List of Bennington College people

Transcription

NARRATOR: THE U.S. ENVIRONEMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY CREATED A PARTNERSHIP WITH BENNINGTON COLLEGE IN 2012 TO WORK CLOSELY WITH STUDENTS IN A CLASS CALLED SOLVING THE IMPOSSIBLE. TAUGHT BY PROFESSOR SUSAN SGORBATI, STUDENTS STUDY INTRACTABLE PROBLEMS AND DEVELOP SKILLS TO WORK TOWARD SOLUTIONS. THE EPA ASSISTS PROFESSOR SGORBATI EACH SEMESTER WITH ENVIRONMENTAL PUBLIC POLICY PROBLEMS FOR THE STUDENTS TO WORK ON. ONE CLASS TACKLED THE ISSUE OF CLIMATE CHANGE. We decided that we want to do a local project on climate change and we raised this idea with our professor. So I went to the village trustees in North Bennington our local town and asked David Monks was there was a project that they were involved in that had to do with energy reduction or that would be some way of addressing climate change. Efficiency Vermont had publicized a program where they would help towns and villages to install LED street lighting, which would not only save energy but is better lighting for a lot of reasons. So a couple years ago I contacted Green Mountain Power to get a list of all the street lights and there's a lot of things that Efficiency Vermont wanted you to do to analyze the street lighting you had can you take out any? can you dim any? so the first thing I do is I get this big stack of papers from Green Mountain Power with all the street lights. So when Susan asked if I had any ideas I said well I have a great one, that if the students are patient enough First we had to go and see if the street lamps were actually there, and then see how the community members felt about LED and how they felt about the amount of light in each area all sorts of logistical things. So I designed this flyer, and on here is a little info graphic we found about LED lights and some information about the project. Then we dropped this off on everybody's doors. And they came to one of the trustees meetings and proposed this project and of course the voting was pretty simple this is hard to turn down when they're willing to do all this work for us for nothing. So they got the approval and went ahead. And we gathered so many valuable things that we wouldn't gather otherwise if we were not involved with the community as much. For example, we figured out that some of the lights were 24 hours a day on. It's not something that's going to be marked in the lists of the lights that we were given. The woman that we asked said they'd been on for the last two years, so you can imagine how much money and, more importantly, how much energy that's wasting. The last thing they did was they came, again, to the trustees with all their documentation. They made a full presentation--a slideshow--explaining that if this was going to save the village close to ten thousand dollars a year, that Efficiency Vermont would pick up the cost of the conversion so there's zero cost to the village, and then, they said�we should vote on it! (laughs)--what's there to vote on? It's going to reduce kilowatt hour usage by 51,000 and remove about 60,000 pounds of carbon out of the air. So it's pretty significant for just a small town of 108 fixtures. So by involving the students the project was able to get completed in a very timely manner and is now in the que to be potentially replaced within the year. NARRATOR: THROUGH THE PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN BENNINGTON COLLEGE AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY, STUDENTS WERE ABLE TO LEARN ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE AND ADAPTING TO CLIMATE CHANGE AND THEN, PUT THAT KNOWLEDGE INTO PRACTICE. ONE OF THE OUTCOMES OF THE PROJECT WOULD BE FOR THE STUDENTS TO CREATE A RESOURCE OF INFORMATION THAT CAN BE USED BY OTHER SCHOOLS AND TOWNS TO DUPLICATE THE SUCCESS OF THE BENNINGTON PROJECT WITHOUT HAVING TO START FROM SCRATCH. The issue of citizenship, to begin with that one, is something that we really have to understand as not a choice--it's an obligation--it's a responsibility. And if we, in higher education, think we have to shield our students from the full implications of that responsibility, we're in trouble. We, on the contrary, it seems that we have to develop their capacity to do it and do it brilliantly. Specifically at this age--the age of undergraduates and circumstances of undergraduates--I think they're uniquely positioned to engage the challenges and frankly the exhilaration of what it means to really take on the kinds of challenges we're facing. But they feel that this kind of work connects them to their future. It's not just an exercise that they're getting a grade for. Personally, a lot of the times climate change seems like this huge insurmountable issue and it's really hard to address that because, well, where do you begin? So I think this project helped me see that there are very accessible, and sometimes easy, ways to address it and establish small changes. In Susan's class we've talked a lot about leverage points, like how to find spots in this huge system that can really be turning points and change trajectory of where we're going. So like this North Bennington project and like a college campus, I think communities as leverage points is like a really valuable thing that I've learned. Almost every week there is a new report, there's a new finding, that climate change is happening even faster than we thought. I think we really need to provide young people ways to get involved and actually do something. I think that feeling of really changing things really motivates people to do even more, and that was the case for us. I want to make a point here that what we're talking about isn't ultimately about Bennington College. It's about the potential of students in classrooms all over this country to be able to participate powerfully in actually making a difference in what's going on about he kinds of issues that the Environmental Protection Agency represents.