Past Activities

Meetings

• Conservation Focus Group informed of our goals and wants to help …

  In mid-October, Elizabeth Skewes and Liorah Wischer representing our group met with some members of the Conservation Focus Group for the Biology Department (including Estella Leopold). They are interested in coordinating outreach and education on conservation issues, and were excited to learn about our group. Liorah and Elizabeth gave an overview of our planned activities, and they know we are looking for some operational funds to get some of our initiatives started. They will meet again before Thanksgiving and would like our group represented.

Initiatives

• Initial plan of action
  1. Establish a formal departmental sustainability group: We propose to establish a formal departmental sustainability group, to include faculty, staff, and students, but open to any who wish to participate. The sustainability group would oversee the planning and implementation of the departmental sustainability initiative.
  2. Assess the ecological footprint of the department: The first step in becoming a more sustainable department is to assess how we collectively use resources. We proposed to have a “sustainability” seminar in which we obtain necessary information to develop and use scientific protocols to measure resource use and efficiency.
  3. Recommendations and implementation: With broad collaboration of students, faculty and staff, we will produce a set of practical recommendations to reduce resource consumption at the departmental and individual levels. We will promote these recommendations through a combination of meetings, emails, a website, and posted information. This aims to be an adaptive process in which we will solicit feedback and incorporate it in future actions.
  4. Assessing and reporting results: It is important to demonstrate that by modifying our actions, we are making a difference. Therefore, we will track departmental resource use on a continuing basis, and distribute periodical reports quantitatively describing our progress.
  5. Future steps: Initially, all recommendations will be voluntary. However, we envision that at some future time, certain recommendations will become part of departmental policy. We anticipate the outcome of this initiative will enable us to create a framework for use by other UW departments in assessing and addressing their ecological footprints. We will work with other groups on campus that share a desire for sustainability, so that they may use what we have learned and apply it to their own initiatives.

Resolutions

• Initiative Kickoff Memo approved by Departmental Chair (pdf or Word doc)

Field trips

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Updated on 2006 August 03. Copyright© 2006 University of Washington, unless indicated otherwise.

Department of Biology • UW