Race To Sustainability Gardens By The Bay
Everardo Frost
If you are a member of a student club, an instructor who is interested in pursuing a location for a long-term garden program, or if you are another CNM-affiliated person interested in establishing community gardens, please contact Bridget O'Leary-Storer at [email protected].
The Campus as a Living Lab (CLL) program encourages applicants to tailor garden beds to serve either as part of an academic curriculum, a learning garden, or a research garden. The program utilizes campus facilities, renovations, retrofits, events, and other projects to teach student learning outcomes in existing courses in innovative and interesting ways, while also integrating sustainability concepts across the curriculum. Here are some noteworthy accomplishments:
Individual Departments at CNM are encouraged to apply for a garden bed if the beds are not adopted out by faculty for any given semester. Water in the Desert and Campus Race to Zero Waste programs are available for Campus Living Lab Projects. Faculty members or students interested in Campus as a Living Lab projects should contact Bridget O'Leary-Storer at [email protected]
Each year, the Campus Race to Zero Waste Program calls for best practice case studies from campuses across the U.S. and Canada to showcase programs and strategies in waste minimization, food waste reduction, education, and awareness. The case study program is a great opportunity to study our progress and to share helpful information with colleges that are working on similar efforts.
In 2021, CNM hosted an Online Education Campaign so that students and staff who are not on campus may continue to learn about waste and recycling. The campaign emphasized residential solutions that align with our situation in Albuquerque, as well as global waste issues. The topics presented included buying in bulk, composting at home, plastic pollutants and pollution, recycling materials and contaminants, the recycling market, landfills, and environmental justice. Learn more about the 2021 CNM Case Study.
Single-stream recycling is an all-in-one recycling method where materials can be combined into one single bin. CNM has blue single-stream recycling bins located next to the trash cans in most classrooms and large green cardboard recycling bins have been placed in common areas across all campuses.
St. Thomas infuses sustainability into every aspect of campus life, from academic programs and student activities to facilities and dining operations. We are working as a community toward a goal of carbon neutrality by 2035, which is why St. Thomas' Board of Trustees approved a university commitment to divest our endowment from fossil fuels.
Our understanding of (and commitment to) sustainability is grounded in our identity as a Catholic university. Our plans embrace the principles of caring for creation, environmental stewardship, and advancing the common good on a shared planet. When it comes to sustainability, The Princeton Review ranks St. Thomas in the Top 50 Green Colleges in America.
Each year, students elect a sustainability representative to Undergraduate Student Government. Students also participate in a Sustainability Living Learning Community through Residence Life and lead multiple clubs to champion sustainability. Off campus, St. Thomas students engage in sustainability via many ongoing initiatives.
The Sustainable Communities Partnership (SCP) collaborates with communities to integrate community-identified sustainability projects into St. Thomas courses across disciplines, engaging students in real-world and applied learning.
In a Sustainability Living Learning Community, you will engage in experiential activities to understand the complexity of key environmental themes while exploring sustainable solutions. You will grow together as you and your community examine important environmental issues.
The main hub of our university is set atop the eastern banks of the Mississippi River in St. Paul. The St. Thomas Sustainability Club coordinates a cleanup that traditionally covers a 2.6-mile stretch of the neighboring body of water, between the Lake Street bridge and Ford Parkway bridge. This Tommie tradition has involved a number of groups and clubs dating back nearly 30 years.
Dining Services and Facilities Management are two key St. Thomas partners committed to advancing sustainability through greener procurement strategies, diversion of food waste, and ongoing education while partnering with all members of the campus community. Students are very engaged and often lead educational opportunities about waste reduction, recycling and composting. Ongoing efforts include:
The Pollinator Path is a series of gardens, some planted to attract pollinators and some planted for aesthetic purposes. They provide critical food and habitats for a wide variety of pollinators and a "living laboratory" for students and the community to study pollinator activity and learn how to support declining pollinator populations.
St. Thomas has one of the only student-focused microgrid research facilities in the nation. Students help develop technology and are trained to shape the evolution of energy in the face of climate change.
Located on the edge of campus, the Stewardship Garden was created to help create a more just and local food system. The project creates research and education opportunities in urban agriculture for students and helps build community relationships on campus and with neighborhood residents. A portion of the produce from the Stewardship Garden is donated to local food shelves.
Designing new buildings for LEED certification is part of the university's larger plan to achieve carbon neutrality for 2035. The university is designing all new buildings larger than 25,000 square feet to a minimum of LEED silver standards. Frey Hall (featured here) became the first mid-rise building in Minnesota to receive LEED platinum certification.
The Office of Sustainability Initiatives facilitates campus sustainability by convening stakeholders from across St. Thomas and the Twin Cities to comprehensively assess, strategically plan, and implement sustainable innovations. We create academic programming for students across the curriculum through experiential, applied learning opportunities and we empower faculty to integrate sustainability into their courses.
The race begins in San Marcos (halfway between Austin and San Antonio) and ends in the Gulf of Mexico at Seadrift. Those 260 miles of hot, buggy paddling and portaging, under the broiling Texas sun and through the pitch-black night, with alligators and big gars to watch out for as you near the coast, culminate in a 7-mile churn through the bay to reach the finish line.
The cutoff for officially finishing the race is 100 hours, but top racers aim for under 40 hours. This year, challenges abounded. Water levels were low, heat was intense, and the bay was choppy. Check out a short video about the race to see some of the challenges they face.
By noon the slowest paddlers had passed through, and the spectators disappeared. We spent the afternoon drifting in the cool water, watching a nesting pair of hawks in the trees, cardinals bathing in the rocky shallows, and hummingbirds zipping above us. Vitex was blooming in a well-tended flower garden by the deck.
Come learn about gardening and design at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, authors, and gardeners a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance; simply click this link and ask to be added. Season 8 kicks off in fall 2024. Stay tuned for more info!
Hello! I'm Pam Penick, a dirt-under-my-nails, hoping-for-rain, spiky-plant lover gardening under the Death Star in Austin, Texas. Here's where I share all the gardening goodness I can dig up, not just at home but wherever I go. Want to know more? Read about me and my gardens, dive into my menu offerings, and follow me on Instagram & Facebook. Or drop me a line to say hi.
The Center for Sustainability advances academic and public understanding of the ways in which social justice and sustainability intersect by integrating principles of social, environmental, and economic sustainability into campus operations, academic and student life, and outreach programs.
Climate change disproportionately affects Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities, creating even greater disparities along the lines of race and socioeconomic status. Just as solutions to reverse global warming must be ingrained in our daily behaviors and decisions, so too, must be actions to promote racial equity, for the only way to build a sustainable world is to ensure quality of life for all people and the planet.
We recognize the complicated history of Santa Clara University--built by the Spanish missionaries on the land of the Ohlone and Muwekma Ohlone people. The SCU community has a lot of work to do to rid the university of institutional racism and foster diversity, equity, and inclusion. We aim to uphold the recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Commission for Diversity and Inclusion.
This means we help improve the understanding of their impact of purchasing/ consumption of resources (e.g. water) and materials (e.g. personal stuff). We also strive to engage the campus to partake in conservation, resource reduction, or voluntary simplicity, as well as recycling, composting, and creative reuse/ upcycling strategies.
Example metrics: number of individuals involved in sustainability-related co-curricular and employee programs, assessments of the campus community's perceived value and intrinsic motivations for sustainable behaviors.
Example metrics: number of sustainability-related and focused courses, number of students and faculty engaged in sustainability-related research, number of students engaged with community members at BUG sites.
The Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS) is a transparent, self-reporting framework for colleges and universities to measure their sustainability performance. View SCU's latest Gold rating report here.
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