Category: Engagement

#TheTea on Fast Fashion

by Carson Bandy

The clothes we put on our back are profoundly personal. Almost as personal as what we choose to put into our bodies. The clothes we wear have stories, good ones, of the times we had in them or the joy they’ve brought us. But there can also be a darker story attached to them that’s not often seen. As some of you may have read in my last blog post, this year I have commited to quit fast fashion. Not only is textile production one of the most polluting industries in the world, but it also comes with a slew of human rights violations. This isn’t exactly new information but what exactly is fast fashion? Fast fashion can be defined in a few different ways. The ethical rating website Good On You defines fast fashion as “cheap, trendy clothing, that samples ideas from the catwalk or celebrity culture and turns them into garments in high street stores at breakneck speed.” Investopia describes fast fashion as “a term used by fashion retailers to describe inexpensive designs that move quickly from the catwalk to stores to meet new trends.  Read more

Lessons My Mother Taught Me

by Eni Owoeye


To “live sustainably” in the United States is to participate in an ever evolving campaign. Images of the stereotypical “greenie” – bike riders, DIY fanatics, and the quintessential vegan – have always existed in this landscape, and as technological advancements make our lives easier, we often find innovative ways to replace the status quo. Every year our cars get sleeker, and smaller, and ever more “green”.

But for many individuals, the status quo IS sustainable. Stewardship is a cultural norm. I’ve asked students and administrators across our campus to share lessons from their mother – knowledge preserved through space and time, a testament to the ingenuity and simplicity that can exist beyond contemporary eco-friendliness. Read more

Green Resolutions!

The rhetoric around New Year resolutions often leave me tired. The phrase “new year new me” often breeds discontentment for your current place in life or, at best, a sense of failure for when we inevitably fail to live up to the laundry list of character ideals we have built for ourselves. Changing your habits or adding some new ones doesn’t have to be a new year exclusive. If you’re having a slow start to your New Year’s resolutions (like me) or just looking to better yourself, here is a list of manageable, eco conscious resolutions to try this year or whenever. 

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NYU Sustainability 2019 #YearinReview

From purchasing policies to student leadership, major building achievements to orientation; students, faculty, staff, and administrators from across the university have been instrumental in making a greener NYU in 2019. This year we partnered with multiple sites across our global network, had 1,750 individuals attend one of our public speaking events, and provided $90,000 to fund various green projects. Here are few shining moments from 2019:

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GREEN GRANT: Multispecies Worldbuilding Lab

My Green Grants project is the Multispecies Worldbuilding Lab, which is a small team of students, artists, ethnographers, and media designers who produce a podcast about climate change. We invite scientists, writers, and artists to talk about a particular organism, ecology or site that they study, and the interdisciplinary methods or tools that they’ve used or developed in the course of their research. We also discuss their teaching practices or how they engage others around difficult conversations about climate change. What makes our podcast different from other podcasts about climate change, I think, is that we are interested in giving voice to the human interviewee, as well as the thing or place that they study. So we aim to combine interviews with field recordings and experimental soundscapes to give listeners a more intimate and visceral sense of the liveliness of worlds outside. I’m interested in experimenting with ways of listening to nonhumans, or allowing animals, plants, microbes, water to speak alongside the human voice. 

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