Blog category: Director’s Corner

In graduate school at the School of Natural Resources and Environment (now the School for Environment and Sustainability) at the University of Michigan, I had the privilege of learning environmental education concepts from one of the truly great environmental educators, Dr. Bill Stapp. One of our class exercises was to…

In the November 2017, Sustainability Digest I wrote about attending a conference in Atlanta and hearing Paul Hawken talk about Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming.  Project Drawdown, for the first time, defines specifically what we need to do, and what we can do, to…

“The essential challenge is to transform the isolation and self-interest within our communities into connectedness and caring for the whole…. We begin by shifting our attention from the problems of community to the possibility of community.”  Peter Block Here we are in early 2018, and the fabric of our national…

“…a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.”   Albert Einstein Former Unity College President Mitch Thomashow explains the emergence of the sustainability movement this way: “Sustainability is a response to a planetary emergency.”  Investigate any point around the Sustainability Compass –…

"The winter solstice celebrates the return of hope to our land as our planet experiences the first slow turn toward greater daylight…. Pause now to sit in silence in the darkness of this space. Let this space be a safe enclosure of creative gestation for you." From The Circle of…

In September I attended a Chattahoochee Riverkeeper Climate Change Conference where I heard Paul Hawken speak about his new book, Project Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. His ideas had a huge impact on me. I left the presentation thinking very differently about how to…

“When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.” ~H.G. Wells A depiction of the Luafmaschine. A 200th anniversary slid by this summer without much notice for the invention of a taken-for-granted transportation device that changed the world, and today…

“Food fraud, or the act of defrauding buyers of food or ingredients for economic gain… has vexed the food industry throughout history.” -- Renee Johnson, “Food Fraud and ‘Economically Motivated Adulteration’ of Food and Food Ingredients” This summer I read a fascinating and eye-opening book, Real Food Fake Food, by…

“There is as yet no ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it.  Land … is still property.  The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.” -- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949 Sustainable landscapes result when…