Student Essays, Opinions & Other Insights on a Sustainable UMD 2013-2014 Academic Year | Page 20

Kenneth Ke

Major: Bioengineering
Class of 2016

While walking to class on the Maryland campus,
I can’t help but appreciate that our campus is in
fact, beautiful. The autumn trees are slowly
detaching their leaves one by one like fiery
angels being discarded from heaven, floating to
the grass below in order to circle the chemistry
building in a wreath of red and orange. It is as if
nature itself is celebrating the triumphs
accomplished every day in this haven of
education. But beneath this beautiful dance of
colors an ugliness is uncovering as the twisted,
gnarled branches of the semi naked trees are
beginning to show through the brilliant hues of red, yellow, and orange.
I signed the sustainability pledge because I could not imagine a world lacking the beauty that we experience
and take for granted day after day. We live in a gilded society, where on the surface everything seems
harmonious as we push the Earth for all we can reap from the land, sea, and sky. But there is trouble looming
just underneath the surface. Like a bridge that has far exceeded its maximum capacity, the earth is starting to
show signs of wear. The cracks and signs of fatigue are evident as ecosystems are destroyed in the Great
Barrier Reef and Glacier National Park is basically on its last limb. It is easy to ignore the warning signs until
we do start losing the precious resources we rely on. At that point our Earth’s harmony, like our bridge
inundated with cracks and material fatigue, will collapse. One thing our university could do to become more
sustainable would be to create an algorithm to find which places on campus have the highest wind. By
creating this topological map of campus wind patterns we can find the place where the wind converges and
the maximum wind speeds are generated. At these points we could build wind turbines to generate electricity
in the most efficient way possible. This would minimize the number of actual structures built while
maximizing the output.

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