Ithaca, NY, Mar 24--Ithaca College will host a North American summit on sustainable development April 6-7, 2004. Exploring Positive Growth: The Summit on Sustainability is by invitation only and will be attended by delegates from corporations, academic institutions, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations.
The keynote speaker is Mathis Wackernagel, coordinator of the Center for Sustainability Studies at Mexico's Universidad Anahuac de Xalapa and co-creator of the "ecological footprint," a widely used accounting method for measuring the rate at which humanity is consuming the world's natural resources. Wackernagel's research has shown that humanity is currently consuming natural resources at an unsustainable rate.
According to Ithaca College President Peggy R. Williams, "The purpose of the summit is to discuss how we can achieve growth that can be sustained from one generation to the next. The strategies we use today favor short-term thinking and financial results.
"To achieve sustainable growth, we need to think in terms of decades and give equal consideration to the impact our decisions will have on profits, society and the environment."
The summit will be held on the Ithaca College campus in Ithaca, N.Y., and will include presentations by Robert Musil, executive director and CEO of Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Pamela Lippe, a consultant who worked on the design of the Conde Nast building at Four Times Square, the world's first "green" skyscraper.
Attendees will include corporate delegations from Bristol-Myers Squibb and BC Natural Foods; regional sustainable development delegations from Central Texas, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Western Canada; and academic sustainability delegations from the University of North Carolina's Center for Sustainable Enterprise and the University of British Columbia. To view the complete summit agenda, visit www.ithaca.edu/sustainability.
Though the practice of sustainability, or sustainable development, has been adopted by national governments and a number of leading corporations, it is just now beginning to be taught comprehensively at the nation's leading colleges and universities. The summit is part of Ithaca College's plan to become one of the nation's first academic institutions to incorporate sustainability business and management practices into its curriculum and its daily operations.
The College is using a grant from the National Science Foundation to revise and develop courses that incorporate sustainability principles into the curriculum of all five of its schools and recently announced plans to construct a $14 million building for its business school that will be designed to exceed the highest level of Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) standards of the U.S. Green Building Council.
