Earth Day and Every Day at CSW: Sustainability Matters

On Earth Day, CSW also welcomed a special guest - Bracken Hendricks ’85, the CEO and founder of Urban Ingenuity.

On April 22,1970, 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment in massive coast-to-coast rallies. Thousands of colleges and universities organized protests against the deterioration of the environment. Groups that had been fighting against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife suddenly realized they shared common values. The idea for a national day to focus on the environment came to Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, after witnessing the ravages of the 1969 massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California.

Today, the fight for a clean environment continues with increasing urgency, as the ravages of climate change become more manifest every day.

CSW is committed to taking important steps to encourage our community to be mindful of waste, energy usage and other ways to reduce and conserve. The Sustainability Committee, comprised of students, faculty and staff and led by Science Teacher Marilyn Del Donno, has been diligently working on many initiatives this year such as:

• America Recycles Day: advisor groups were charged to “compete” against one another in a recycling contest
• Dorm energy-saving competition
• Development of D block course on Recycled Art including an installation from campus waste
• Presentation of a sustainable purchasing policy to admin council
• The group voted on presidential candidate’s energy policies
• Presentation on energy use at assembly
• Designed and pulled off fun pranks that helped encourage the community to think about sustainability
• Attended a talk on a Brandeis University on sustainability in Israel
• Networked with alumni/ae. 

During Assembly this week in honor of Earth Day, the committee also presented the Sustainability Award Champion to Andre Labate, in the facilities department. He was acknowledged for his many significant contributions toward making our campus more sustainable like replacing light bulbs with lower wattage and LED bulbs, adding water-saving shower heads in all the dorms, the installation of numerous motion light switches around campus, cutting the total lighting wattage 50% in the art building, and for his consistent reminders to power down at the end of each day. Congrats to Andre and thanks to him and the entire facilities department!

On Earth Day, CSW also welcomed a special guest - Bracken Hendricks ’85, the CEO and founder of Urban Ingenuity. Their vision: to finance and develop advanced energy infrastructure projects that speed the clean energy future. Bracken is a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress, working on policy solutions at the interface of clean energy and economic development. He has served as an advisor to former President Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation on issues of job creation, energy innovation, and resilient urban development, and he helped establish the US Department of Energy’s Better Buildings Challenge as well as clean energy portions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

He shared his personal story of taking his passion for art into urban planning and then progressing into public policy: “I was a studio art major, and now, essentially I’m a banker.” Bracken presented a sampling of his exciting work, and then over lunch, had a discussion with the students in the Sustainability Committee.