Month: June 2017

OWU’s ‘Still In’ Paris Climate Agreement

President Rock Jones, Ph.D., signed the document June 5, making Ohio Wesleyan one of 183 colleges and universities to endorse the proclamation. “We Are Still In” also has been signed by representatives from 125 cities and nine states, and by 902 businesses and investors.

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University Among Those Supporting Paris Climate Agreement

There’s a familiar name among the 1,219 who signed the “We Are Still In” document in support of the Paris Agreement and its efforts to combat climate change.

President Rock Jones, Ph.D., signed the document June 5, making Ohio Wesleyan one of 183 colleges and universities to endorse the proclamation. “We Are Still In” also has been signed by representatives from 125 cities and nine states, and by 902 businesses and investors.

“It is imperative that the world know that in the U.S., the actors that will provide the leadership necessary to meet our Paris commitment are found in city halls, state capitals, colleges and universities, investors and businesses,” the document states. “Together, we will remain actively engaged with the international community as part of the global effort to hold warming to well below 2℃ and to accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy that will benefit our security, prosperity, and health.”

There are many reasons for Ohio Wesleyan to sign the document, Jones said. Perhaps most notable is the pioneering work of F. Sherwood Rowland, Ph.D., a 1948 OWU graduate.

A Delaware native, Rowland earned the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work studying chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). His research led to significant discoveries in the field, including that chemicals in aerosol sprays, air conditioners and foam insulation were damaging the oxygen layer surrounding the earth’s atmosphere.

At a White House climate change roundtable in 1997, Rowland spoke passionately on behalf of scientists concerned about global warming: “Isn’t it a responsibility of scientists, if you believe that you have found something that can affect the environment, isn’t it your responsibility to do something about it, enough so that action actually takes place? If not us,” Rowland said, “who? If not now, when?”

Woodrow W. Clark II, Ph.D., a 1967 Ohio Wesleyan alumnus, also made an impact through his efforts to protect the environment as one of 30 members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC was a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, along with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, for the film “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The spirit of “We Are Still In” also connects well with Ohio Wesleyan’s academic program and the April announcement that it was creating an Environment and Sustainability Program with a new environmental science major this fall, Jones said.

The Environment and Sustainability Program will include the collaboration of nearly 20 Ohio Wesleyan faculty members who specialize in the natural sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. One of the program’s highlights its innovative “Conversations: Toward a Sustainable Future” course. Students will take the course twice – once as newly declared environmental science majors and once as seniors in the program – to provide both a cornerstone and capstone for their study of ecological issues.

In addition, Jones said, Ohio Wesleyan’s signature Sagan National Colloquiumlecture series also has spent a semester examining global warming.

“In 2013, the entire campus focused attention on the ‘Interdisciplinary Impacts of Climate Change’ through the Sagan National Colloquium,” Jones said. “The Colloquium’s founding vision of connecting the liberal arts with civic arts – studying a topic and taking action in response to that study – is reflected in our signing of the ‘We Are Still In’ document.”

Learn more about the “We Are Still In” initiative at http://wearestillin.com.

Environmental Studies at OWU Update Summer 2017

An update on OWU’s Environmental Studies Program as the summer of 2017 starts.

An update on OWU’s Environmental Studies Program as the summer of 2017 starts.

This is a followup to a 2015-2016 update and 2016-2017 update posted on the OWU Environment & Sustainability Blog.

First of all, the Environmental Studies Program is no longer a thin after our proposal for an expanded Environment and Sustainability Program was voted into existence at the May 2017 faculty meeting. The proposal was compiled by a group of faculty, Laurie Anderson, Ellen Arnold, Amy Downing, Chris Fink, and John Krygier, drawing from 5 years of efforts. Additional work on the Environmental Science major was done by Bart Martin.

Information about the program has been added to the OWU web pages:

Our proposed OWU Campus Sustainability Plan created by students, staff and faculty over the last few years is just about in its final form and should be heading to the administration this summer.

Sustainability_Plan_OWU_March_2017

Student Emily Howald has spent the year gathering feedback and making adjustments to the plan. The Sustainability Task Force (STF), initiated in 2008, has overseen the development of the plan. Contact Nathan Amador and let him know if you want to be added to the STF mailing list. The STF is open to all.

Student Emily Howald and faculty member John Krygier wrote a paper which is to be published as a chapter in the book Sustainable Communities Design Handbook edited by OWU Alumni Woody Clark (OWU 1967). The book should be published by Elsevier in 2018. The chapter is an overview of OWU’s approach to sustainability, called “Scrappy Sustainability at Ohio Wesleyan University.” Clark was recently presented with an OWU Alumni Distinguish Achievement Award.

The 2017 May Move Out was another success. Students donated tons of items to Goodwill as they moved off campus last month. The event, first held in 2012, is at this point relatively easy to manage and does not cost the University any money (the cost of additional storage pods for donations is offset by the need for fewer trash dumpsters).

Our reusable carryout food container program is also relatively stable after some ups and downs over the last year. We have added drop off locations for the containers, increased their size, and decreased the size of the paper, throw-away containers (thus an incentive to use the reusable containers). Students Izzy Sommerdorf and Sarah Hanes have developed a proposal for making the program even easier for students, and our campus food service, Chartwells, is evaluating their proposal.

Sustainable food on campus has moved forward on several fronts. Our campus food service has recently worked out an agreement to purchase local produce from the Seminary Hill Farm, just south of campus, beginning this fall. This outcome is based on the efforts of student Ellen Sizer.

Student Emily Howald is working on a proposal for quarter-credit OWU Activity courses focused on gardening. Students would work with a skilled gardener in a course held during the first half of the fall semester, and second half of the spring semester, to maintain our campus community garden.

Students Maddie Coalmer and Larynn Cutshaw generated a proposal to plant perennial crops (asparagus, mint, raspberries), which require minimal maintenance, on a few out-of-the-way locations on campus.

Another successful Green Week was held at the end of the 2017 spring semester:

We have expanded the number of hydration stations on campus with a half-dozen new stations being installed this summer. Most of the new hydration stations are in or around athletic facilities on campus. Athletes have tended to be one of the more significant users of bottled water. Student Dominic Orsini wrote a grant and received funding for promotional water bottles. These will be used to promote the new hydration stations to athletes when they move on campus late this summer.

Nathan Amador will take a group of 12 students to Costa Rica as part of a Travel Learning course. This will be the second time the class will travel to Costa Rica. The students will learn environmental data collection and analysis methods, then implement those methods while in Costa Rica over the semester break (January 2018). Amador and the students are working with Amy Work (OWU ’04) and her Geoporter organization. More info on Amy’s efforts are here.

Again, thanks for all the efforts on what has been a great cross-disciplinary collaboration between faculty, students, staff and alumni over the past five years.