eNewsletter for the SEE Initiative UD Tree Trail Full SEE Event Calendar

The University of Dayton Sustainability, Energy and the Environment (SEE) initiative is an exciting new approach to integrating the efforts of UD students, faculty and staff toward building a stronger, more environmentally sustainable future for the University and for the surrounding Greater Miami Valley community.

“Sustainability” can be defined as the aim of meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. ("Our Common Future", World Commission on Environment and Development, Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, chair.)   As a matter of global social justice, sustainability must also include the responsibility of current wealthier nations to use resources in such a way as to not compromise the potential for those in developing economically countries to meet their current needs.  These twin challenges of global and intergenerational equity are fundamental motivating factors for our efforts at the University of Dayton.  “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity,”
(Horace Mann, US educator (1796 - 1859))

One of the great transformations our society must make in the very near future, if we are to successfully address sustainability and environmental issues, is to begin the process of thinking and planning over a much longer-term time horizon than has been our practice to date.  Climate change consequences that may play out over centuries are being irreversibly set in motion today.  We must find ways of thinking like a mountain:  “Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf."  (Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (1949))

For the past two centuries we have become accustomed to the convenience of burning stored solar energy, in the form of fossil fuels, as a means of powering our industrial progress, it is apparent that these finite resources are beginning to become more scarce.  We will have to work hard to restructure our use of energy to be both more efficient and more cognizant of both the limits to growth in production of fossil fuels and the limited capacity of the earth’s ecosystem to absorb the byproducts of fossil-fuel combustion.  “Fundamentally, no civilization on Earth can be anything but a solar society…Unlike its predecessors, fossil-fueled civilization cannot last thousands of years.” (Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History (1994))