Sustainable Academics

Our aim is to understand the challenges of peak oil, global climate change, and natural resource depletion.  More importantly, we want to work to create the solutions to those problems.

~Jim Ellefson
Professor; Poet-in-Residence

In the Classroom

Sustain Champlain encourages faculty to include sustainaibility concepts in their curriculum and to engage students in related projects.

Examples include:

• Contemporary Media Issue 315 with Professor Rob Williams, Mid-Term Video Project Assignment: To shoot, edit and upload a one minute YouTube video on a specific sustainability related project on campus. See the videos here.
  
• Concepts of Community 120 with Professor Cyndi Brandenburg, uses Hurricane Katrina as a case study to consider notions of environmental justice.   Assignment/Project description available.
  

• History 415: Seminar on World Contemporary Issues with Professor Chris Colt focuses on sustainability with readings such as Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollen, Deep Economy by Bill McKibben, and The Transition Towns Handbook

• History 415: Seminar on Contemporary World Issues with Professor Ron Miller focuses on environmental issues and a transition to a sustainable culture, focusing on issues such as global climate change and peak oil, food and agriculture issues, renewable energy, as well as the historical, political and cultural context of our current crisis. The underlying theme is to consider the modern industrial worldview alongside the emerging holistic/ecological worldview.  Texts include Derrick Jensen's Listening to the Land.

• Event Management Senior Seminar with Professor Peter Straube - students have presented on green hotels, green restaurants, and green events.

• Cor330: Survivor Morocco with Professors Cyndi Brandenburg and Mike Lange. What will it take to survive in the 21st century? This class explores the interplay between climate change and individual and cultural survival in Morocco. Using multiple disciplinary perspectives, we examine what it means to survive in the face of environmental change, from a single person through an entire population. By understanding survival in both human and environmental contexts, we illustrate how challenges faced by people in this region mirror challenges faced by everyone.

• Core Global Module for students studying abroad - discussions about ecological and carbon footprints.

• Cor210: Scientific Revolutions with Professor Signe Daly. The challenges of the 21st century demand an understanding of the nature and limitations of scientific thinking, the place of science within society, and its relationship to other forms of human thought and expression such as religion, art and literature. This course will examine three major transformations of scientific ideas and their social and historical context, and will help students gain a broad understanding of the relationship of scientific ideas to other forms of thought and expression.  Course is currently studying issues around windpower.
  

Lectures and Presentations 

Sustain Champlain sponsors and collaborates lectures and presentations on topics ranging from local foods and climate change to environmental justice.

Past events include:

• The Wisdom of Small Farms and Local Food with John E. Caroll, Professor, Environmental Conservation, University of New Hampshire
• Green Grass and High Tides: Hope, Joy, and Opportunity within a New Green Economy, a panel of professors, farmers, and green engineers
• Focus the Nation Kick-off Event with author Bill McKibben

LEAD

Sustain Champlain draws connections between our projects and the Life Experience & Action Dimension (LEAD) program by developing proposals for student participation.

See current LEAD opportunities here.

Past examples include:

• Residence Hall captains for the Consumption Junktion energy challenge
• Participation in the campus-wide Sustainabilty Challenge
• Participation in the Champlain College delegation to the annual PowerShift student conference