We all know that the earth’s supply of oil, the fossil fuel that has supported our Industrial Revolution and current way of life, will be largely depleted by 2057. We all know that the burning of this fuel has released enough CO2 into the earth’s atmosphere to trap heat and precipitate an overall warming effect.  The call has gone out to seek alternative and clean energy sources. CCSU’s President Jack Miller in August 2007 became a charter member of the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment. What are the actions that CCSU is taking to achieve sustainability--that is, living in a way that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs?” A lot.

For one, CCSU as an institution operates with an Environmentally Preferable Purchasing Policy and a Solid Waste and Recycling Plan. But how do people at CCSU, in New Britain, and beyond begin to change the way they live? It must be through education – through cognition and sensory experience. And this spring there is an exciting flurry of activity.  In collaboration with CCSU Global Environmental Sustainability Action Coalition [GESAC], the CCSU Art Gallery has presented a National Teach-in on Global Warming Event: the artist and musician Michael Pestel’s February 5 talk on Aviaries, Bird Extinction, and Global Warming.  The exhibition Aviary remains open through March 5.  This multimedia art installation and hands-on performance space invites all visitors to contemplate birds we can no longer hear and to celebrate those that we can.

Aviary is followed by SUSTAINABLE? (March 19-April 24), an exhibition which explores issues of sustainability at the global, regional (the Park River watershed), and local levels (slow food in a novel installation of an Urban Oaks Organic Farm Stand; the celebration of urban forestry and our local open space in Walnut Hill Park). This exhibition opens March 19. On this day COEEA (Connecticut Outdoor and Environmental Education Association), in partnership with the CT Partnership in Sustainability Education and CCSU’s School of Education, will also hold its annual conference at CCSU. The topic: Sustainability Education for the 21st Century.

The momentum builds. GESAC’s 2nd annual Global Sustainability & Climate Change Symposium offers an array of panels and workshops at CCSU, open to all, April 15-16. Reflecting the conviction that the arts can play an important role in raising our awareness of mounting environmental concern, the UMC (University, Museum, Community) Collaboration New Britain has chosen as its 2008-09 theme: Landscape and Environment.  If last year’s UMC event at the New Britain Museum of American Art is any indicator, this year’s “CCSU Night at the Museum,” on April 16, will be explosive: a showing of the creative connections that CCSU students make between the Museum’s holdings and their own current experience of “nature and environment” in New Britain and Connecticut at large.
 
For updated information on these events, visit www.art.ccsu.edu/Gallery.html; www.ccsu.edu/gesac  ; www.coeea.org/COEEA2009ConferenceBrochure.pdf  ; and www.communication.ccsu.edu/UMCcollaborative/default.html