Climate change the focus of dept. conference
With the increased awareness of climate change and diminishing natural resources, the department of landscape architecture and environmental planning organized a way to teach students about how to sustain current resources and environment.
Dozens of students, faculty, scientists and professionals attended the Sustainable Landscaping Conference at the Eccles Conference Center Wednesday to discuss, network and learn about sustainable planning. Students who attended the conference were introduced to new ways to create sustainable societies.
Graduate students Megan Dunford, Dan Bolin and Brian Mazzola were the co-chairs in charge of this year’s conference. Dunford said sustainability is “a way to build and design things that will last.”
One student who attended, freshman Tyson Stoddard, said the conference is held every year by the Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning Graduate Student Organization.
Dunford said, “The conference started about nine years ago as a way to introduce sustainability into our curriculum more.”
She also said, “It’s just been kind of a tradition.”
“Our theme this year was called surviving the future, an anthology of sustaining societies. We got into past societies, Mayans, Incas and looked at whether they were sustainable and then we compared them with present day societies,” Dunford said.
Speakers at the conference included environmental professionals and professors from all over the country as well as USU professors.
“Landscaping architecture, it’s a really broad field. You can go into a lot of different things,” Stoddard said. “One thing that interests me is the environmentally planning aspect and designing communities and developing housing areas.”
One of the presentations was given by Robert Gillies, director of the Utah Climate Center at USU and state climatologist for the state of Utah. Gillies said climate change is an integral part of planning for the future and knowing how to keep things sustainable.
“There are a lot of different aspects when it comes to sustainability,” Stoddard said.
James Houle, outreach coordinator and program manager for the Stormwater Center, focused on sustaining the water supply when he spoke. Houle said we should focus on water drainage needs because they are an important aspect of sustainability. Some of the chemicals that pollute the water make it harder to sustain the environment and the “implementation of a clean water act is slow,” Houle said.
“You can take this knowledge that we’re learning about sustainability and you can design communities that will be able to be efficient with storm water with all different kinds of things,” Stoddard said.
“It’s important to learn about sustainability in our field because we’re involved in a lot of big projects and we’re developing the land,” he said. “What we can put into practice is ways to develop the land and be responsible about what we’re doing so that the projects we do are sustainable over a long period of time.”
Along with teaching students about sustainability, Dunford said one of the goals of this year’s conference was to open it up to students in other majors.
“That’s what we’re trying to do,” Dunford said, “expand, get other students involved.”
When learning about sustainability, she said, “We can learn from our past to sustain our future.”
-liz.w@aggiemail.usu.edu