Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Rob Melnick, Executive Dean: Well you’re here in the headquarters of the Global Institute of Sustainability. Our mission, which is to promote sustainability education, teaching, operations and research throughout Arizona State University; not just in our Institute and School but throughout all four campuses as well as by extension helping community partners, businesses, cities, and non-governmental organizations to prepare for a more sustainable future.

When the former College of Nursing was designated as the place that we would erect the headquarters – basically the Global Institute of Sustainability – we had a choice. The choice was you could knock the building down and start over, or you could refurbish the building to make it more sustainable to kind of practice what we preach. Some of the features that we did when we decided to refurbish this building, the carpet that you’re standing on now in the Global Institute of Sustainability is made from all recycled material. The furniture in here is made from recyclable and recycled materials. The lighting in here is a special kind of lighting that very closely mimics sunlight, so it’s much more hospitable and sustainable on the human body.

We also have sensors in all the hallways and in the offices so that if the office is not used, or the hallway is not used, the lights automatically turn off so we use less electricity. We also generate electricity. On the roof, we have solar panels and we have wind turbines that generate electricity.

The topics people know best and associate with sustainability would be, for example, renewable energy, energy efficiency, and solar energy in Arizona, for example. On the other end of the continuum, sustainability research that’s not typically associated with this term is what we call social transformation. How do people make a change to a more sustainable future? How does society adapt to natural resources shortages and to a crowded hot planet, for example. Social transformation involves sociologists, anthropologists, archeologists, etcetera, so everything in between. Urban sustainability, what are the systems that cities use, transportation, water, waste that make for or don’t make for a sustainable future. We’re doing work in all of those spaces.

What I want to do is empower people to change the world. We like to think that what we’re doing here around sustainability is going to empower and create skill sets for the next generation of leaders that are going to have a real huge challenge on their hands. But it’s going to be the young people – people in college today, the people in elementary and high school today – that can change the planet.

I think Tempe is making good progress to be sustainable, but one of the challenges that every city I work with – and that’s a lot around the world – faces is what do you mean by sustainability? Sustainability is often a mysterious term even to those of us who study it. I think Tempe has done a lot of really good thinking about this kind of stuff, and I certainly think it’s one of the leaders in the valley. So we work with Tempe in particular – rather than any specific project – in particular by understanding Tempe’s problems and trying to identify solutions that exist both within the university, where we have knowledge that could help solve a problem that Tempe has or an initiative that Tempe is moving towards sustainability, or by identifying other cities that have had similar problems and have solved them in the past in providing education, technical assistance, etcetera.

Well I’d like to think that ASU and the city in the future would both continue the ongoing relationship we have where our students can learn, kind of in real time, and at the same time help achieve its goals for sustainability in whatever form that may take. So it’s been really a two-way street between Tempe as a laboratory and ASU as discovery factory, by being able to bring in talent from the outside that we know and you know to bear on the challenges that the city has set for its staff and to benefit its residents.

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The above transcript provided by Landmark Associates.