Christmas Special

Strides in Sustainability in the curriculum at Rider

From an email we received today from Pat at Moore Library, regarding upcoming faculty workshop [January 17]:

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the way our society is consuming the earth’s natural resources is not sustainable. This ecological crisis has scientific, social, political, and economic repercussions. It is our responsibility as an institution of higher education to educate our students about the many dimensions of the environmental changes at hand. In this 90-minute workshop, we will give some basic background about global change, discuss ongoing institutional changes in response to the climate challenge, and provide participants with existing models for integrating sustainability into coursework and co-curricular projects across the University.

The RU Libraries have been getting a lot of help from the sustainability steering committee to increase awareness about wasting paper and other resources, and we now have a library blog and posters at Talbott and Moore Libraries–thanks to Mike Gray and Diana Petras–that will make students think before printing and discarding paper from the printers! Laura Hyatt, Biology faculty, has used some of the statistics of wasted paper in one of her classes in the form of an exam question, and Diana Kayes, part-time Sustainability Coordinator and Rider student, has been working with me to create additional posters. I will be at the Vale Conference in January with a poster advertising the RU Libraries’ ideas on reducing wasted resources and the partnerships involved in this project. Hopefully next semester and in the future we will start to reduce all of the paper, toner, cartridges, etc. used in the two libraries!