Sustainability expert stresses future

Because of a stable climate, in the span of 10,000 years, humans have gone from hunter-gatherers to modern, technological beings, said sustainability expert Anthony Cortese.

But, because of human-worsened global warming, “all bets are off.”

“That is the reality of where we are now as a species,” Cortese said.

Cortese, the co-director of the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment, president of Second Nature and co-founder of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, spoke Thursday in the Indiana Memorial Union’s Whittenberger Auditorium.

The speech was part of SustainIU, a week-and-a-half-long series of events sponsored by the Office of Sustainability, along with several other organizations. His talk, titled “Higher Education’s Critical Role in Creating a Healthy, Just and Sustainable Society: A Lecture by Anthony Cortese,” focused on the concept and importance of sustainability and its application to a university setting.

“We do this work for a simple reason,” Cortese said. “If we don’t figure out a way to operate differently, our chance of creating a just and sustainable society in the future are slim to none.”

He defined sustainability as the use of resources so that the needs of human development are met without producing unusable waste or negative economic impacts or environmental effects.

“We tend to think the economy is over here and the environment is over there,” Cortese said. “That’s wrong.”

Cortese discussed the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment, an agreement on the part of college and university presidents nationwide to pledge to end their campus’ greenhouse gas emissions.

He said presidents at 623 schools have signed the commitment, but IU is not one of them.

“Sustainability is not just about the environment,” Cortese said. “It’s about meeting the needs of all current and future generations.”

School of Public and Environmental Affairs graduate student Abby Schwimmer said universities are good locations to try new environmentally friendly practices.

“This is a living laboratory,” Schwimmer said. “It should be used as a vehicle for sustainability.”

Jennifer Larson, also a SPEA graduate student, said Cortese’s idea about realizing that material possessions create waste rather than fulfillment is the key to sustainability.

“I liked that he talked about making a values shift,” Larson said. “That’s the most significant idea, in terms of maintaining an aggregate desire to make change.”

Schwimmer said her favorite part was the discussion of how when things are created in a non-sustainable way, they leave behind holes of used and wasted materials.

“He brought in more of a global perspective when he talked about everything here being taken from elsewhere,” she said. “Sustainability is the awareness that everything you do affects someone else.”