UNH is poised as a leader in sustainability; its program in Ecogastronomy received national recognition in the New York Times last month. There is growing demand among students nationally for programs incorporating sustainability, and UNH has experienced rapid growth over the past few years in programs like Sustainable Agriculture and Environmental Engineering. As mentioned in posts prior to this one, a potential Sustainability Dual Major is currently in development for future implementation at UNH.
The proposed curriculum is structured in a way that makes it easier for students to enter into the dual major at any point in their academic career at UNH. The “dual” nature of the major makes it easier to implement, since it requires a blending of fields rather than a full curriculum of sustainability, and this widened perspective is also what that the Sustainability Academy is trying to encourage. The approach is very flexible, so students have the freedom to choose how they want to use some of their credits, whether it be in a traditional course or in an independent study of a particular initiative. The program will be able to incorporate existing courses, consistent with the sentiment that sustainability is a discussion in which many diverse fields of academia can participate. It will include online activities as well as field trips to provide hands-on experience with applied sustainability. The engaging of students in the many sustainable initiatives on campus will develop the capability to face related issues on a larger scale. The interdisciplinary style of the program will allow students to better carry sustainability into their professional careers, and prepare students for a world in which sustainability will be an important part of every occupation .
The idea behind the dual major is that it will study coupled human-earth systems, rather than only ecological or climate systems. To achieve sustainability, studying climate change alone is not sufficient. We must focus on how human institutions impact natural systems, and how natural systems impact human institutions. My interest in this connection is what led me to the opportunity to participate in this process and have this blog. For those who understand and wish to further explore this interplay, there needs to be venue in which to do so. The Sustainability Dual Major would provide the structure necessary for innovative ideas to be cultivated. I believe that the individuals who we will see make great strides in the field of sustainability will emerge from programs like this one. If the Sustainability Dual Major is implemented, UNH would be at the heart of an intellectual Big Bang; as a facility it possesses the capacity to successfully host such a program, and would flourish as a community by doing so.
…I wanted to provide a summary of the posts from the semester and the goals I had hoped to achieve. This project began as part of a required Sustainable Living internship for which I chose to work with the Sustainability academy on their upcoming initiative to create a program connecting sustainability with the humanities. I was very excited about this opportunity because I had been looking for a venue in which to study the relationship between culture and sustainability. Within the SustainabilityAcademyat UNH, part of the discussion is the de-desciplinizing of sustainability. I was particularly interested in exploring what this means.
Let me provide some background: Sustainable development is an idea that has been around for awhile. The report resulting from the 1987 Brundtland Commission provided the most commonly-cited definition ? development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This definition is both vague and limiting and has become a textbook definition students can rattle off on demand. This contributed to the term “sustainability” becoming a buzzword. It became an amorphous term thrown out in any conversation concerning the environment, and in this way, lost its true meaning.
More recently the focus has been on reconstructing the way people think of sustainability. It is necessary to incorporate other disciplines, or to quote Chief Sustainability Officer Tom Kelly, to de-disciplinize the concept of sustainability beyond its scientific implications. It must be expanded past ecology or environmental sciences, or any one department, in order to both make progress and convey the true gravity of the concept. This is where I find my place within the sustainability discussion.
To provide an anecdotal story that illustrates my point, when I was trying to choose a picture for my powerpoint presentation about this internship, I asked a friend of mine and she said “How about a picture of a person recycling? Or a big happy planet?” These are the things that everyone associates with sustainability. The picture that I chose is of an Abenaki basket (discussed in previous posts), which is a native American tribe from New Englandand parts of Canada. The baskets are an important part of Abenaki culture, but the sweetgrass and ash tree used to make them are both in jeopardy due to industrial development and climate change. In order for their culture to be sustained, their environmental resources must be protected.
My internship work consisted primarily of participating in campus events related to sustainability and disseminating information about those events through a weekly blog on theSustainabilityAcademy website. This was done in hopes of raising awareness of the ways in which sustainability is connected to our daily lives. When I was first given this assignment, I knew that my role would be to explore the interplay between culture and sustainability and spread the knowledge of this relationship. But now, as I reach the close of this project, I feel that it is my own perception of sustainability that has grown the most.
Some of the topics I blogged about were clearly related to sustainability but may not have appeared to have cultural implications on the surface. One such topic was sustainable initiatives in the area, for example the implementation of a biomass generator at theRockinghamCounty complex. I provided the data for cuts in carbon emissions and money saved. The cultural component comes into play when we consider the impact of a state institution leading by example and making socially responsible choices, (as well as supporting the local woodchip suppliers of New Hampshire). Another event was Greener Taste of Greater Durham, in which local and regional businesses, including restaurants and green technology companies, congregated on theUNH campus to share their unique initiatives to merge environmental consideration with economically sustainable choices. Again, at first glance this may appear to be purely science-driven, but because of the magnitude of the event, I could feel the energy and creation, not of a passing trend, but of a lifestyle that will hopefully become part of our culture.
Then there were blog topics in which the link between culture and sustainability was much easier to see. I focused on the annual Sidore Series: the theme of which was Sustainability Unbound this year. This was an event in which five speakers were invited to lecture at UNH in a three-day series open to the general public. They spoke about Plato, cultural commons, the sounds of nature, political ecology, and how we interact as humans with creatures in our environment.
I also discussed the courses being developed for the sustainability dual major. In the fall of 2011, three professors (Susan Curry, Courtney Marshall, and Joelle Ruby Ryan) were awarded funding to develop courses bridging sustainability and the liberal arts. I was able to interview them about these courses, which will focus on topics like ecology in theRoman empire, the global sex work industry and environmental justice. I asked each of them why they feel it is important to educate students in liberal arts and the humanities about sustainability. Each gave a different answer, but together they convey what I was searching for much more eloquently than I could have. From Professor Marshall, assistant professor of women’s studies and english, believes there needs to be more discussion about how cultural images interact with policy and shape how we feel about policy. The attention to the creative process that is fostered in the Humanities programs is needed, and humanities students will benefit from seeing there is a place for them in the discussion of sustainability. Professor Curry, lecturer in classics, answered that the humanities contribute stories and images to convey ideas. Such images make sustainability accessible to the general public, and also expand it beyond the hard sciences behind it. The humanities incorporate cross-cultural ideas. This allows us to consider the worldviews of other cultures, and how they play into their political systems and conceptualizations of the environment. Professor Ryan, lecturer in women’s studies, feels that human liberation and the natural environment are inherently connected, and that the understanding of the connectedness of life forms is important.
It was an amazing experience to participate in such a diverse selection of events and to be exposed to all of these ideas. Though some of the post topics may seem unrelated, one of the most poignant things I learned from this project is that sustainability is a theme threaded in some way in all of the things I wrote about. It is an underlying factor in all of the courses being developed, and all of the lectures of the Sidore series speakers. Prior to this internship I had only begun to expand my understanding of sustainability beyond the definition I first offered.
One of the most rewarding parts of doing this project was that sustainability began to come out of the woodwork in my regular course work. This semester I took a course called Globalization and Health. This course focuses on the ways in which the increasing degree of global integration affects human health. This is particularly a concern in developing countries where economic reform does not always meld with environmental responsibility and high occupational standards of health. Peoples and Cultures of Latin America was my second course, and a large part of the course looked at land rights of indigenous peoples, and how their cultures can be sustained when they are pressured to surrender their lands for industrialization. My Social and Political Philosophy might at first appear to be the least related to sustainability, but having this course this semester was very timely. I dedicated an entire post to the analysis of a chapter from Melissa Lane’s book The Ecorepublic, which uses allegories and concepts from Plato’s Republic to illustrate the emergence of sustainability in larger society. The course covered the philosophies of both Karl Marx and John Locke, which appeared in discussions and lectures on sustainability. We also read Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, which elaborates on the transition from humans in nature to reliance on material goods and human labor, ideas that are clearly related to sustainability. None of these courses mention sustainability in their descriptions or are recommended for students studying sustainability. This connection is natural, no pun intended, and it is my greatest hope that this project, in the context of the much greater work being done at UNH, will help others see sustainability emerge in their daily lives as well.
This week is the UNH Undergraduate Research Conference – an important and really wonderful annual event. Each year, more and more students showcase research related to sustainability, and this year is no exception.
We wanted to bring to your attention a special session of tomorrow’s URC – the Ethnic Studies Promo 2012 - to encourage you to attend and to bring students to attend this Friday.
Often the cultural and social aspects of sustainability are not as visible as its “green” aspects. But they are CRUCIAL to what sustainability is. As the flyer listing the sessions states, “Critical Ethnic Studies is a field that touches the lives of everyone in an increasingly multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and multi-cultural world. Ethnic Studies is a field that is both practical and theoretical. In it, scholars address questions of power, social movement, freedom, liberation, community, culture, and history. Scholars explore the lasting legacies of race, colonialism, conquest, war, and other matters of power, violence, survival, and overcoming adversity. Scholars study the give-and-take and the back-and- forth between competing and collusive cultures. In the URC Ethnic Studies Sessions, students showcase intellectual work that directly engages life in the world around them.”
This really hits at the heart of sustainability. We hope you can attend.
This past Monday I interviewed Joelle Ruby Ryan, the last of the professors developing courses for the Sustainability and Humanities partnership. She is a lecturer for the women’s studies department, typically offering “Introduction to Women’s Studies”, “Gender, Power, and Privilege”, and “Transgender Feminism”. The course she is working on focuses on the global sex industry, and will be called “The Global Sex Industry: Exploring Transnational Feminism, Ecocriticism and Sex Worker Rights.” As far as I can tell, while there are courses that examine sexuality cross-culturally, there are no existing courses that focus specifically the sex industry.
When the opportunity came to create a course related to sustainability, Professor Ryan sought to answer the question “How can we create a dialogue between sustainability and sex work?” We spent a good deal of time talking about this; out of the three courses being developed, this connection might be more difficult to grasp for students who do not have a detailed knowledge of either sustainability or the sex work industry. The course will discuss how sex work can be viewed as work like any other job, as well as a sustainable economic choice, as opposed to something to be abolished. Like so many other vices in our society, while every individual may not personally endorse it, prostitution and other sex work will exist and are not going anywhere anytime soon. Professor Ryan’s course will explore how they can be made sustainable, and constructed as labor. It will also look at ways to improve labor conditions, such as unionization, HIV prevention, decriminalization, destigmatization, and possibly a reconstruction of the occupation as entrepreneurial.
In addition to the use of films and articles, Professor Ryan hopes to have both workers and activists as guest lecturers. The workers will be involved in the discourse, which is not always the case when this issue arises in wider society. This is important for delineating between human trafficking and voluntary work; it is common for anti-sex work activists to construct all sex workers as victims, while for some it is a personal choice.
The course will cover not only making sex work economically sustainable, but the implications of sex tourism and how it affects the environment. It will also look at how globalization has interacted with sex work in terms of global capital and global feminism. When I asked why she felt it was important to educate through the lens of sustainability, Professor Ryan answered that she felt social justice and eco-criticism need to be merged. Human liberation and the natural environment are inherently connected, and the understanding of the connectedness of life forms is important. She said that though she has just begun to explore sustainability, she hopes to learn more and infuse it into all of her work, which was very exciting to hear!
The course will be controversial, using the abolitionist view as a historical background from which to progress forward. It sounds like a great learning experience, and Professor Ryan is hopeful that it will draw students from all disciplines.
On behalf of all of us at the UNH Sustainability Academy, THANK YOU to many, many faculty, staff, students, administrators, and state, regional, national and international partners for making the sustainable learning community at UNH a reality!
Last night, I was fortunate enough to attend the “Celebrating the Sustainable Local Food Network” at Young’s Restaurant in downtown Durham. The food was absolutely delicious, (omeletes, sandwiches, and the best apple crisp I have ever had), but even more so, the people at event were inspiring. It wasn’t necessarily the speeches that were made, as the fact that there were so many people gathered in one room to talk about local food and support each other in the local community.
There is tremendous energy surrounding the local food movement, and that could certainly be felt in Young’s Restaurant last night. It was another reminder to me of what a special and close-knit place Durham is. As summer approaches, I encourage all of you to go to your local farmer’s markets, make connections, and buy local. Plant your own gardens and grow your own food! Food is one of the best uniting forces in the world, and the local food movements across the country make this otherwise cynical college student feel like there is lots of hope left.
I have devoted a few posts to the discussion of the courses being developed for the Sustainability Dual Major. Faculty fellow Siobhan Senier has also created a course that will ideally be incorporated into the program once it is completed. It is typically the Introduction to American Studies Course, but the topic will be Sustainability in New England and Beyond. Essentially it is a course focusing on culture and sustainability. It will study the sustainability of cultural groups both regionally and internationally, as well as the cultural changes required to make our world sustainable.
A particular topic the course will address, and one that I have discussed in a previous post, is how sustainability relates to Abenaki culture, in terms of the relationship between the natural environment, their language, and their basket-making traditions. Students will have the unique opportunity to assist in the construction of an online exhibit of Native American baskets. This is an interesting topic to study because it is so close to home; the issues faced in terms of preserving cultural heritage both socially and environmentally are ones that we can comprehend relatively easily.
The course will also explore the implications of racial and economic stratification in natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina through reading Dave Egger’s Zeitoun. While this example may serve as a case study, the disparity in the degree of suffering between the affluent and impoverished populations all over the world is glaringly obvious. If we are attempting to expand sustainability, do these ethical and human rights concerns fall within its jurisdiction?
An area that I am particularly interested in that will be covered by the course is how the demand for conflict minerals impacts the lives of people in other nations, particularly the Democratic Republic of Congo. Students will be reading the play Ruined, by Lynn Nottage, which is about surviving wartime violence in theDRC. It forces us to face our contribution to conflicts like these, since electronics that we seem to be unable to live without contain the minerals in the center of the dispute.
This course sounds like it would be a great experience for students of any academic department, as it will incorporate political, environmental, and historical themes within an english course, while engaging the four content areas prioritized by theSustainabilityAcademy: climate and energy, biodiversity, food, and culture.
