Introducing...Sustainability Sunday!
by Hannah Paul
Hey CU ASDA!
Congrats on finishing another semester of dental school, and good luck with the next! With exams in our past (for a brief moment) I wanted to start up a little blog feed focused on various sustainability topics to fit into the Sustainability section of ASDA Health and Wellness. As you can see, I’ll be calling it Sustainability Sunday (because it’s cheesy and I like alliteration) and will do my best to submit a new post every week (maybe every two weeks, we’ll see how this goes), so I hope you guys enjoy them! I’ll try to keep them short and sweet. This is the first time I’ve ever done a blog post, so bear with me as I figure it out… This week, to start it off, I’ll give a brief overview of the concept of sustainability and a quick action item at the end.
So... what is Sustainability?
We typically think of sustainability as responsible resource use that allows the environment to remain in a balanced state. As the idea has gained more traction in recent years, what it means for society has been expanded upon and interpreted in several ways.
The 1987 United Nations Brundtland Commission Report - Our Common Future:
In a move to gather the world’s nations in a collective effort to recognize and address environmental degradation, this report was the first to officially define sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” This emphasized the importance of looking forward and considering the impacts of today’s consumption patterns on the lives of people tomorrow.
The Triple Bottom Line: People, Planet, and Profit
Coined by British entrepreneur John Elkington in 1994, the term Triple Bottom Line further describes sustainable development, placing it within the intersection of society, the economy, and the environment. Each sector is dependent upon the other and sustainability cannot be achieved without fully accounting for them all.
Nested Sustainability Framework (Future Oxford):
This adaptation of sustainability created by Future Oxford in 2015 depicts the economy as a social construct nested within the human community, which is itself a part of the natural environment. Therefore, the environment sustains the human community which then sustains the economy - the big emphasis here being that the environment is the foundation of it all.
UN Sustainable Development Goals
With sustainability as the ultimate target, the United Nations General Assembly met in 2015 to establish 17 objectives to address the major challenges we currently face world-wide. With the aim of fulfilling them by the year 2030 the UN called for action on a global, local, and individual scale. For the past next 10 years, the focus will be on addressing poverty, empowerment of women, and the climate emergency. The number and diversity of these 17 goals goes to show just how much is involved in sustainability, and how developing solutions can often be quite complicated. Visit their website below and click on the photos to learn about each specific goal!
About the Sustainable Development Goals
And, if you want to take some easy action locally:
Anschutz Campus Composting Petition
CU – Climate and Health Advocacy, Sustainability, and Education (CHASE) and Student Health Promotion Committee are pushing to bring composting to the Anschutz Campus, and we would love to have your support in this! If you’d like to see this happen, please sign the Anschutz Campus Composting Petition here!
I hope this quick intro was at least slightly helpful and informative for y’all! Please feel free to reach out to me at hannah.paul@cuanschutz.edu if you have questions, concerns, or want to hear about a specific sustainability topic in a future post!
Thank you!