CSUN Leads the Scene to Keep It Green
While many consider climate change to be the most important issue of our time, not everyone agrees. Although former President Obama took an active role on the international scene to attempt to curb climate change when he signed last year’s Paris Agreement, President Trump’s actions during his first 40 days in office may signal a shift in U.S. policy, both domestically and abroad. And, according to a Gallup poll taken during last year’s elections, climate change failed to rank as a top issue among Democrat and Republican-leaning voters.
Despite this, California has implemented its own plan to combat climate change. The Associated Students at California State University, Northridge have as well. A new campus Sustainability Center is currently under construction and is scheduled to open in May 2017. With the opening of the center, CSUN could be considered a leader in sustainability efforts.
“It’s going to be the most innovative building on our campus, as well as in the CSU at this point,” said CSUN Director of Sustainability and Energy Austin Eriksson. “It’ll be the first building with composting toilets. It has the first grey water system on campus, so water that’s used in sinks will be used outside of the building for irrigation.”
The center will house CSUN’s Institute for Sustainability. Here, students will be able to find studies on sustainability, informational flyers, and even volunteer opportunities. The A.S. Recycling Center will also be located at the new Sustainability Center.
“It was recognized that there’s a lot of different groups on campus, and we all have the same goals to promote sustainability on campus and educate our students,” said Darien Siguenza, Chair of the Associated Students Committee on Sustainability. “I think it’s going to be really awesome to have everyone under the same roof; and just to be able to have that collaboration and that same space, I think is going to be very beneficial for the future.”
With the new Sustainability Center, Associated Students and CSUN’s Institute for Sustainability hope to expand upon their current educational efforts and resources. However, while they recognize the importance of their recycling programs on campus, and acknowledge they can be improved with better signage, they want others to know this is only a small part of what should be done. They say other things like waste prevention and energy efficiency are more important. The manner in which the Sustainability Center will be powered reflects this belief. Since it will generate all of the energy it will use, it will be a net-zero energy building.
The campus community as a whole has welcomed and supported sustainability efforts at CSUN. Professor Loraine Lundquist, a physics and mathematics lecturer at the CSUN Institute for Sustainability, said this support is in stark contrast to the lack of support among the nation’s current political leaders.
“Over 12,000 papers have been published on the topic, and 97 percent of those papers agree with the consensus that first of all, our globe is getting warmer, and second of all, that we are the ones causing it,” she said. “But that is not the perception in the country right now, and that really does change our politics. There’s a lot of politicians that themselves have that skepticism, and it’s made it very hard to implement solutions, because a lot of the most important solutions are policy solutions.”
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