Sustainability is a hot issue in the UC Davis community, especially among students contemplating the world of tomorrow.

California Student Sustainability Coalition held a Sustainability Summit on campus June 1, drawing more than 50 students, faculty and staff interested in the topic. Sustainability is often described as the ability of an ecosystem to maintain ecologically friendly processes, functions and productivity into the future.

Brennan Bird, junior undergraduate nature and culture major, is a coordinator for a campus student organization called SolArising, which is devoted to teaching students about easy sustainable practices, particularly related to solar energy.

Bird gave a demonstration of various types of solar ovens. One of his signs read “Every day, enough sunlight hits the earth to meet annual world energy demand four times over.”

He explained that SolArising wants to increase student awareness and help students learn how to utilize solar energy for standard practices like cooking, growing their own vegetables, and heating water.

“We’re teaching people how to use the sun to meet their everyday needs,” Bird said.

SolArising would also like to become more active on campus, he said. One way to do this would be to provide sustainable alternatives to existing campus operations  and equipment.

“We want to provide a sustainable cooking resource as an alternative to the microwave,” Bird said, elaborating that providing a solar oven in addition to the microwaves in the Coffee House would make this new sustainable resource easily accessible and allow students to try it out.

The summit also shined the spotlight on units like Unitrans, which is working to ensure that the UC Davis public transportation program remains efficient and green.

Unitrans General Manager Geoff Straw discussed potentially creating a corridor that would be restricted to cars, allowing only public transportation vehicles. This would cut down on the transit time of Unitrans, ultimately allowing the bus routes to be faster and more efficient, he argued.

Unitrans runs about 900,000 miles per year, Straw said. Ninety percent of those miles use natural gas as fuel—though natural gas still contains carbon and creates carbon emissions, it is the most clean fuel alternative available. Unitrans plans on continuing to use natural gas to operate their vehicles.

However, Unitrans seeks additional funding to make all this possible.

“It is not just about being green and making sure the earth works,” Straw said. “Funding is a big part of all the programs.”

On the academic end of the spectrum, staff and faculty also want to guarantee that students have the opportunity to learn about future green programs and practices.

Frank Loge, professor of civil and environmental engineering, recently taught a new interdisciplinary course, Integrated Design of Green Buildings, which is focused on how to make buildings more energy efficient and environmentally sustainable.

The class examined key aspects of sustainability and even asked students to define the oft-ambiguous concept. Two of them presented at the summit a definition—"sustainability requires meeting present needs without compromising the needs of the future.”

Loge's co-instructor, Denise Jones, explained that the class project was to construct a green, sustainable kitchen for the student farm.

“Hopefully this class will be an inspirational tool for students to get other programs like it started,” Jones said.

More information: California Student Sustainability Coalition, www.sustainabilitycoalition.org

Caitlin Cobb is a News Service intern.