SUSTAINABLE TRADITIONS
How you can help the Environment?
Advice from the CES Students:
• Bring your own bag to the store
• Carpool
• Eat ugly produce
• Skip the straw
• Unplug electronic energy vampires
Follow Stevenson’s Center for Environmental
Stewardship on social media @stevensonces.
Joe Matanoski, Ph.D., caught the beekeeping
buzz in 2013 and brought the first hive to
campus that same year. He now has three
hives with approximately 150,000 European
honeybees.
the community. In coordination with Sodexo, Stevenson’s
Dining Services, and advised by Tucker, this program
is now in its third year. The SU facilities team, too, has
prioritized sustainability, implementing creative and eco-
friendly strategies across campus. The examples are many
and include the switch to fluorescent bulbs; installation of
motion sensors on lights; and the use of sand, instead of
salt, on the Dell Family Pathway to ensure that chemicals
do not melt into the Gwynns Falls below. In addition, under
the leadership of now-retired Director of Facilities, Jon
Wells, Stevenson became the first university in Baltimore
County to have composting on campus.
Gorman, under whose aegis many of these initiatives
have flourished, is distinctly proud of SU’s growth.
“The collective efforts of many people have resulted in
numerous tangible campus manifestations of our attention
to environmental sustainability and stewardship,” she
says. “Add to that the less visible, but perhaps more
Kim Pause Tucker, Ph.D., uses the Gwynns Falls watershed running through the
Owings Mills campus as a natural laboratory for environmental education.
important, actions taken to promote civic engagement and
volunteerism, to Leave Steve Green, to clean up our streams,
to save the Bay one reef ball at a time, to foster partnerships
and networks that support the environment, to deliver
environmental education, and you have a university that is
of the most visible products of the grants are the water bottle filling
stations that were installed through the combined efforts of Tucker and
Matanoski. There are two stations in the Manning Academic Center
and one in Mustang Stadium, and they serve as a reminder to students,
faculty, and staff to reduce their reliance on disposable plastics and
BYOB (bottle, that is).
In describing her work with Stevenson’s Community Garden,
Miller explains, “you get what you put into it.” This is, indeed, an
apt characterization not just of the garden, but of sustainability and
stewardship at Stevenson as a whole. The university has been fortunate
to have supporters from the community as well as from among the
faculty and staff. Community partnerships are essential to the success
of these initiatives, and SU works to give back to the community, too.
truly contributing to serving the greater good by embracing
environmental sustainability and stewardship as a way of
living.”
Sustainability has no endpoint—it’s an ever-evolving
commitment through which communities explore new
ways to promote the health of the environment. In the
tradition of the sisters of Notre Dame de Namur selling
eggs to support their fledgling institution, the Stevenson
University community knows how to make thing work.
Each campus initiative—whether large or small—provides
an opportunity. As Durmowicz affirmed in characterizing
sustainability efforts at SU: “We do a lot of small things
that add up.” SU
For instance, the campus is home to a chapter of the Food Recovery
Network, a national network of college students who pick up unused Cheryl A. Wilson, Ph.D., is Dean of Stevenson’s School of
food from the dining halls and bring it to hunger fighting partners in Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of English.
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