these events.  With constant reminders and by using the map feature users will be able to see where and when the events are happening on the map.  I want more people to realize what the vision of the Office is and I want them to get involved.  It is my hope that this app will help produce a campus where people are working towards creating a sustainable campus where people are constantly making new improvements.

~Erich

 

 

Post from Lauren Fuess

I find myself at the end of our little recycling experiment this week and in fact we just finished our presentation to the class about the project.  In the process of reviewing our results and preparing that presentation we realized a number of things.  Most importantly we realized that the results we got weren’t very valid.  We found alot of problems with our methods, namely that no one had been monitoring at the same time (morning could range from 7 am to 10 am) and that some of us had been monitoring different bins in the same general location than others.  Honestly I don’t know what to draw from the monitoring aspect of the project.  It’s hard to draw any solid conclusions on such limited data. I think before we can move forward with any revamping of recycling on campus we need to redo this monitoring project with more standardized methods and include a lot more bins.  Then we might be able to get an idea of where recycling is happening, what the needs are, etc.  It’s frustrating to go through a week of monitoring and realize that we don’t have any solid results, but still we learned a lot from the project, especially through the mapping.  It’s a good starting place if nothing else.  Finally, it taught me how difficult the process of becoming more environmentally friendly can be.  It’s not as simple as one would think, as w ehave seen through this project.  Recycling on campus still has a long way to go, but this project was at least a start.

Post from Calley Moore

During our first meeting I was assigned to brainstorm marketing strategies.  I came up with the following: to get the parents involved, advertise with flyers, get teachers to carpool, link with smart phone app, present idea to classes so that people can link class schedules, make it easy to sign up and have event sign up for weekend activities.  My next assignment was to come up with a slogan for the actual flyers and for the website. My slogan: Sometimes a little company is better, locomote together.  We then compiled everyone’s ideas and made a survey.  Then we each stood outside the library and asked students and faculty what images/slogans they liked.  They were more attracted to the slogans that implied they would save money.  After the research was done, I was assigned to make the two flyers which we showed in the presentation.  We had one final meeting the night before the presentation where we put everything together and discussed what everyone would talk about.  We have our event in early January to present rideshare!

Post from Josh Lam

The app proposal has been submitted to the ECOllective Student Project Committee for funding consideration, and has garnered serious interest from the Sustainability Director and the Computer Science Department’s Software Innovations Lab. With ECOllective approval and funding, the Computer Science Department chair Dr. Starr believes coding development can begin in early Spring ’12, with an initial product completed by the end of the semester. Dr. Starr has discussed the possibility of a long-term development relationship between the Innovations Lab and the Office of Sustainability, which would provide students with valuable inter-disciplinary experience, as well as realize a project with significant potential for promoting campus sustainability.

The app itself could attract grant funding, serve as a basis for creating an on-going inter-disciplinary community sustainability project, while also promoting awareness about CofC’s effort to transform itself into a sustainable campus. As an added benefit, the app couldeven draw consistent revenue and be licensed out to other organizations. Once developed, it could be licensed for use to other colleges and institutions for their own sustainability programs. Therefore, it would help CofC establish itself as a national leader in sustainability.

Post from Abigail Tennenbaum

This past Saturday morning, Green CofC held our first street sweep. Starting at St. Philip and Morris and moving north towards Line Street, we collected over six bags of trash, two bags of recycling, and some of us got breakfast along the way. Among our finds were plenty of plastic water bottles, plastic cups and packaging; we even found a discarded Purple Heart. Various members of the local community showed their curiosity and support for Green CofC’s efforts. We found that the most prevalent and difficult items to pick up were the bottle caps and cigarette butts that litter our streets. Green CofC believes it is important to remember the full spectrum of actions we are all capable of doing, from sweeping streets to promoting sustainability. We must all remember the role we play and the change we can achieve; Green CofC is working to be a small part towards a beautiful and sustainable future.

 

ColleenAdrianChris

Post from Geoff Yost

A core concept that drives sustainability is the notion of maintaining something for the future.

Our group, planning for the development of a CofC Sustainability smartphone app, is laying the groundwork for something that will be both a functional product and an illustration of that core concept.

Having begun the process of developing an app in my work at the George Street Observer, I was extremely interested in applying my knowledge to another project. In particular, I researched the cost expectations, implementation strategy, and ways we could integrate various forms of media into the user experience.

From a cost perspective, I was the only member of the group with any expectations. I reached out to friends in the development community, and determined that the baseline cost was going to be $50-$100 per hour, based on what we proposed to a developer. This was important when we took our ideas to the Computer Science department’s Software Innovations Lab. While their proposed costs were higher than we were expecting, it was important that we had the understanding that app development is expensive.

As we looked more into what feature sets we wanted to implement, I proposed that we build the app in stages, staggering the cost, and adding functionality over time. From that suggestion, we built a strategy that ranked our most important features as priorities. So, the app that will eventually be built will begin with core features, and others will have the opportunity to add to it over time.

Next, I proposed adding media elements, like a podcast and links to the Office’s blog, as well as push notifications. I saw push notifications as critical to the app’s success. Notifications allow for engagement for user. They’re familiar to those who use smartphones, and offering features like a tip of the day, or event reminders will breed habitual use of the app among users.

Along the way, I thought of some perspective Steve Jobs gave in March at the conclusion of one of his last public appearances.

“Technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the result that makes our heart sing,” Jobs said.

This app is exactly that. Technology won’t solve our sustainability issues. Classes won’t solve our sustainability issues. Marrying the two together, though, will help us pursue that end of maintaining something for the future.