Discover(ing) Sustainability

It’s not often that “parking lot” and “sustainable” bump into each other in the same sentence. But UNH’s E Lot, by first-year residence Williamson Hall, is becoming one of the university’s most recognizable sustainable research projects. That’s where the UNH Stormwater Center, dedicated to protecting water resources through stormwater management, has installed a pervious concrete [...]

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One of the claims for eating locally has been that it helps reduce climate impacts caused by the transportation of food over long distances. A recent study by Carnegie Mellon University researchers has called into question this claim, however, showing that transportation of food is a minor contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (11%) as [...]

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Now that spring has finally sprung here in Durham, I’m making regular visits to some of the university’s most valuable (in my opinon) assets — the 500-plus acres of woodlands that are College Woods and East and West Foss Farms. Offering miles of trails and a rich diversity of woodlands and wildlife, these areas serve [...]

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Impressed — that’s how I feel today after seeing two groups of UNH students in action. First, I went to the Reuse! clothing swap held by the UNH student group the Ecological Advocates. What a deal: not only could swap clothes you no longer wanted for ones others had dropped off, but you could even donate [...]

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I spent part of this glorious Earth Day with some horticulture technology students at UNH’s Thompson School for Applied Science. For the final project of their grounds management course, they designed and today are installing a sustainable landscape in front of Putnam Hall. The students are putting into practice what they’ve been learning for the [...]

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Posted on behalf of Tom Kelly, Ph.D., UNH Chief Sustainability Officer April 22, 2008 As we approach Earth Day 2008, sustainability has become the buzzword of the day. A Google search on “sustainability” brings up more than 21 million hits – still shy of “American Idol” but more than double the hit count of “war [...]

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Now that the longest winter in the history of New Hampshire winters (by my uneducated estimation) seems finally to have loosened its grip on us here, I look longingly at my scrubby lawn and beleaguered garden beds and dream of working the soil once more. The New York Times has my number, apparently, as yesterday’s [...]

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How cool is this?  UNH now has an online, interactive, and super fun map of our sustainable learning community! The idea is to show visually the breadth of UNH’s commitment to sustainability: how we organize everything we do around the concept. That includes curriculum, operations, research, and engagement, or what we call the “CORE” of [...]

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Have you ever heard the song by Bruce Cockburn “If tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear”?  Well I have a new question to ponder.  ”If you don’t smell cleaning products in the bathroom, does that mean it’s not clean”?  This is a question that has come up recently in working with UNH Facilities Housekeeping and their [...]

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The discussion in the climate blogosphere last week was focused on a new article by Roger Pielke, Jr., et. al. that appeared in the journal Nature. The article raises some questions about the assumptions behind the scenarios the IPCC uses when projecting future trends in the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, particularly about how much new technologies can reduce future emissions [...]

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