By ANNIE DYSART Last Wednesday, a group of students and staff gathered in the AMU Ballrooms for the first ever Marquette Sustainability Town Hall meeting. Capturing the group's attention with a few "dad jokes," Brent Ribble - Marquette's Sustainability Coordinator since last year - set the tone for a setting he hoped would be a warm and trustworthy place where "all ideas are good ideas." What is sustainability? Ribble defined sustainability as "meeting our social, environmental, and economic needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs." Occurring at an intersection of the interests of "people, planet, and profit," sustainable solutions are most effective when they acknowledge and cooperate with the cultural and socioeconomic systems shaping communities.
Discover, dream, design, deploy: these words represent the four phases of Marquette's Campus Sustainability Plan. The plan is to discover what Marquette is doing well right now, dream and set goals to improve sustainability efforts, design specific courses of action to actualize those dreams, and then deploy the designs to make goals a reality. These goals will fuel sustainable change in the operations, academics, and engagement at Marquette. Ribble hopes to implement concrete sustainability goals by first quarter of the 2018 spring semester. Meeting attendees broke out in small groups to discuss each of the four phases. Many agreed that one of Marquette's most impressive sustainability efforts is the composting system in the dining halls. Engineering Hall's gold LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating was also acknowledged as a standard that should be met and exceeded by future buildings on campus. Numerous proposals were made to make Marquette a more environmentally friendly place: increasing the presence of compost and recycling systems off campus, making limos more energy efficient, decreasing plastic consumption and waste production, and incorporating sustainability into the curriculum were just a few of the aspirations expressed by the group. Marquette Sustainability's first Town Hall meeting was a success. It created a community of environmental ambassadors that could speak comfortably and confidently about their ideas regarding how to create a greener campus for both present and future students. It was apparent that the room was full of people eager to make a difference, their enthusiasm embodying the passionate undercurrents that will drive the sustainability movement for years to come.
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