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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

SustainIU Week focuses on diversity

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SustainIU Week begins Monday with the goal of promoting diversity and sustainability and focuses on the theme “Sustainability in an Unequal World.”

The week is organized by the Student Sustainability Council and will include different events each day, including lectures, discussions and performances.

Through her work with Diversity in Action and as a former intern at the IU Office of Sustainability, Cleo Hernandez said she realized diversity and sustainability overlap in many ways. She used this thinking and helped come up with the theme for SustainIU Week.

“It became the perfect way to blend my two favorite causes into one important issue: how individuals need to be motivated and empowered to change the future,” Hernandez said.

Kathleen de Onis, education and research intern at IU’s Office of Sustainability, said there are three parts to sustainability: economics, environment and equity. However, she said equity tends to be forgotten.

Low-income communities and communities with high populations of people of color are disproportionately exposed to unsustainable practices, de Onis said. This was recently seen in Flint, Michigan, where people were exposed to high levels of lead pollution in the tap water.

Specifically, de Onis said prisoners were only given bottled water for five days before going back to drinking the polluted tap water.

Flint is not an isolated case, so a goal of equal sustainability is making sure issues like this do not happen again, she said.

“A goal of sustainability is making the invisible visible,” de Onis said.

Events for the week include trivia games, movie screenings and a clothing swap.

Kicking off the week is a keynote lecture taking place 7:30-9 p.m. Monday in the Whittenburger Auditorium. The speakers are Drew Lanham, ornithologist and Clemson University professor, and Julian Agyeman, environmental social scientist and Tufts University professor.

Lanham’s speech will focus on how to create a larger, more inclusive community that better coexists with the environment.

Agyeman will talk about “just sustainabilities,” a concept that focuses on giving all communities an equal chance at sustainability.

This idea of equality in sustainability is a large part of the week’s theme.

The week’s theme is also reflected in an event Wednesday titled “Bridging Toxic Links.” This is a multi-performance event intended to expose intersectional injustices regarding sustainability and the environment.

“Bridging Toxic Links” will include music, dance and spoken word performances, as well as a live graphic artist who will sketch themes discussed throughout the night.

At the end of the night, each performer can write on a leaf a change they plan to make in their daily lives and attach it to a commitment tree.

This event will start a discussion that will continue at an event on March 8 titled “From Ferguson to Flint.” The conversation will focus on racial justice and public health for communities facing environmental and climate injustices.

Those attending can also discuss how to build a coalition to attempt to solve these problems, de Onis said.

Hernandez said she hopes students and faculty can learn to view diversity and sustainability as connected ideas through attending events and taking part in sustainable activities during the week.

“I hope that they will learn that both the people and our environment need some significant tender loving care,” Hernandez said.

Hernandez said a week dedicated to sustainability is vital to any Big Ten university.

“Universities are great learning environments,” Hernandez said. “We should learn about sustainability in order to make our future as good and thrivable as possible.”

Because so many different organizations on campus have some sort of sustainability effort, it is important for everyone to come together and collaborate during one specific week, de Onis said.

This collaboration allows everyone to ask important questions, take risks and have difficult conversations about power and injustice.

“It’s a great opportunity to have sustainability at the forefront of our minds both for the week and then extending beyond,” de Onis said.

De Onis said it’s important for students and faculty to think about how they can use their individual talents to collaborate with each other.

“We need all hands on deck to try and solve these problems,” de Onis said. 

This article was clarified to reflect that communities with high populations of people of color, not only low-income communities, are disproportionately exposed to unsustainable practices.

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