CSU, Chico News

This Way to Sustainability II, the largest sustainability conference in the U.S., will be held in the Bell Memorial Union at California State University, Chico Nov. 2 through 5, 2006. CSU, Chico, Butte Community College, the Associated Students of CSU, Chico and the Associated Students of Butte Community College will host the conference.

The conference is free and open to the public. Preregistration is over, but interested people can still register on-site.

With more than 680 participants already registered for the conference, the conference is easily the largest such conference in North America, said CSU, Chico coordinator of Environmental Studies Mark Stemen. "We were recently at the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education Conference in Tempe, Arizona, and Tony Cortese, who will be our keynote speaker, proclaimed that conference was the largest in North America with 660 participants," said Stemen. "With more participants enrolling all of the time, we will easily top those numbers."

The conference opens on Thursday morning at 8:30 a.m. with welcomes by CSU, Chico President Paul Zingg and Dean of the College of Natural Sciences James Houpis. There will be workshops throughout the day, beginning at 9 am with "Reuse and Recycling in Demolition for Campus Construction Projects."

Anthony D. Cortese, ScD, will speak on Thursday at 7 pm in the BMU Auditorium. Cortese is president of Second Nature, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to catalyze a worldwide effort to make healthy, just and environmentally sustainable action a foundation of all learning and practice in higher education. He was formerly the commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. As the first dean of Environmental Programs at Tufts University, Cortese spearheaded the award-winning Tufts Environmental Literacy Institute in 1989 and the internationally acclaimed Talloires Declaration of University Leaders for a Sustainable Future.

Felicity Barringer, Washington correspondent on the environment for The New York Times, will provide a second keynote address Friday, Nov. 3, at 4 pm. Barringer joined The Times as a contributing correspondent in Moscow in 1986. She filed stories about the political and cultural upheavals of the early Gorbachev era. In addition to her coverage of Soviet culture, her subject matter ranged from the Chernobyl disaster to the Soviet space program. She was the founding editor for the Monday Business Day section, which launched in May 1995 with a special focus on news about the media and technology sectors. Barringer is the author of "Flight From Sorrow," a 1984 biography of Tamara Wall, who lost her family and childhood on a journey from Hitler's Germany to Stalin's Siberia.

President Zingg and Provost Scott G. McNall will co-host a buffet dinner starting with "mock-tails" at 5 p.m., followed by dinner at 6 p.m. As part of the program, President Zingg and Jack Rawlins will be present for the presentation of the $10,000 Jack Rawlins Environmental Award to Taylor Bass, a business major who wrote a proposal for a student-run organization in social entrepreneurship. "A social entrepreneur," said Bass, "is an individual with innovative solutions to society's most pressing social problems." The purpose of the award is to foster a lifelong commitment to environmental activism.

The Mayor's Climate Protection Agreement will also be signed during the program. The agreement is a result of Seattle Mayor Gergory Nickels challenging mayors across the country to join Seattle to register support of the Kyoto Protocol in taking local action to reduce global warming pollution. Mayor Scott Gruendl and President Zingg will sign the agreement.

A complete schedule of the more than 80 workshops and lectures during the three days of the conference is available online.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 8:30 am and is filed under 2006 Fall.