I was so excited about Shana Weber’s lecture on Thursday night!! She far surpassed my expectations and really did a wonderful job presenting on college campus sustainability.

Weber talked a lot about how college campuses are living labs and how we must take advantage of the opportunities that this atmosphere allows. There are hundreds of brilliant minds on Lafayette’s campus and we should not be constrained by the label of our majors. There is the potential for so many multi-disiplinary projects to be done on campus but in order to do so we must pop “major” bubble that we put ourselves in. Like we discussed in class, we cannot pre-package our college experience and only work in our fields otherwise we will never reach our full potential.

Sustainability allows for so much multi-disiplinary work and that was clear throughout Shana Weber’s entire presentation. The “Do it in the dark” campaign was a perfect example of this. Weber connected a sustainability employee with someone in the psychology department who then collaborated with a tech start-up near Princeton in order to track energy use on campus. So cool right?! Without a sustainability director these connections never would have been made and a lot of the progress that Princeton has made with sustainability could not have been done.

There is so much room for sustainability change to be made at Lafayette so PLEASE lets fight to get a director of our own! We need a voice in administration to make this change and to make the change effective. President Byerly and Provost Abu Rizvi both came from schools in Vermont, a state that is far ahead of others in sustainable practices, right before they were hired by Lafayette. So I am surprised that they have yet to make significant change regarding our campus’ environmental impact. They have seen how well it can work out so why not bring it to Laf too? Hopefully this change is coming down the pipeline and we can join the many colleges who are becoming leaders in sustainable living.