2nd Time Around- Smart and Sustainable Campus Conference

Thanks to funding from the Delongchamp family, I was recently able to attend the Smart and Sustainable Campuses’ Conference in Baltimore, Maryland. The part of the conference that I attended, the Student Summit, was designed as a way for college students from campuses throughout the country to interact with one another and share ideas about how to make America’s campuses more sustainable.

Having been to a similar conference before, I knew that I was going to take away valuable information from the presenters and my peers about environmental sustainability. So I was surprised that the most interesting thing that I took away from this conference was a much deeper understanding of how the fundamental pillars of sustainability are connected. Most people who are involved with sustainability know a lot about the “triple bottom line”; people, planet, and profit. These are the three pillars that shape sustainability, and before this conference I generally regarded each of them separately and rarely saw how they intertwined. However, at the conference I finally saw how social sustainability creates an environment in which people can come together in order to address environmental issues. Social sustainability to me was always just something that was summarized as helping people in need. Because of my experiences, I now summarize social sustainability as something that creates a community. Donating clothes to the less fortunate is not just a way to clothe people, but it is a way for people to come together as a collective and help one another out. Creating this collective is a huge step towards progress in addressing environmental issues. Environmental sustainability would never make any progress if it was not for the community that is created from social sustainability.

With this new view on social sustainability, I was able to see the problems with the demographics of the people who actively engage in sustainable efforts. Looking around at the conference, I was unsurprised to see that most of the attendees and presenters were young and a majority were women. More importantly, nearly every person attending the conference was white. While I’ve always noticed that this was the case at most sustainability events, it really didn’t seem like a problem to me before this conference. It occurred to me that a huge amount of people are being completely left out of the sustainability movement, and many never have the opportunity to become involved. That’s why social sustainability is so important. I really think that we as humans need to connect with one another and come together as a community to tackle the biggest issues that are facing our planet. It shouldn’t matter how old a person is, their gender, or most importantly what their racial background is. When humans come together we do great things, and it really is time for us who care about sustainability to try our best to get everybody involved.