Sustainability at Wake Forest

A new Master of Arts in Sustainability offered by Wake Forest’s Center for Energy, Environment & Sustainability (CEES) will give students and early to mid-career professionals the diverse skillset they need to carve out a place in the burgeoning global sustainability marketplace.

The MA in Sustainability is a distinctive interdisciplinary one-year program that combines coursework in the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences, management and law. The program is currently accepting applicants for the Fall 2014 semester. Read more…

Marcus Wright, WFU award recipient

WFU Manager of Waste Reduction and Recycling, Megan Anderson, helped to develop the first-ever community awards program for sustainability in Forsyth Co. this fall. Anderson, who serves on the advisory council for the Winston-Salem Sustainability Resource Center, developed the program to recognize best practices and inspire others to reach for higher levels of sustainability integration.

According to Anderson, “There are many businesses, non-profits, groups, and individuals that are doing wonderful and inspiring things in our community to support sustainability.  We felt that it was very important to recognize these outstanding efforts, and at the same time, help set high goals for the future of our community.  Sustainability should be an integrated concept in the strategic planning for our local leaders and organizations, and we hope that this event helped spur collaborative partnerships, the sharing of best practices, and high bench-marking goals for future sustainability initiatives in Forsyth County and beyond.”

2013 Winners

• Sustainable Business of the Year (1-50 employees):  Inside Out Designs

• Sustainable Business of the Year (51+ employees):  Wexford Development LLC of Winston-Salem

• Sustainable Non-Profit of the Year: Triad Community Kitchen

• Spirit of the Community (Individual or Group): Marcus Wright, Director of the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and Mass Spectroscopy Labs of the Chemistry Department for Wake Forest University

• Honorable Mentions:  Gallins Family Farm, Betty and Jim Holmes Food Bank Garden, Winston-Salem Industries for the Blind, and Old Salem Gardens of Old Salem

By Dedee DeLongpre Johnston, Director of Sustainability

Beyond meeting regulated health and safety requirements, a new chemical inventory tracking system at Wake Forest provides a useful means of minimizing laboratory waste on campus. The system catalogs the thousands of different types of chemicals – from acetone to dimethyl sulfoxide – stored in academic buildings and laboratories, facility storerooms, and supply closets. The system can also be used to track the maintenance and calibration schedule of various pieces of laboratory equipment, which helps prevent premature breakdowns.

Although hazardous waste is collected routinely on campus, this inventory system identifies how chemicals should be disposed of, and under which deadlines, in a systematic way. This was previously difficult to monitor given the widespread distribution of chemicals across campus.

To date, it has been difficult for faculty and students from physics and chemistry to neuroscience and health and exercise science to know what chemicals colleagues in other departments might already have procured. In the past, this has meant that the purchase of both hazardous and non-hazardous chemicals has been duplicated. Exacerbating the problem, faculty and students are often left with surplus supplies due to minimum purchasing requirements.

Now, with the new system in place, a professor or graduate student can easily check online to see what each department already has in storage, before making any purchases.

Steve Fisenne, Associate Director of Environmental Health & Safety, had a major role in bringing the new system to campus and is particularly excited about the benefits it brings. “Implementation of this system will allow the university to uncover opportunities in sustainability, waste reduction, cost reduction and efficiency,” while complying with, “regulatory requirements and providing a safer working environment.”

By Joey DeRosa, Communications and Outreach Intern

Screenshots of the prototype application

This past fall, undergraduate health communication and software engineering students were asked to work together to design an application that would improve accessibility around Wake Forest’s campus.

From wheelchairs to long boards, students considered the unique ways people maneuver around our 340 acres each day. One student team chose cycling, a theme proposed by the Office of Sustainability that supports our campus-wide transportation demand management goals. The collaboration showcases the advantages of faculty working transdisciplinarily to solve big problems and the benefits of engaged learning for sustainability.

“Working with the theme of sustainability was interesting,” said Jesse Akman, a junior who developed an application for cyclists with his partner, sophomore Adelina Cato, “we ended up looking at a lot of statistics about bikes saving CO2 and alternative transportation options.”

Akman, a Computer Science and Philosophy double major, took the Health Communication course with Professor Steve Giles as an elective. Cato registered because it applied to her pre-med requisites.

The application’s map-like format is interactive and specific for bike users, explained Cato. It is similar to Ride the Wake, a smartphone application developed by another computer science class that provides users with a real-time locater map for the shuttles that transport students to and from off-campus apartments and other locations.

Giles and Professor of Computer Science, Paul Pauca, realized how beneficial collaboration could be after working together on a grant proposal to develop a smoking cessation application.

“We both knew that our disciplines complemented the other,” said Giles, “but we struggled to really understand what the other person did within his discipline.”

By connecting the two classes, the computer science students were challenged to think about health problems and user interaction with an application, while the communication students learned how to develop the actual technology that makes their creative ideas possible.

Pauca, who bikes to work and stores his set of wheels in his office each morning, explained how groups such as Akman’s had to understand how different people approach biking and what major barriers might prevent them from doing so, such as motivation, convenience, or even physical barriers, like stairs.

“For me, it’s transportation, but if I am elder, I would want to make sure I take the path that is safer,” said Pauca.

Pauca’s youngest child inspired his first experience developing an application when he was diagnosed with Pitt Hopkins Syndrome. Named VerbalVictor for his son, Pauca’s program helps to reduce the high price and bulkiness of existing tools available to people challenged by the genetic disorder. VerbalVictor can be downloaded to a smartphone for just $11.99.

Though this semester’s student applications are not ready to sell in an online application store, they are still significant achievements. “The process itself has educational value,” said Pauca, “and it also allows students to create something of value to society.”

According to Giles, the goal for the application is to build it for Wake with the hope that it could ultimately be replicated for other college campuses.

“I’m hopeful we can do this again in the future,” said Giles on the coming together of the two classes, “and perhaps be more strategic in building this collaboration into other courses.”

 By Sydney Leto (’14), Staff Writer

EcoReps participate in Think Green Thursday

Twenty-seven undergraduate students from diverse disciplines attended the first-ever Social Impact Career Workshop, co-sponsored by the Office of Personal & Career Development, Service & Social Action, My Journey, and the Office of Sustainability.

Part one of a three-part series, the workshop received overwhelmingly positive feedback through student evaluations. “It really opened my eyes to the myriad of options,” commented one student. “[The workshop] taught me about the ‘next step,’” noted another attendee.

During the first half of the event, Dr. Katharine Brooks, Executive Director of Personal and Career Development, led students through a self-reflection and planning exercise. The group then heard from a professional panel that included Dr. Ananda Mitra, Professor and Chair of Communication; Dedee DeLongpré Johnston, WFU Director of Sustainability; Ryan Lesley (’06, MBA ‘14), former Peace Corps volunteer and co-president of WFU Net Impact; and Alex Tsuji (MBA ’14), secretary of WFU Net Impact. After brief introductions from each panelist, students had the opportunity to ask questions. The discussion reflected interests that ranged from local to global issues and spanned sectors from non-governmental to corporate.

Former Wake Forest Fellow Annabel Lang (’12) developed the idea for the workshop while working with EcoReps, a peer sustainability education program of the Office of Sustainability. With an increasing number of Wake Forest students gaining sustainability-related experience through curricular and extracurricular endeavors, she saw a need to bridge the gap between these undergraduates’ experiences and their future professional lives.

Part two of the Social Impact Careers Workshop will take place Tuesday, January 15^th, 2014 at 5:00PM. In this next installation, students will learn how to “pitch” their experiences, passions, and skills to potential employers. Additionally, attendees will learn how to take advantage of the upcoming Job & Internship Fair, on-campus opportunities for gaining social impact experience, job search resources, and networking strategies. To participate in part two, students should register through the DeaconSource calendar. It is not necessary to have participated in part one, in order to participate in part two.

By Hannah Slodounik, Program Coordinator

Photo credit: Ken Bennett

Students in my fall 2013 Literature and the Environment seminar (ENG 341G) spent the semester exploring different sites of belonging through world literature. Their course work carried them through critical discussions on the anthropocene, bioregionalism, deep ecology, ecotones and general systems theory. In their final class unit, they targeted their analysis toward key issues of sustainability. Several groups of students got together to reflect on the ways sustainability connected them to different communities of practice. Prominent among such communities was Wake Forest.

In the following essays, students consider the ways environments are composed through participation. They urge other students to be more fully present in the ways they interact with their campus environment, and they propose solutions for more sustainable technological practices.  Other essays reflect on the ways Wake Forest has shaped students as engaged individuals; students consider the ways the college’s environs have provided a vital resource for their spirits. Though all these short essays are quite different in their approaches to place values, all share an important central insight:  Sustainability is something that needs to be grounded in communities of belonging.

By Dr. Judith Madera, Magnolias Project Participant 2012

After nearly three years, the events that followed the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan are still impacting the lives of 83,000 nuclear refugees. The effects of the tsunami that followed the earthquake, and the damage to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility, linger in the form of radiation and now increased atmospheric pollution from a return to fossil fuel-based energy sources. For Jeannie McKinney (‘10), the disaster rekindled her passion for clean energy sources that don’t carry the same risks as nuclear power generation.

McKinney, who graduated from Wake Forest University with a BA in East Asian Studies, left the states to teach English in Hokkaido, Japan. Although always interested in learning about and experiencing other countries and cultures, she also held an underlying passion for the environment. She could not have predicted just how quickly her passion would translate to environmental conservation work until the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

The small farming community of Kuriyama, in which McKinney was teaching, felt the reverberation from the earthquake that occurred roughly 300 miles away, and in more than just the literal sense. “I watched as locally grown produce proudly displayed in the grocery stores was slowly replaced with foreign imports, as more and more Japanese food products were found contaminated with radiation. I, myself, promised my family that I’d switch to Australian beef and chicken, just so they would worry less,” she said.

McKinney was troubled that she may visit the town years later to find it damaged with dirty energy projects and overdevelopment.  To try to prevent this, when she returned to the states, she volunteered with the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) in her hometown of Knoxville, TN. Now, as the Communications Coordinator and Webmaster for SACE, McKinney handles all electronic communications for the non-profit, which advocates for clean energy programs and policies and opposes nuclear and coal-generated power.

“Our entire culture of development and technological growth is built on the fact that we think we have endless amounts of energy to sustain it all, but fossil fuels and high risk energy sources have limits. We’re poisoning our atmosphere by burning them, and I know firsthand just how disastrous ‘clean’ nuclear energy can be,” stated McKinney.

Determined to continue to fight for what she believes is the right path for America’s energy future, McKinney plans to attend graduate school for environmental public policy in a few years. “Wake Forest gave me the opportunity to have a broad and diverse education, allowing me to test the waters with many different areas of study and helping me to learn about the world from various perspectives.”  In her past position as English teacher abroad and her current one as a clean energy advocate, McKinney both exemplifies the local and global opportunities that stem from a Wake Forest education and personifies our motto Pro Humanitate.

 By Hannah Slodounik, Program Coordinator

Photo courtesy of the CAMEP.

If you take a look at your hands, your wrists, or your neck, you will likely see something special, precious even. It is quite dense, glows with an almost aura-like quality, and, as of press time, costs about $1,350 an ounce. The material – gold – is familiar to all of us. Less known, however, is how it gets to us and the role of another unique metal in that process. Liquid Mercury, a toxic substance that has been phased out of equipment and processes in the US over many years, is essential to artisanal gold mining in much of the world.

On October 16^th, Luis Fernandez the director of the Carnegie Amazon Mercury Ecosystem Project visited Wake Forest for a lecture on the use of mercury in artisanal, or manual gold mining and its impacts on the environment and people of the Madre de Dios region of Peru. Madre de Dios is a region of eastern Peru extending into the Amazon basin and is marked by some of the most intensive artisanal gold mining activity in South America.

The process of gold mining in the Amazon is much as it was a few hundred years ago here in the US. Water cannons are used to wash away the topsoil from small areas of forest, a few hundred feet square. This leads to extensive deforestation; a new study from Greg Asner, also with the Carnegie Institute, determined that over 120,000 acres have been deforested for gold mining in Madre de Dios and small artisanal mines have become the main culprit. After removing the vegetation and topsoil, the pay dirt is then washed through equipment to separate the gold by gravity. The problem with the pay dirt in Peru, and other areas where artisanal gold mining is common, is that the gold is present only in small flakes, not the stereotypical nuggets. So, miners use mercury to bind the small flakes of gold and concentrate them, separating the gold from other sediments. In the end, the mercury is burned off, releasing it into the atmosphere and environment. This mercury finds its way into soil and rivers, where it is slowly accumulated in crops and fish, contaminating some of the only reliable sources of food in the region.

Fernandez’s research focuses on identification of mercury contamination in fish and people in the region and his latest work has produced alarming information: over 60% of fish sold in markets in Puerto Maldonado, the capital of Madre de Dios, are contaminated with dangerous levels of mercury and 78% of people in Puerto Maldonado had unsafe levels of mercury in their bodies. Even worse, the most vulnerable population, women of childbearing age, had the highest mercury levels at 3 times the safe amount.

So, with all this bad news we ask ourselves, what can be done? What are the long-term effects on these populations? What are the long-term effects on the environment? Can the contaminated areas be reforested and, if so, how can it be done? Can the demand for gold be reduced so that it is not profitable for these small-scale, mostly illegal operations to persist? The answers to many of these questions are still unknown. There are currently few identified major health effects due to the low but chronic exposure to mercury, but cryptic effects such as decreased intelligence in children are being identified. Methods of removing mercury from the environment on a large scale are in their infancy and the gold mines are small but spread across a vast area, further complicating restoration efforts. What is known, however, is that if consumers demand safely and responsibly mined gold, as has been done with diamonds, or if they simply demand less gold, artisanal gold mining activity and the damage it causes will fade.

Contributed by Max Messinger

Photo credit: Ken Bennett

As a chemistry major with an environmental studies minor, I enjoy the chances I get to take classes that depart from the sciences. I have developed a great fondness for a course I am currently taking – Religion and Ecology, with Dr. Lucas Johnston. It has made me look beyond my knowledge of the environment, beyond my knowledge of religion, and realize that human history is not necessarily a story of the conflict between religion and nature. Religion and Ecology merges what seem to be two very different bodies of study into one, examining preconceived notions, and taking a deeper look into the impacts of each upon the other.

During the first weeks of class we addressed the intimate dance between the roots of various religions and the environment. The class is mainly discussion-based, and requires students to lead two of the classes in the semester on selected readings. The readings are captivating and diverse, covering topics related to environmental history in Eastern and Western religions, American romanticism, and radical environmentalism. We also read The Story of B by Daniel Quinn and essays from American Indian environmental activist, Winona LaDuke, who spoke on campus this semester. The final project for the course is the presentation of either an annotated bibliography on a topic of choice related to the course, or an engaged project which explores the relationships between religions and their habitats.

This class has given me a chance to discuss the history of how and why religions ranging from Christianity to Hinduism to Radical Environmentalism began, and what kinds of values shape these ways of viewing the world. Religions often define how nature should be viewed and valued, whether it is claiming “dominion” over the land, or connecting with the gods that reside in rivers and mountains. Conversely, there are also cases where habitats shape religious expression.

This class has caused me to examine more closely the culture in which we live, as well as other cultures and habitats around the world. For me, it’s more scientific than an anthropology class, more discussion-based than a religion class, and more historical than an environmental studies class. It links the human species with their habitats, and explores how the values we place on those habitats shape our lives and determine whether we thrive or struggle within them.

Contributed by Claire Nagy-Kato (‘14)

Since its founding in 2011, Greeks Go Green (GGG) has worked to involve members of the Wake Forest Greek community in reaching our campus sustainability goals.

Representatives from participating chapters meet bi-weekly to talk about the many junctures between sustainability and Greek life. The effort is facilitated by sustainability interns Emily Pence (WFU ’15) and Stewart Rickert (WFU ’16).

To date, GGG has gained traction mainly with the sororities of the Panhellenic Council on campus. This year, however, the student interns are working to expand the GGG network to include both sororities and fraternities on campus. “Although in the past sororities have accounted for the vast majority of GGG involvement, that doesn’t mean that members in fraternities on campus aren’t passionate about the environment or principles of sustainability too,” said Pence.

There may be several explanations for comparatively lower fraternity involvement: initial enthusiasm for GGG was expressed most visibly by sorority members; past student GGG interns have all been sorority women. With the addition of Rickert to the leadership team this year, the network gained its first male GGG student intern and a highly visible advocate of sustainable interests within the Greek community. According to Rickert “we began working to make Greeks Go Green more appealing to fraternities and have seen a substantial increase in participation from fraternity members this year.” Pence added that, “the increased interest that we have witnessed from fraternity members over the past semester shows a lot of potential for effecting change on campus.”

The organization currently enjoys active participation from the following fraternity and sorority chapters on campus:

Kappa Beta Gamma                                 Kappa Alpha Theta

Kappa Kappa Gamma                             Alpha Sigma

Chi Omega                                                 Delta Kappa Epsilon

Kappa Delta                                               Pi Kappa Alpha

Alpha Delta Pi                                           Theta Chi

Delta Delta Delta                                      Kappa Sigma

Delta Zeta

This year, members of the Greek community can look forward to a screening of 180º South and a campus cleanup day, in addition to annual energy conservation, waste reduction, and carpool challenges.

If you’d like to get involved, contact Greeks Go Green interns Emily Pence ( ) or Stewart Rickert ( ) for more information.

By Joey DeRosa, Communications and Outreach Intern