If you’re in the neighborhood on March 4, 2010, and you’re pondering a Master’s in Sustainability Management, the Earth Institute, Columbia University has an invitation for you:

The Earth Institute, Columbia University invites you to join us for an information session on Thursday, March 4th at 6:30 p.m. to learn more about the brand new M.S. in Sustainability Management co-sponsored by Columbia University’s School of Continuing Education and the Earth Institute.

All organizations, whether they are multinational corporations or local nonprofits, face a growing number of environmental challenges from limiting carbon emissions to managing water resources. The M.S. in Sustainability Management is a highly specialized professional program that will formally train and educate sustainability practitioners for a broad range of fields. The program is designed to meet the growing demand for sustainability managers and will train leaders to bridge the gap between the principle of sustainable development and its practice. Students in the program will learn sophisticated environmental measurement tools and cutting-edge environmental science to fully understand the systematic and organizational role of sustainability in any organization. This program is ideal for practitioners and aspiring professionals working in organizational management, regulatory compliance, facilities operations, and environmental stewardship.

The program is offered on a full-time or part-time basis to accommodate the schedules of working professionals.

Date: Thursday, March 4th
Time: 6:30 p.m.
Location: Columbia University, Morningside Campus, Low Memorial Library, Faculty Room

To register for the information session, please go to:

https://register.applyyourself.com/?id=col-scems&pid=1953&eID=27667&rid=1

Master of Science in Sustainability Management
School of Continuing Education and The Earth Institute
Columbia University

http://ce.columbia.edu/Sustainability-Management

Further Reading:

Blogs From the Earth Institute
It’s Blog Action Day
It’s Not Easy Being Green
Green Toilets at ASU Polytechnic
Saving the Planet is a Solid Career Choice
Sustainability Degree Offered at Arizona State University

Posted by Alexa Harrington

It’s Blog Action Day, and the politically correct bloggers (of which I am, mostly, on my less-sarcastic days) are supposed to tell everyone to save the planet, damnit. So reduce, reuse, recycle, walk, don’t drive, eat local, think global, compost, be as organic as is everly possible, don’t tangle up dolphins or club baby seals, and if you can possibly swing it, please consider adopting some polar bears or penguins (they’re in trouble and it’s totally our fault).

Previous Planet-Saving Posts:

Sustainability Degree Offered at Arizona State University
Saving the Planet is a Solid Career Choice
Textbook Rental Saves Money and Trees
Green Toilets at ASU Polytechnic
Penguin Games
It’s Not Easy Being Green
Free Money For Textbooks
No More Tray Sledding For You!

Posted by Alexa Harrington

In an effort to reduce waste and do their part to save the planet, college dining halls have begun to go trayless. Plates are still available (they’re not barbarians), as are eating utensils.

It turns out that the trayless policy has reduced water and energy use, and because the students can only gracefully carry so many plates and bowls in their arms, they’ve been wasting 30% less food due to the decrease in my-eyes-were-bigger-than-my-stomach syndrome.

The traditional using of the dining tray as a sled during Winter Term will be much reduced as well, about which the schools are stoked and the students are understandably pi**ed. Times change, people.

You’ll have to stick with surfing down the dorm hallway on bathmats (rubber side up, yarn side down) and baby powder. My dorm had carpeting, which sucked until we invented Flame Ball (it involves a fuzzy tennis ball, hairspray, lights off, and no one getting their deposit back).

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Big dreams and no money. Such is the situation colleges, universities, and the students who attend them are struggling with. The schools want to teach students to think outside the box, to be able to look ahead and improve the future of humanity. The students want to learn how to think wider and deeper and bigger and more. The President wants the schools to kick some researching butt and find ways to get us out of this mess (pick one).

Too bad there’s a global economic crisis, and the recession our country is experiencing is sucking the life and the funding out of everyone’s Big Dreams balloons. Now the schools and the students are walking around carrying sad little limp and deflated aspirations, jettisoning the deeper-thinking, big-picture courses and degrees for the more utilitarian/practical ones.

I won’t bore you with numbers, but there are an astonishing number of folks doing pre-professional undergrad work, and a ridiculous number of business degree holders in this country. I think we’re good on the ‘future of money’ front; someone learn something that’s helpful in a different way. Think outside the box, people. Don’t give up on the idea that knowing how to think in non-linear directions is conducive to the survival of mankind.

Read this piece in the NY Times:

The world economic crisis and the election of Barack Obama will change the future of higher education. Even as universities, both public and private, face unanticipated financial constraints, the president has called on them to assist in solving problems from health care delivery to climate change to economic recovery.

American universities have long struggled to meet almost irreconcilable demands: to be practical as well as transcendent; to assist immediate national needs and to pursue knowledge for its own sake; to both add value and question values. And in the past decade and a half, such conflicting and unbounded expectations have yielded a wave of criticism on issues ranging from the cost of college to universities’ intellectual quality to their supposed decline into unthinking political correctness. More…

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Sometimes it’s hard to change your ways so as to avoid evilness. I love books (have I mentioned that before?) and am probably the last human on Earth who would buy a damn Kindle thingy and start reading my “books” on a screen. However (here comes the part where I clear my throat and mumble about how sometimes change is good and it’s possible I was wrong), in light of the unavoidable fact that textbook publishers are vile bastards with severely bankrupt karma, digital textbooks may be the way to go. Cheaper, lighter, easier on the back, healthier for the trees, etc.

Digital textbook company, iChapters, is currently running a series of campaigns highlighting how the lives of students have been changed by technology (good changes, one hopes). Part of their campaign strategy involves a $1,000-for-textbooks sweepstakes, which is good for you if you’re an under-funded college student and would just pee your pants if someone gave you that much money for books.

I read all the fine print. You have to be 18 and live in the U.S. Five students will win, and apparently all you have to do is sign up here. According to the rules, you don’t have to buy anything to win, just sign up by filling out the little entry form. Also, you can sign up once every day during the promotion period (July 15th 2009 through August 29th 2009) and it will count as a valid entry. Good luck, people.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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“MBA” is a wince-worthy term these days. The NY Times is saying MBA programs are in need of a major overhaul. Jon Stewart just cleaned Jim Cramer’s clock using only words and logic. And then there’s the whole tanking economy, which some folks are blaming the MBA-havin’ money guys for.

In light of all of the above, my advice to anyone wishing to earn their MBA degree is to please think a little bit outside the business-school box and maybe get yourselves a slightly more well-rounded education than the current population of MBAs seem to have done. I see nothing negative about earning an MBA; having an understanding of the inner-workings of money, finance, and business theory could only serve one well. But dig deeper and think bigger, people.

Further Reading and Resources:

MBA Facts and Figures
In Bad Economy, MBA Degree Beckons
New Accelerated Green MBA Degree
How Does a Second-Grader Beat Wall Street?
AIG Fiasco
Auto Bailout
The Daily Show: Jim Cramer

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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People tend toward sameness and the comfort of the familiar; they fear change and dislike it when everyday elements that they took for granted like plastic bags, incandescent light bulbs and cheap gasoline, are suddenly on the brink of a big vamoosing.

Change is inconvenient, it’s a big pain in the ass, and is somehow always more expensive. Politically correct green fuel, electricity, vegetables and grocery bags cost enough to make a person think twice about the purchase. I was a total meat-eating omnivore before I knew too much about the chemical-laced life and times of the animals I was devouring. While I seem to have no problem killing an animal so I can eat it, I do have a problem eating an animal that was treated badly and pumped full of weird bits.

Knowing too much sucks. Reading Fast Food Nation was an eye-opening mistake. Now the only meat I can stomach (conscience-wise) is more than twice the price of the non-PC stuff. I’m working up to it, but thus far I haven’t been able to bring myself to pay $13 for the happy chicken (that presumably frolicked in the fields and died willingly) which is half the size of the miserable, science-experiment, $6 chicken.

I’m one who fully supports saving the planet, and even so am bitching and moaning about how much change sucks. Imagine how difficult it’s going to be to change the minds of the planet-haters. Sometimes the only way to get a new and different ball rolling is to threaten society with the end of the world as they have known it, or to make the change trendy and cool. Cameron Diaz and Leonardo DiCaprio were the best things to happen to the green movement. Cameron made traveling around the world in the name of eco-consciousness and driving a Prius cool.

The more chronologically advanced generations may be finding the green stuff difficult, but the less-curmudgeonly, more forward-thinking younger generations are doing good things for the planet. According to the NY Times, more college students are signing up for environmental studies programs. I’m hoping it’s a sign of solid change, and not just a soon-to-fizzle trend. A. Dupin at WorldWideBlog has a thoughtful, in-depth post up about this trend, and the collection of good signs that it goes beyond just the college students.

Related Posts:

Sustainability Degree Offered at Arizona State University
Saving the Planet is a Solid Career Choice
Green Toilets at ASU Polytechnic

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Scrabble teaches kids how to argue convincingly that their totally made-up word is real. Poker teaches kids that good luck and better lying wins the most cash. Monopoly teaches kids about capitalism and that to win you must crush everyone in your path so as to acquire and control as much of the world as possible. Memory is pretty self-explanatory (I’m hoping). And now, so we can teach our kiddos about the grisly effects of global warming, there’s Penguin Rescuer. It’s made by Wonderworld, which has not only created an eco-learning toy, they’ve also implemented eco-friendly manufacturing practices.

The game is for ages 3 and up, and is oddly not available in the U.S. I’m not entirely sure why, unless there’s some holdup admitting we have a problem with global warming. The game can be procured via Amazon UK or through a South African site (because those countries are capable of dealing with their global warming issues), but I haven’t been able to find it in the U.S., strangely enough.

Further Reading (for those still in denial):

Penguins Now Threatened by Global Warming
Penguins Helped and Hurt by Changing Climate
Arctic Ice Melting at Alarming Pace as Temperatures Rise
Penguins in Decline Due to Global Warming
The Shrinking World of Penguins

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I have two irrational fears: public bathrooms and crosswalks. Anyone who has taken a college-level biology course will mostly understand my fear of public toilets and the recurring unsettling dreams I have involving hellaciously decrepit restrooms. The crosswalk weirdness only ever gets me blinking frowns and silence when I try to explain, so never you mind about that one.

I’ve posted before about the forward-thinking greenness of Arizona State University and their sustainability degree programs (here and here). Now, according to Mr.Bradford at Geek Stew, they’re doing great (and not at all scary) things with toilets in the new Santan Hall building at ASU Polytechnic. I’m enjoying vicarious feelings of deep, settling calm just knowing there are safe and shiny toilets out there.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I wrote a while back about Arizona State University’s new degree programs in Sustainability. When I first read about it, I was just happy that there was a glimmer of hope shining through the fog of global warming and pollution. My logic was that if higher education was seeing this as a viable degree, then societal thinking about how to save the planet was changing. And, obviously, if we teach people how to implement ‘green’ technologies and practices, then someday we might be smart enough to save ourselves. This article from FastCompany makes my happiness even more complete. Business executives are all over this sustainability degree action:

The idea: If companies hope to operate in a world that increasingly demands sustainable strategies and practices, they’ll need employees who actually have the technical expertise. “Significant and high-profile corporations are saying we need to do this,” says director Charles L. Redman. Indeed, executives from Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) and Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX), as well as Arizona utility companies APS (NYSE:PNW) and Salt River Project, have already joined the school’s board.

Students will learn to identify and provide solutions to both local and global challenges, taking on such issues as rapid urban growth, sustainable energy and materials use, and water management. At least a dozen research projects are under way, including one on strategies to combat the rising heat index around Phoenix, and another on a special strain of bacteria that could be used to create fuel.

If the white-collared people of the world are seeing this as a solid career choice, then doesn’t it follow that society overall has changed the way it thinks about natural resources and the environment and all the generally bad stuff mankind does to the planet? Was I just too pessimistic before? Because I totally thought it was going to take complete polar ice cap-meltage to convince the money-makers that the sky is falling.

Watch this if you prefer to stay pessimistic and laugh about the fate of the planet and how dumb humans are.

Posted by Alexa Harrington