Sustainability News

On Cronkite News, see how Project Cities is working with the city of Peoria (the program's 2019-2020 community partner) to use water wisely. The video news story also touches on a previous Project Cities initiative with former partner Apache Junction.

"We all use water, and we need to have a better understanding of how we consume the water and what we are going to do to encourage further decrease in water consumption," said Lisa Estrada, sustainability manager for the City of Peoria. By collaborating with Project Cities, Peoria will create plans for water shortage response and water conservation.

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With great sustainability knowledge comes great sustainability leaders — this is the mantra that Arizona State University School of Sustainability students like Julia Colbert and Kevin Goddard live by. Colbert is a graduate student studying K-12 sustainability education and Goddard is an undergraduate student interested in water policy and sustainable urban design. Together, they have been working hard to get sustainability into K-12 schools through their Student Council Sustainability Officers Initiative (SCSO).

Last fall, Colbert and Goddard partnered with the City of Phoenix to transition SCSO from the city to the School of Sustainability. SCSO is focused on adding a Sustainability Officer position to Student Councils to implement student-led sustainability initiatives in K-12 schools throughout the Valley. Projects may include water and energy conservation, cafeteria waste auditing, recycling and even cultural events such as International Night.

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What makes a queen bee? How does a queen bee achieve her regal status that elevates her from her sterile worker sisters? This has been a long-standing question for scientists studying honey bees, including honey bee expert and Distinguished Sustainability Scientist Robert Page.

To get at the heart of the question, scientists have now used for the first time the gene-editing tool CRISPR/Cas9 to selectively shut off a gene necessary for general female development.

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To begin to imagine the difficulties, joys and adventures of human life powered by an energy system dominated by solar, last week Arizona State University published “The Weight of Light,” a free digital book featuring science fiction stories, essays and art exploring a variety of possible solar futures.

The book features four original science fiction stories — three of which take place in possible future versions of Arizona, with a fourth unfolding in a revitalized and transformed Detroit — each illustrated by an artist from the Phoenix community. The stories are accompanied by essays written by ASU faculty and graduate students in a wide range of fields, from electrical and systems engineering to public policy and futures studies.

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For the past few years, Professor Hallie Eakin has been teaching "SOS 327: Sustainable Food and Farms" in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. Eakin, a senior sustainability scientist in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, is an expert in food systems and students take her class to learn about theories of food security, rural livelihood sustainability and food sovereignty, as well as sustainability challenges associated with food system activities (production, processing, distribution, consumption and waste).

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Two new segments of “Catalyst” by Arizona PBS, in the episode released March 20, feature Senior Sustainability Scientists in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability: Jenni Vanos and Harvey Bryan.

Hot playgrounds and microclimates

The “Hot playgrounds and microclimates” segment discusses research studying the effects of heat and microclimates on playgrounds and the corresponding activity of children playing there.

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Two Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability Senior Sustainability Scientists, Jesse Senko and Ira Bennett, brought a group of students to the Sea of Cortez in Mexico for a class they are teaching called “Sea Turtles, Sharks and Fisheries of Baja California: Emerging Topics in Marine Conservation."

This Global Intensive Experience, organized by the ASU Study Abroad Office, was one of 15 spring break programs across 12 different countries. These 20 students were part of the 230+ students participating in a study abroad program during ASU’s 2019 spring break.

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Interview by Kayla Frost

Alice Waters — who will deliver a free, public Wrigley Lecture on March 27 — is a world-famous chef who founded and owns the restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. Waters has written 16 books, including two New York Times bestsellers “The Art of Simple Food I & II” and, most recently, a critically acclaimed memoir “Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook.” Waters also founded the Edible Schoolyard Project with the goal of establishing teaching gardens in schools and connecting them with sustainable food curriculum (“edible education”) for pre-kindergarten through high school students.

In anticipation for her Wrigley Lecture, titled “We Are What We Eat: Teaching Slow Food Values in a Fast Food Culture,” we asked Waters a few questions including how food can be a conduit for solving major issues in society and what advice she has for anybody who wants to discover the joy of seasonal, local, delicious food. Read the interview below, which has been edited for length and clarity.

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Senior Sustainability Scientist Joshua Abbott is a principal author of a new opinion paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled “Governing the recreational dimension of global fisheries.” Abbott is an associate professor in Arizona State University's School of Sustainability and an affiliated faculty in the Center for Biodiversity Outcomes.

The paper discusses the importance of recreational fisheries and the need to improve their management and their inclusion in fisheries policymaking. “Recreational fisheries deserve to be considered on equal footing with commercial fisheries, particularly in mixed coastal fisheries,” the authors argue.

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A new article on ASU Now, "ASU students developing off-grid tech to help small farms build resilience to climate change," tells the story of how five Arizona State University computer science seniors found themselves tackling issues of climate change and sustainable food systems. As part of a capstone project called SolarSENSE, these students are using SolarSPELL off-grid technology to make agricultural sensors more affordable and accessible for small, rural farms around the world. SolarSPELL, Solar-Powered Educational Learning Libraries, is a project directed by Senior Sustainability Scientist Laura Hosman.

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A panel at the Future of Humane Technology event Thursday at the Barrett and O’Connor Washington Center in Washington, D.C. explored the power of narratives to shape what we do with climate change. Two Arizona State University faculty associated with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability contributed to the discussion: Distinguished Sustainability Scholar Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Regents’ Professor and director of Jewish studies at ASU; and Distinguished Sustainability Scientist Gary Dirks, director of the ASU Wrigley Institute.

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Maria Cruz-Torres, a senior sustainability scientist and an associate professor in the School of Transborder Studies, has been documenting a lesser-seen side of Sinaloa’s prized seafood industry — its female shrimp traders — for 20 years. This research project earned her the Victoria Foundation’s Eugene García Outstanding Latina/o Faculty Award last September. Launched in 1969, the Phoenix-based group was the first Latina/o community foundation in the United States and now hosts an award series honoring contributions in academia, civil service and the arts around Arizona.

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Interview by Kayla Frost

If you know anything about Raj Patel, you know he has a lot to say about our food system, capitalism and activism. After Patel delivered a Wrigley Lecture at Arizona State University in November 2018, we asked some follow-up questions over the phone. But before we get to the interview — an introduction.

Patel, a research professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, has written several books including “The Value of Nothing,” a New York Times and international best-seller, and “Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.” Patel’s most recent book, which he co-wrote with environmental historian Jason W. Moore, is “A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things.” He’s also a co-host of the food politics podcast “The Secret Ingredient.”

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Senior Sustainability Scientist Nancy Grimm, the Virginia M. Ullman Professor of Ecology in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, was named a 2019 Fellow of the Society of Freshwater Science in honor of her outstanding contributions to stream and watershed science.

According to Grimm's biography on the Society of Freshwater Science fellows site, "Grimm studies urban and stream ecosystems. Initially working on stream nitrogen dynamics, she expanded out and down to riparian and hyporheic zones and then abruptly became an urban ecologist."

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In a new study, distinguished sustainability scientist Stuart Lindsay and his colleagues at Arizona State University explore a surprising property of proteins — one that has only recently come to light. In research appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the group demonstrates electrical conductance through proteins poised between a pair of electrodes.

They further show that such conductance only occurs under highly specific conditions, when the contacts connecting the protein molecules to their electrodes are composed of exactly the molecule the protein has evolved to bind. This provides a recipe for wiring proteins into electrical circuits.

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Haley Penny is a hardworking senior soon to graduate from the School of Sustainability and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. Through her unique experiences abroad and insight from influential professors, Penny learned the importance of cultural representation in sustainability and city planning, and became motivated to develop multilingual sustainability curriculum.

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Arizona State University recently earned six prestigious Department of Energy awards, totaling nearly $5.7 million, ranking it first among university recipients of Solar Energy Technologies Office awards to advance photovoltaic research and development in 2018.

Three of these winners were senior sustainability scientists in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability: Mariana Bertoni, Clark Miller and Zachary Holman.

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The Acoustic Ecology Lab at Arizona State University was recently featured in an episode of “Catalyst” by Arizona PBS. The episode focused on the work of Senior Sustainability Scholar Sabine Feisst and Senior Sustainability Scientist Garth Paine.

“We want to understand the totality of our sonic environment: how our human-generated sounds interact with animal sounds, with the sound of wind and water — and how human-generated sound can perhaps have an unfavorable effect,” Feisst said in the video.

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A Thought Leader Series Piece

by Jack Kittinger

We know the challenges we face in conservation. Conservation is about human security — it's about people, communities, families — our children. Globally, we continue to neglect how important nature is to our survival and ability to thrive.

Even as our most pressing environmental problems multiply, our resources to combat them don't keep pace. We strive. We come up short. It's easy to look at the global scale of the challenges we face and feel overwhelmed — to want to give up.

But we don't and we can't.

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Hillary Junglas, a senior in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University who’s double majoring in supply chain management, is driven to apply sustainability to the business world. And with all she’s learned and experienced through ASU, she’s on the right track to do just that.

“I love the School of Sustainability and could not be happier with my experience as a sustainability student,” Junglas said. “The people, the classes, the experiences available — everything motivates me every day to follow my passion and make a difference with my degree. I look forward to graduation and where life will take me, but I will always credit the School of Sustainability for the inspiration and support I needed to succeed.”

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