sustainability | Sustainability

U named finalist for Racial Equity and Sustainability Collaboration award

December 6, 2021

By Ayrel Clark-Proffitt, Sustainability Office

The University of Utah is one of five finalists for the Racial Equity and Sustainability Collaboration award from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).

The U’s project, “Integrating racial equity, social justice, and sustainability through general education learning outcome assessment,” uses learning outcomes for all undergraduates to understand the inseparability of racial equity, social justice and sustainability, said Adrienne Cachelin, professor (lecturer) in the Department of Environmental & Sustainability Studies and the project lead.

“Too often, sustainability education focuses on ecological science, ignoring the systemic link between the devaluation of black and brown bodies and the degradation of the environment,” Cachelin said. “It’s the same system at play—two sides of the same coin.”

The project was developed in response to a letter from students to the university administration that suggested granting a degree to any student that did not understand sustainability was “profoundly irresponsible.” Cachelin notes that many universities include a sustainability general education course requirement. However, the project’s interdisciplinary faculty team chose to focus on learning outcomes to ensure that undergraduates are likely to engage in conversations about the relationship between racism and environmental problems in more than one required course. The U’s General Education Learning Outcomes call for students to build skills in “judging the value of a system according to how it accounts for equity and inequity created by human actions,” and “analyzing a system focusing on the interdependence of people and planet.”

The award winners will be announced in an online ceremony on Dec. 9. AASHE empowers higher education administrators, faculty, staff and students to be effective change agents and drivers of sustainability innovation. The University of Utah is an AASHE member institution providing all students, staff and faculty with access to AASHE’s resources by creating a free account using an @utah.edu email address.

We are grateful

November 25, 2021

By the Sustainability Office

It is easy to be cynical. It’s hard to escape any day without the weight of the world creeping into our thoughts, our conversations, or even our dreams. It can be overwhelming.

And yet …

We are not alone. We are thankful for the world leaders who committed to important steps to reduce the threats of climate change earlier this month at COP26, the annual climate change summit. We are thankful for the protesters pushing, demanding that countries do more to protect communities. And we are most thankful to those engaging in the everyday work to address climate change, systemic racism, environmental degradation and countless other complex issues where change is desperately needed.

It is easy to be cynical. But it is also easy to be grateful.

Jessica Chaplain, PhD student in Communication at the U, attended COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland at the beginning of November. Below is a highlight of her experience inside and outside the event center.

Chaplain poses in front of a welcome display at COP26.

Global Change & Sustainability Center Seminars: Fall Preview

August 30, 2021

By Maria Archibald, Sustainability Office

The Global Change & Sustainability Center (GCSC) Seminar Series returns on Tuesday, Aug. 31. The series features a different speaker on alternate Tuesdays of the fall semester. All seminars are free and will take place on Zoom.

Dr. Brenda Bowen, director of the GCSC and associate professor of Geology & Geophysics, will kick off the fall series with her talk on “Transdisciplinary Explorations of Sustainability in a Time of Change at the Bonneville Salt Flats.” She encourages everyone—students, staff, faculty, and community members—to tune in.

“I’ll be talking about work that I’ve been doing for eight or nine years, really focused on the Bonneville Salt Flats and the changes that are currently happening in this landscape,” Bowen says. “We’ve been studying how this environment is changing from a biophysical standpoint—so looking at the sediments in the groundwater and environmental fluxes of how the landscape is changing—but then also have been working really closely with social scientists, and communication scholars, and engineers, and artists, and stakeholders from a huge range of different perspectives to try to do science that will help aid in data-driven decision making.”

While Bowen specializes in geology, she explains that the interdisciplinary and social science elements of her work are just as essential. “We got to advance the work on the science, and across the sciences, but then also really bridged into these other areas around how perceptions of environmental change are framed based on your position in the stakeholder ecosystem,” Bowen says. “Who talks to who, and who’s at the table, and how [are] decisions made about land management, and resource use, and extraction, and mitigation, and restoration? Who’s making those decisions?”

Interdisciplinary sustainability research like Bowen’s will reappear throughout this semester’s GCSC seminars, which feature faculty members from all different disciplines across the University of Utah campus, ranging from law to philosophy to engineering. The fall series takes on questions such as, “How do we bridge across these disciplinary silos that are so entrenched in academia?” Bowen explains. “How do we see this from all…different disciplinary lenses and approaches?”

Dr. Stacy Harwood, professor and chair in the Department of City & Metropolitan Planning, will give the second seminar on “Everyday Racism in Integrated Spaces,” which examines the experiences of students of color at the University of Utah, a predominantly white institution. “We talk a lot about campus as a living lab,” says Bowen. “But it’s not just the physical spaces where we do that—it can be in our social spaces, too.”

Dr. Carlos Santana, professor of Philosophy, will wrap up September with a discussion of the Anthropocene and possibilities for collaboration between natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities in a new geologic era.

In October and November Dr. Heather Tanana, research assistant professor in the College of Law, will discuss the intersection of Indigenous resource needs, climate change, and environmental policies; Dr. Taylor Sparks, professor of Materials Science and Engineering, will discuss the materials needed to achieve a just energy transition; and Dr. Lynne Zummo, professor of Educational Psychology and curator of learning sciences at the Natural History Museum of Utah, will explore the cognitive process related to learning and making decisions about climate change.

Bowen encourages students, staff, faculty, and the broader community to tune in at no cost for this semester’s bi-weekly seminars. Interested graduate students can still add the online section of the one-credit GCSC Seminar course, which can be found under SUST 6800-002 in the course catalog.

Join us for Bowen’s seminar on ecological change at the Salt Flats on Tuesday, Aug. 31 at 4 p.m., and learn more about the upcoming seminar speakers and topics.

GCSC Seminar: Awakening an Audience with Environmental Theater

April 14, 2021

By Maria Archibald, Sustainability Office

Thinking about climate change can be so overwhelming that we might, at times, wish to look away. Some aren’t willing to look at all. Phantom Limb Company invites us to consider our relationship to the natural world through a different lens—one that is mesmerizing, emotional, and beautiful.

On Tuesday, April 20 at 4 p.m., co-founder and artistic director of Phantom Limb Company Jessica Grindstaff will give her GCSC seminar, “Storytelling, Imagism and Empathy: Awakening an Audience,” which explores puppetry and performing arts as methods of generating emotion and action around environmental issues and climate change. Three virtual performances by Phantom Limb are also offered through UtahPresents, with the final screening on April 22. Ticket holders will be able to view all three performances through April 30.

Jessica Grindstaff began her career as a visual artist, and arrived in the theater industry through an unexpected twist of events. “I can’t really explain how we ended up where we have,” she says of her journey with co-founder, Erik Sanko. “We had a visual art show together, and then the gallerist wanted him to do a little performance with the puppets that he was exhibiting.”

“We just accidentally ended up making this play,” Grindstaff says. “It was supposed to run for a couple of weeks in downtown New York, and then the New York Times wrote it up and it ended up running for three months.”

The show was a huge success. After it closed, a producer approached Grindstaff and Sanko and asked what they hoped to do next. “We both had been big fans of the Shackleton story, so we said let’s make a play about that,” Grindstaff reflects. They received a grant to fund their idea, and soon found themselves in Antarctica researching Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 Trans-Antarctic Expedition. “I would say that it was actually there where it started to become real for me,” Grindstaff says. “I started to understand what I wanted to do”

In Antarctica, Grindstaff and Sanko met and worked with scientists whose research centered on climate change and melting ice. “The majority of their work [was]… in one way or another cataloging the effects of climate change on the ice, on the land, on the animals that live there,” Grindstaff explains. “So, rather than the play just being about Ernest Shackleton, we introduced a component to the piece that was about the future of Antarctica and climate change.”

It became important to Grindstaff and Sanko that their work include a social and environmental message. “And so, we decided to make a trilogy,” Grindstaff says. “We would spend the next 10 years making a trilogy that was related to people’s relationships to the environment and nature, and how that was changing,”

The second piece in the trilogy, Memory Rings, is about the Methuselah—the world’s oldest living tree. “We were looking at the timeline of that tree’s life and everything that happened from germination until now, and looking for stories of people’s relationship to the forest or wood over that time,” Grindstaff says. The final piece in the trilogy, Falling Out, takes place in Fukushima and examines the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami and subsequent nuclear meltdown—a natural disaster paired with a manmade disaster.

Phantom Limb’s plays rarely have words, focusing instead on movement and imagery. “On stage, we’re placing images near one another and then ask an audience to make their own connections,” Grindstaff says. “Especially when you’re talking about things like climate—issues that are overly described to us in society in very specific ways that are often around fear, or guilt, or what we should personally be doing—I think leaving space for people in that conversation to find out who they are, and what their role and what their thoughts are in it and their emotions are in it, is really important and it’s really powerful.”

Grindstaff and Sanko use puppets, in part because they are an effective medium for generating emotion. “For a puppet to work, someone has to empathize,” Grindstaff explains. “The puppet is nothing. It’s a piece of wood or a papier-mache. An audience member has to engage in the work on an empathetic level, they have to put themselves inside of it. And I think around the topics of climate and climate change and our roles in our communities, that that is a great thing to do.”

The results of their art are hard to measure, Grindstaff says, but audience members often tell her that they feel moved and leave the theater thinking about their own roles within these complex issues. “They walked out looking at themselves, which is a goal, I think, in our work.”

Register for Grindstaff’s talk on Tuesday, April 20 at 4 p.m. to learn more about Phantom Limb Company’s work, and how environmental art moves hearts and minds.

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February 2, 2021

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GCSC seminars: spring 2021 sneak peak

January 29, 2021

By Maria Archibald, Sustainability Office

The Global Change & Sustainability Center (GCSC) kicks off its spring 2021 seminar series on Tuesday, Feb. 2. Brenda Bowen, director of the GCSC, encourages everyone—students, staff, faculty, and community members alike—to tune in.

The 2021 spring series features a different speaker on every Tuesday of the spring semester. All seminars are free and will take place online.

Bowen explains that the increased frequency of the spring seminars is due, in part, to the GCSC’s desire to provide opportunities for connection and engagement in the online world. “We just don’t get to see our community the same way right now with everyone working remotely,” Bowen says. “This is really one of the main ways we’re connecting with students, with faculty, and with the community.”

Speakers will include professors and alumni from the U, as well as researchers and academics from across the country. “We have Steve Burian kicking off the seminar series,” Bowen says. “He’s been an associate director of the Global Change & Sustainability Center since its inception, and is just concluding a really exciting project where he’s been working with USAID on water sustainability globally.” On Tuesday, Feb. 2, Burian will give the first GCSC talk of the semester, “Catalyzing Higher Education Capacity to Advance Water Security in Pakistan.”

The spring seminar series was designed to reflect the importance of justice, resilience, and wellness in sustainability work, and to draw connections between sustainability and current, pressing issues, says Bowen. With COVID-19 weighing on the minds of Utahns, for example, the GCSC specifically sought an expert to speak on the connection between global change, viruses, disease, and land-use decisions.

Other talks will examine how social factors influence health, explore strategies for inclusive community engagement, share research and practices for urban resilience, discuss sustainable development in the aftermath of COVID-19, and much more.

“What’s exciting is that all of [the talks] build on each other and you learn a little bit about something different in each one,” Bowen says. “The whole point is to come learn something new.”

Bowen encourages graduate students to sign up for the one-credit GCSC seminar course and hopes that community members will tune in every Tuesday at 4 p.m. “You’re going to get every perspective,” she says. “The artistic perspective, a justice perspective, a biophysical science perspective, a policy perspective, built infrastructure…we’re going to come at it from all these different viewpoints.”

While each speaker comes from a different background and expertise, their talks fit together and tell a story over the course of the semester. “They weave together into this complex world of sustainability,” Bowen says.

Join us for Steve Burian’s seminar on water security on Tuesday, Feb. 2 at 4 p.m., and learn more about the upcoming seminar speakers and topics.

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October 1, 2020

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Sustainability Leaders Recommit to Centering Equity and Justice

June 2, 2020

Along with many of you, we spent this past week filled with grief. These feelings are tragically familiar, as is their cause. The legacy of racial oppression played out on city streets around the country and right here in Salt Lake City. We all must play a role in demanding justice in our communities and our nation. Recognizing that our silence would itself be a form of violence, we recommit to working actively against the systems that devalue and disregard black lives and disproportionately impact communities of color. In the Sustainability Office and Global Change & Sustainability Center, we will center justice and equity, reaffirming antiracist practice as a fundamental part of our shared work. We stand in solidarity with oppressed communities, pledge to listen and act, and acknowledge that this is a collective fight.

Brenda Bowen, Global Change & Sustainability Center Director
Adrienne Cachelin, Sustainability Education Director and professor/lecturer in Environmental & Sustainability Studies
Kerry Case, Chief Sustainability Officer

Researching Sustainability from Home

March 19, 2020

Did you know that the Sustainability Office has a librarian?

Academic Librarian Amy Brunvand has been working with the Sustainability Office to help collect and preserve information about using the campus as a living laboratory for sustainable change. While campus is shut down, University of Utah students, faculty, and staff can think of campus libraries as a virtual branch library that offers access to collections, subscriptions, and services to anyone with a university network ID and password. That means you’ll be able to do college-level research from home in order to complete literature reviews, term papers, and other course assignments.

There are specific strategies that are especially useful to approach sustainability research topics. Consider: Who cares about this topic? Why do they care? The list of stakeholders often includes:

Federal, state, and local government agencies that set policy and write regulations;
Industries and businesses that lobby for favorable business conditions;
Citizen groups that advocate for environmental and social justice causes.

Many of these types of organizations put reports and information online. However, researchers may still run into frustrating paywalls. If that happens to you, University of Utah campus libraries can help. For instance, if you are researching local issues, the Salt Lake Tribune has a paywall, but you can read articles online for free by using the Marriott Library subscription. Likewise, if Google Scholar—a search engine for scholarly academic papers—hits a paywall, you can log into the library website to get the article you need. Even if the university doesn’t have a subscription, librarians can ask if another library can send articles via interlibrary loan.

Here are three things you can do to make research from home more efficient and effective:

Set up your computer for off-campus library access.
You’ll need to do a few things to get full access to library subscriptions, ebooks, and journal articles.
Get research help from a real person.
If you are not finding what you need, don’t waste hours searching. The Marriott Library offers research help via live chat, phone, and email.
If you hit a paywall, ask the library for help.
Campus libraries have a number of ways to help you get around paywalls and can even purchase copies of ebooks on request.

Recently, Brunvand set up several research portals to help students find information about key local issues:

Librarians at the Marriott Library serve as liaisons for sustainability-focused degree programs. These librarians have also set up research portals, including the following:

As always, Brunvand is available to help answer questions about sustainability research. You can email her at amy.brunvand@utah.edu. Be aware that library hours and services may change in response to the COVID-19 public health situation. Check the Marriott Library’s COVID-19 webpage for updates. Computer labs are available in the Union, Gardner Commons, and Health Sciences Education Building; please check with individual labs for hours. If being at home puts you in a vulnerable spot, contact a Student Success Advocate.

Seeking Systems that Serve Us All

February 24, 2020

by Amber Aumiller, graduate assistant, Sustainability Office

In the western United States, most of our cities are situated in arid landscapes–dryland ecosystems or deserts. Historically, dry landscapes have been viewed as wastelands, lacking value until we created a use for them. Most humans now live in cities, and dryland ecosystems are currently home to over 2 billion people worldwide. Like any other organism, we humans modify our environment to facilitate our survival and meet our needs. And there is a tendency for us to think of cities as separate from “nature”. Dr. Nancy Grimm’s groundbreaking work examines the relationship of humans and other living creatures with their urban environments and looks at ways we might rethink the socio-cultural value of the water-limited landscapes we call home.

On Tuesday, February 25th, Dr. Nancy Grimm will present her talk “Rivers of our dreams: water futures in urban central Arizona” from 4 – 5 p.m. in room 210 of the Aline B. Skaggs Biology Building as part of the Global Change and Sustainability Center’s Seminar Series.

Dr. Grimm, an ecosystem ecologist and interdisciplinary sustainability scientist, is the Virginia M. Ullman Professor of Ecology in the School of Life Sciences, distinguished Sustainability Scientist in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, and Regents Professor at Arizona State University. Last year, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Grimm currently serves as the co-director of the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (URExSRN), working with cities to create collaborative visions for future urban infrastructure, building resilience and sustainability plans, and exploring nature-based solutions to urban resilience challenges. As the director of the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER), an innovative interdisciplinary study of complex metropolitan regions, she helped develop conceptual models of social-ecological-technological systems, expanding how we think of ecology today.

Biodiversity makes ecosystems healthier and more resilient to destabilizing disturbances. Climate change is already bringing more potentially catastrophic disturbances like storms, floods, and droughts to our doorsteps. Couple this with the lack of biodiversity in cities, and one can see how, in thinking of our cities as separate from nature, we’ve made ourselves more vulnerable and less prepared to survive climate crises. Dr. Grimm’s research asks the question of how we might come together collectively to make plans and increase our ability to adapt to stability-rattling events.

A desert city like Phoenix, with 20 years of CAP-LTER data, can help researchers model systems around questions like how pollution might cycle through the water of the city and desert streams. Who might be impacted most in extreme events like floods or droughts? How will the city’s infrastructure hold up? How does stormwater impact water quality? Different ecosystems respond differently to the same disturbance, so not every city will approach, respond to, or withstand droughts or floods in the same way. But looking at ecosystem models that include cities is a way to start thinking of all the complex interworking parts of the system.

What does it look like for an urban environment to affect changes in an ecological system? How important is the factor of scale in shaping more sustainable cities? What sorts of tradeoffs might we expect in an effort to create a more sustainable future for ourselves?

Come explore these questions with Dr. Grimm on Tuesday afternoon, February 11, 2020. Her talk “Rivers of our dreams: water futures in urban Arizona,” will be from 4 – 5 p.m. in room 210 of the Aline B. Skaggs Biology Building. As usual, we’ll have some sweet treats, coffee, and tea, so bring your mug and enjoy.