On April 2nd, 120 students, faculty and curious New Yorkers alike filled into Kimmel to hear Educating for Sustainability’s 2018 speaker, Dr. Ayana Johnson. I wrote a Women’s (Green) History Month spotlight about Dr. Johnson, so I already knew she was an impressive individual, but her talk kind of blew my mind.
Many of the people in the audience were interested in topics of sustainability and ocean conservation, but we all had something to learn from Dr. Johnson’s pioneering work.
by Cecil Scheib, Assistant Vice President for Sustainability
NYU is aspiring to be among the greenest urban campuses in the nation. And we need your help.
How could you better incorporate sustainability into your learning, teaching, and research? What internships or employee training programs would help you grow? How might we lower our environmental impact from food to energy use? What would you like to see throughout the Global Network? Read more
In the last installment of Women’s Green History Month we honor NYU Environmental Science Department’s very own, Dr. Ayana Johnson. A mentor to many in ES, the Brooklyn native attended Harvard then graduate school at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Dr. Johnson was not satisfied just seeking a career in marine biology (which is already a pretty cool job) but decided to amplify her skills and talent for public speaking and pursued the often frustrating effort to change policy.
Welcome to Green Grants: The People Behind the Projects. Below is an interview with Emily Hirsch (NYU Wagner School of Public Service, MPA Public and Nonprofit Management and Policy), who was awarded a Green Grant to install a dishwasher in the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life for her project, Bronfman Goes Green.
Emily Hirsch (EH): When I started working at the Bronfman Center, I was responsible for office management and I noticed how many paper goods we went through in a week. I’ve always been passionate about the environment, so I started thinking about ways we could reduce our paper good usage. Since this is the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life, a dishwasher became more complex due to keeping it kosher.
Kashrut (Jewish dietary law) in its strictest form does not allow meat and milk to be combined in any way. This makes a dishwasher complicated because we can’t use the same cutlery for both meat and dairy and would also need separate dishwashers and sinks. Our solution was to pick either a meat or dairy dishwasher for the [Green Grant]. We serve more dairy meals than meat meals and a dairy dishwasher would have the most impact on our community to reduce the amount of paper waste we went through.
2017 was a great year for films. We got a million different Marvel movies, another Star Wars and finally a Wonder Woman. Besides blockbusters, some of the best documentaries about sustainability were made by passionate environmentalists like Al Gore. So when it’s family movie time, instead of watching Love Actually for the 10th year in a row, why don’t you try one of these fabulous new docs?
What the Health
The controversial film was released earlier in the year made people consider adopting a vegan lifestyle. The documentarian explored links between a meat- and dairy-heavy diet and serious diseases like obesity and diabetes. Some have argued that they may have stretched the truth. You’ll have to watch for yourself and decide what’s the truth.
