UMBC forges ahead with sustainability

Sustaining the energy

By Patrick Hixenbaugh, Contributing Writer

Published: Thursday, September 19, 2013

More than ever, UMBC student groups are coming together to develop sustainability interests, such as the community garden and composting. This is a recent outgrowth of UMBC’s deep commitment to climate neutrality. By fostering connections between people, UMBC is definitely moving in the right direction when it comes to sustainability.

Already this month, UMBC has seen composting in The Commons, as well as behind the scenes work on a new Community Garden initiative and a bike share program.

“Students come in every year with ideas,” says Donna Anderson, Manager of Landscape, Grounds and Recycling, “The Climate Commitment Task Force [CCTF] has been around since 2007, and there’s a lot that has already happened.”

In 2007, Dr. Hrabrowski signed a commitment with 330 other universities to reduce our climate impact and lead the drive to develop new sustainable technologies.

“We’re making a great deal of progress [in sustainability],” says Dr. Hrabrowski. “If people look, they can see all our progress in teaching, research and practices on campus.”

To further that goal, the administration is increasingly encouraging student involvement, which had prior been somewhat fragmented across different groups. “There are so many groups interested in the same thing,” said Anderson. “They need to be connected to each other, so we can get the full picture of what can be done.”

In November 2012, the administration created a new position, the Environmental Sustainability Coordinator, and brought on Tanvi Gadhia, UMBC alumni ’09 and an environmental studies graduate student at Johns Hopkins.

“Having Tanvi here makes a difference. We’ve always needed a link between the CCTF and what students are doing,” said Anderson.

On August 30, Gadhia hosted the Sustainability Leadership Summit, a gathering of student leaders in sustainability with representatives from many student and staff groups.

“What I liked most [about the Summit] was the opportunity to meet people that both shared an interest in the field, but who also were already involved in different student orgs,” said Allie Henn, a junior environmental studies and economics double major. “It also gave me a better idea as to how to voice my ideas and opinions in a constructive way.”

For composting, students, rather than the administration, play the main role in educating the campus. “My role is disseminating information to student leaders,” said Anderson. “It’s important for student leaders to get information out to their groups.”

The Community Garden is also a student-led initiative. “As a culture, Americans have become very separated from their food,” says Julianna Brightman, junior environmental science major. “A garden at UMBC is a way for us to bring one another back to where our food comes from.”

It’s not easy to overcome inertia. “A lot of things we try, people aren’t for,” said Jasmine Wands, junior environmental studies major, and president of Environmental Task Force.

But this year, the sustainability groups are coordinating more to get things done. “We wanted to do a zero-waste policy, but composting and the bike share took precedence,” said Wands.

Much of this new productivity and interconnection can be directly traced back work done by the Sustainability Coordinator. “[My role] is to coordinate the many aspects of the campus’s environmental footprint,” said Gadhia.

Gadhia said, “[I] work to empower the campus community, to catalyze new initiatives, and develop new programs that help improve [our] environmental impact.”

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