The rather superhuman efforts that motivated undergrads put into eco-socio conscious work makes me wonder what the hell I was doing when I was their age. Unbeknownst to me until yesterday, Trojans have a whole slew of Earth Week events planned for next week.

Now, I’ll be part of them :) Laura, the Earth Week Coordinator for Environment First — a student-run group promoting sustainable practices at USC — told me about a forum which’ll discuss current practices at USC and develop a plan to better them. I’ll give one of a number of 10-min talks.

When: Wednesday, April 19, 2006 from 6:30 - 8:30 pm.
Where: Harris 101 on the USC University Park campus.

The event’s put together by Environment First and the School of Architecture, who together are launching the USC Green Practices Initiative, a group of USC faculty, staff and students seeking to “cultivate an environmentally conscious community who understand the environmental implications of their actions and use this knowledge to inform their decisions at USC.”

Lately, I’ve noticed that USC tends to have a helluva lot of departments and orgs and centers working on sustainability issues. We’ve got Environment First and USC Green Parctices Initiative, of course. But we’ve also got Marshall Net Impact, an org of USC MBA students interested in promoting more socially responsible business practices. We’ve got the Environmental Studies Program. And we’ve got the Master of Building Science program in the School of Architecture.

Then we’ve got the USC Center for Sustainable Cities, whose Jennifer Woloch took part in the Green Building panel at the Silverlake Film Festival. That org “engages in multidisciplinary research and education on the environmental, social and economic sustainability challenges facing metropolitan regions, and contributes to the development of public policy that improves the natural and human environment of cities.”

There’s also the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies — Its goal is “to encourage responsible and creative decisions in society by providing an objective source of marine and environmental science and fostering an understanding of the natural world among people of all ages.”

I’m having a bit of a time trying to figure out how they intersect. Hopefully it’ll be clearer to me once I get to the event on Wed :)

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