the Informer

Recently the university named professors Dr. Laura Pence and Katherine Owens as co-coordinators of sustainability for the school.

According to Pence, last semester a Sustainability Commission was created due in part to a demand for one by the Faculty Senate.

Provost Lynn Pasquerella wanted to designate a Sustainability Coordinator when the Commission met and “after some discussions, Professor Owens and I agreed to take on the position jointly,” Pence said.

Because this is the first Sustainability Commission, Pence and Owens were given the freedom to decide exactly what they wanted the goals to be for their positions.

Owens and Pence decided the best place to start was to see where the campus stands with sustainability.

“There is so much energy on campus to start doing projects and make progress becoming more green, but in order to measure the progress of these projects,” Pence explained, “we need to understand the situation at the beginning.”

Currently, the two coordinators are making some short-term goals for the spring semester before making any long term goals for the university. “Essentially we are working on a trial basis for the Sustainability Coordinators and we’ll see how it goes at the end of this semester,” Pence stated.

Pence’s project for the semester is to make an inventory of everything on campus related to sustainability. With help from Lisa Parker from ENHP, Pence will make all of that information available on the Web at uhaweb.hartford.edu/sustain.

Pence explained the reason for this is because “it’s been frustrating to everyone who deals with sustainability that there isn’t more information about what all is going on…So providing a central location where our community and prospective students can learn about all our projects and plans is a high priority.”

Professor Owens will be conducting a greenhouse gas inventory of the university, which Pence said is, “the critical starting point for working to reduce our carbon footprint over time.”

Owens will also be working on surveying attitudes and behaviors of the campus community towards sustainability as a baseline for future plans and projects.

Pence, who teaches an Environmental Sustainability section of First-Year Seminar, is very passionate about this position.
“If I had to have a campaign slogan, I’d call it ‘Communication and Community.’ I’d like to see all the different sustainability efforts by different people be recognized and be much more well known.”

Pence stresses the need to communicate the various projects going on all over campus more effectively and the need to act collectively as opposed to relying on one person or a group of people working independently to achieve sustainability.

“It’s going to take each member of our community working together to create more sustainable habits and practices that reduce our impact on the environment,” Pence said.

“One very exciting and unexpected project arose this semester in part through the Faculty Senate. I’m now working with Facilities, SGA, RHA, CUPS and Professor Wick Griswold to propose a competition next fall among the Complexes to reduce their consumption of electricity and water.”

If this project proves to be effective, they plan to work with CETA to expand it to all of the halls and compare utility use among different types of building construction.

“That project really points out how much we all need to work together to make progress as well as the excitement and energy that happens when we come together as a community.”

To contact the Sustainability Commission with project ideas or information on the sustainability inventory, feel free to e-mail Pence at lpence@hartford.edu.