Sustainability committee to boost campus dialogue
By Easter Khaw
May 21, 2006 9:00 p.m.
The seed of sustainability has grown at UCLA over the past year
and now it is branching into the chancellor’s office.
As part of an effort to continue to educate students about the
importance of sustainability, Chancellor Albert Carnesale recently
signed a charter establishing the Campus Sustainability Committee
as a permanent advisory body to his office, with a full-time
professional campus coordinator.
“We want to continue building a culture of sustainability
at UCLA and to provide leadership in addressing sustainability
issues, especially in higher education,” Carnesale said in a
press release May 15.
The goals and responsibilities of the committee as outlined in
the charter are “to engage the campus in an ongoing dialogue
about sustainability; to integrate sustainability with existing
campus programs in education, research, operations and community
service; (and) to instill a culture of sustainable long-range
planning and forward-thinking design.”
According the University of California, sustainability
“refers to the physical development and institutional
operating practices that meet the needs of present users without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own
needs, particularly with regard to use and waste of natural
resources.”
“It’s changing the way people think,” said
committee cochair Mary Nichols, director of the Institute of the
Environment.
Dorothy Le, Ecology, Economy, Equity Association chair, defined
sustainability as “a way to live your life in (a)
common-sense way so that your children and grandchildren can be
healthy.” This includes being
environmentally cautious and realizing that the Earth’s
resources are finite.
“It’s being recognized as … an important objective
of the campus,” said cochair Crystal Durham, a staff
assistant to the committee and 2005 UCLA alumna who helped draft
the charter.
The public announcement of the charter signing was postponed to
coincide with the launch of the Web site, committee representatives
said.
Committee cochairs and other representatives said the charter,
which was signed April 20, makes sustainability an official
priority of UCLA.
The charter was the brainchild of the Campus Sustainability
Committee, which existed prior to becoming an official advisory
group. It consists of student, faculty and staff representatives,
who will advise the executive vice chancellor on matters of
sustainability.
Many groups are currently represented in the committee but it
will continue to expand, Durham said.
The charter will reinforce sustainability practices already in
place at UCLA, such as energy and water conservation, said Le, one
of two undergraduate representatives on the committee.
Nichols said the charter provides the principles for projects at
UCLA from new buildings to new courses. Though the charter sets
guidelines rather than rules, Nichols said she felt it reflected
the sentiments of the students, faculty and administrators.
Since the charter was signed, the committee has put together a
report of UCLA’s numerous sustainability activities and
created a Web site to educate people about the campaign, Durham
said.
Le said she is optimistic about what the charter means for
sustainability at UCLA in the long run.
“It basically supports what we’ve been doing all
along, and having the high level administrators in support of it is
going to make it go smoothly (in the future),” Le said
“It has the potential to affect everyone. … We all live on
the same earth, and it’s a really unifying vision.”
So far the charter has not had much impact at the student level,
but as departments apply sustainability practices to everyday
activities such as printing paper, using cleaning supplies and
finding more environmentally friendly means of transportation,
awareness will increase, Le said.
She said students need to understand that what they do today
will have consequences for their posterity.
“We’re not going to be able to live in the … world
if we keep doing what we’re doing,” Le said. “Now
that we’ve done all the easy stuff, I think we need to change
how people use their resources (and) think about it.”
For more information on the
Campus Sustainability Committee
and sustainability, go to
http://www.sustain.ucla.edu.
