The Living-Learning Laboratory for Sustainability

There are compelling reasons for Illinois to become a more sustainable campus. We cannot afford to use resources at the rates we currently use them; and if we are to become the preeminent public university in the world, we must provide our graduates with the analytical skills, expertise, and where-with-all to become leaders in the development of a sustainable global economy.

To help achieve these goals, the Environmental Council will connect our campus’s learning and discovery missions to the design and management of our campus. In doing so, our campus will become a living laboratory for environmental sustainability. The following key components will form the basis of the connection between our academic activities and the development of a sustainable campus.

Key Components

• Connect scholarship to campus sustainability. We will initiate and foster cross-campus collaborations dealing with energy, ecology, design, planning, procurement, and technology and process innovations that reduce the campus’s ecological footprint.
  
• Green the Curriculum. Catalyze campus efforts to develop new curricula and programs that prepare students for the technical, ecological, social, and political challenges of creating a sustainable global economy.
  
• Develop a Living-Learning Community. We are working with Housing to start a sustainability dormitory that will allow students interested in the environment to live and learn together.
  
• Provide undergraduate research grants. Provide annual grants to 25 exceptional students to work with faculty members on campus sustainability efforts.
  
• Expand the Environmental Fellows program (our undergraduate minor) to 100 students per year.
  
• Expand interdisciplinary graduate programs. The Environmental Council supports four interdisciplinary graduate programs. We envision adding three new programs in the sustainability of intensively managed landscapes, climate change, and Ecoinformatics.
• Build an Environmental Resource Bank that will serve courses across campus with case studies, web-based tools, photos, graphs, articles, and other materials that faculty can use in teaching.
• Share the activities and successes of the Living-Learning Laboratory and our campus’s environmental scholarship with individuals and institutions across the globe.

To learn more about the living learning laboratory for sustainability, please contact us.