The goal of the 6th Annual UC, CSU, CCC Sustainability Conference, hosted by UCSB June 24-26, was to provide a venue to share and disseminate best practices in sustainability at California Campuses and to build sustainability-oriented collaborations with other campuses and government, business, and non-profit entities. On top of that, the UCSB organizers went out of their way to make the venue part of the solution, and efforts to reduce conference waste included adhering to a master plan to identify all forms of potential waste, to maximize its reduction, and to reuse or recycle as much of it as possible.
“Sustainability,” the issue of whether or not the human life support system on earth can continue indefinitely, became a buzz word during the environmental movements of the 1960s when popular books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring linked the health of the environment directly to economic development. Concerns about sustainability issues have increased dramatically over the years and have resulted in the formation of numerous national and international think tanks and groups devoted to the subject. The University of California now has a system-wide “green” building and clean energy policy, and UCSB was the first of the UC schools to have an active sustainability group on campus.
This is the fourth time in six years that UCSB has hosted the Sustainability Conference. Geography staff member Katie Maynard, the UCSB Sustainability Conference Coordinator and Organizer, pointed out that this year’s attendance was up nearly 50% and commented “We’ve been able to see sustainability spread like wildfire coming out of these conferences.” For more about the Conference Program, see ; for a write up about the Conference and its background, check out this week’s Daily Nexus article at .
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