Last Meeting of the Semester!

Hi all! 

The semester is already practically over and we will be holding our final meeting this Thursday 12/9 at the usual place and time. It will be a relaxed sort of shin-dig, so bring food and drinks if you can! Meredith will be making some announcements about officer positions, power shift and other happenings for next semester. We will also watch FLOW, if people would like to do that.

See you all Thursday!

Meeting Minutes for 12/2/10

Hey all,

Last week we just had a short meeting to sign up for tabling and discuss improvements, changes, things we liked/dislike for next semester.

This week, (12/9) we will be having our final meeting! At the beginning of the meeting those of us who volunteered to do water fountain audits in other buildings on campus should turn them in so we can compile the information and give it to B&G.

After this it will just be a little shin-dig celebrating the end of year! Hope you can all make it!

Final Energy Seminar!

Sawyer Seminar Series on Energy Transitions and Society:

The Pardee Center and the Department of Geography and Environment are pleased to invite you to the Sawyer Series on Energy Transitions and Society. 

Seminar 4. THE BUSINESS OF ENERGY 

Martha Amram (Founder and CEO, Ennovationz)
Joseph Pratt (History, University of Houston)
Paul McManus (School of Management, Boston University)

Hi All! This is the last of the Pardee Energy Seminars, if you haven't made it to one yet you should try to make this one!

Date:  Friday, December 3,  2010

Time: 10.00AM - 12.30PM

Place: Room 424, School of Management building (595 Commonwealth Avenue), Boston University

Please pass this on to others who may have an interest in attending.

Seating is limited. To register, please send an email to pardee@bu.edu by Wednesday, December 1, 2010.

For further details, please go to:

http://www.bu.edu/pardee/research/sawyer-energy-transitions/

There will also be a Pardee seminar on Africa 2060 on Monday, December 6:

http://www.bu.edu/pardee/2010/11/24/pardee-seminar-africa-2060/

Main website: http://bu.edu/pardee

Energy Dependence Forum

Hi all! Below is information for a forum on Oil Dependency hosted by BU today from 5 to 8, sorry it's short notice!

A policy forum co-hosted by: Boston University Center for Energy and Environmental Studies • Environment America • Conservation Law Foundation • ENE (Environment Northeast) • Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2) • Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) • PennFuture •The Union of Concerned Scientists

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

 

Tuesday November 30, 2010

College of Communication, Boston University

Room 101

640 Commonwealth Avenue

5:00-8:00 PM

Program

5:00 - 5:30 Networking & Refreshments

5:30 - 5:35 Welcome and Introduction: Rob Sargent, Environment America

5:35 - 6:00 Keynote Address: Randy Udall, ASPO-USA, energy analyst and sustainable energy activist

6:00 - 6:45 Panel Discussion: The Case for Getting off of Oil

Special Welcome/Moderator: Berl Hartman, E2

Panelists:

1) The Folly of Energy Independence -> Cutler Cleveland, Boston University

2)    National security -> John Gensler, Truman Security Project

3)    The environmental consequences of oil in the 21st century -> Dan Gatti, Environment America

6:45 - 7:00 Break

7:00 - 7:55 Panel Discussion: The Policies that Will Get Us There

Moderator: Luke Tonachel, NRDC 

Panelists:

1)    Taking Advantage of More Efficient Technologies -> Luke Tonachel, NRDC

2)    Creating Incentive-based Fuel Policies -> Jeremy McDiarmid, ENE

3)    Developing Clean, Low-Carbon Biofuels –> Jeremy Martin, UCS

4)    The Intersection of Transportation, Land Use Planning and Climate -> Rafael Mares, CLF

7:55 - 8:00 Wrap Up: Sue Reid, Conservation Law Foundation

Meeting changed to Wednesday at 7- events this week!

Hi everybody,

As the semester winds down I hope you'll join us for our last few meetings.  This week's meeting has been moved to Wednesday night at 7pm in the CEES lounge (CAS 442).  We will be composing a universal proposal to present to other student groups that have money to help us out with our campaign and hearing from the director of dining services about a town hall meeting coming up in the next two weeks.


Events this week:

Wednesday: Geography dept. Tea @ 2 in CEES lounge. water taste test!
                    Volunteers for tabling and conducting the taste test are greatly appreciated.
                     If this goes well we may gain a lot of support from the department.

Thursday: Screening of "Food Inc"- 6:30 pm in Kenmore Classroom Building

Friday: Outing Club's Enviroganza (we will be tabling)- 11am-4pm at GSU plaza


Hope to see you all on Wednesday evening.
-Meredith

Meeting Minutes 11/11

Hello ESO-ers!

For last night's meeting:

We made final decisions about facts to use for our bottled water campaign

Also, a sign-up sheet for tabling next week (Thursday, 11/18 1pm-4pm) was passed around, if you want to table and weren't at the meeting to sign up, shoot us an email! If you can't table and would like to bake some treats to help lure people over, that would be much appreciated also!

For next week, we will be meeting on Wednesday at 7 so that people who want to see a screening of Food Inc. in KCB at 7 on Thursday can do so.

Finally, we contributed to Oceana's petition for clean energy and made hand turkeys =)

Have a great weekend!

Film screening Wed. Year book photo Thursday

Hi all,

If you are looking for something to do tomorrow night (wed. 11.10) please see the link below for a cool film screening.
http://killercoke.org/downloads/local_103_film_flyer_11-10-2010

We will be meeting on Thursday night at 7.  Sorry if anyone didn't receive our email about the meeting change on time.  We've been having some issues with our Gmail.  There will be a yearbook photo this week so please make sure you get to the meeting on time if you want to be in the photo. 

This week we will be doing a lot of things that everyone can get involved with and we will be breaking into small groups to work on them.  There are only four meetings left in the semester so I want to make the most of them! Please bring your water/bottle caps so that we can start making pledge buttons.  E-board positions are available for the spring so please make sure you make it to the meeting if you are interested.  See you Thursday!

-Meredith 

3rd and 4th installment of the Energy Lecture Series

Hi ESO-ers! below I've attached some info about a series of lectures (the first and second have already passed) that you all should try to get to! Be sure to RSVP with pardee@bu.edu if you want to attend!

Sawyer Seminar Series on Energy Transitions and Society:

The Pardee Center and the Department of Geography and Environment are pleased to invite you to the Sawyer Series on Energy Transitions and Society. The Seminar will meet once each month during the 2010-2011 academic year to discuss how energy transitions are themselves socially constituted and how they have, and are likely to, impact society.

http://www.bu.edu/pardee/research/sawyer-energy-transitions/

The Pardee Center and the Department of Geography and Environment are pleased to invite you to the the third meeting of the Sawyer Series on Energy Transitions and Society. Please share the event details with those interested and encourage them to RVSP at pardee@bu.edu 

Seminar 3. ENERGY AND DEVELOPMENT 

Speakers: 

Joan Martinez-Alier (Economics and Economic History, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona)

Paul Epstein (Center for Health and the Global Environment, Harvard University Medical School)

James McCann (History, Boston University)

Date:  Monday, Novemeber 8,  2010

Time: 10.00AM - 12.30PM

Place: Room 412, School of Management building (595 Commonwealth Avenue), Boston University

Seating is limited. To register, please send an email to pardee@bu.edu by Friday, November 5, 2010.

For further details, please go to:

http://www.bu.edu/pardee/research/sawyer-energy-transitions/

Green Your Halloween

Happy Halloween!

 

 

With the weekend ahead, check out some awesome ways to green Halloween:
- Goodwill your Garbs
     Hit up Goodwill for some truly inspirational (not to mention cheap) last minute Halloween costumes.
- Compost that Pumpkin
    Before your jack-o-lanterns turn to mush, haul 'em over to the GSU for composting! Planet Earth (and your roommates) will thank you!
- Conserve your candy waste
    Instead of spending money and wasting packaging on individually wrapped candies, spring for large bags of your faves (like Swedish fish... yum)
- Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
    As always, don't forget your carbon footprint during the holidays. Can't think of the next time you'll be needing that Statue of Liberty costume? Donate it. Don't know how to get rid of all those cans and bottles? Recycle them. Extra candy? Bring them to CAS 442 and we'll eat them : )

Meeting Minutes 10/28

Hi All!

So this was the haps of yesterdays meeting:

We revised the bottled water survey we created last year for tabling in the GSU and discussed creating a little pocket/wallet sized guide about which food companies in the GSU are greenest

We also reviewed the results of the water fountain audit in CAS last week, and we will be moving on to auditing the other academic buildings...yay!

Upcoming events:

There will be a green group pot luck in the GSU basement before our meeting next Thursday at 6!

We passed around a sign up sheet for an Esplanade clean up on November 6th at around 9, if you are interested shoot us an email so you can be on the list!

For Next Week's Meeting we will be meeting after the potluck to make our bottle cap pins and compiling our statistics for further tabling in the GSU!

Meeting Minutes 10/21

At the meeting last Thursday we discussed ideas for the water bottle campaign, particularly what tabling will look like with the survey and taste testing. We got some good ideas for visuals going, and should have some more concrete ideas by our next meeting.

A pledge is being worked on also, so we should have a few options to choose from at the next meeting. We have decided to give out bottle cap pins in exchange for pledging to drink less bottled water, so start saving your caps!

We broke up into groups for the last half of the meeting. One group focused on working on more specifics for the campaign, and is working on gathering facts about bottled water for our next meeting. Another group did a water fountain audit of CAS, and we will hear those results at the next meeting. The last group worked on a new idea, forming some kind of pocket guide to all the different labels green products can have (organic, vegan, fair trade, etc.) and what labels can be best trusted.

Thanks to all those who came to our last meeting and hopefully see you all at our next!

-Alex

Tough Lessons From Oil

Hi All!

There is a great lecture being held tomorrow (10/26) in Stone Science Building (675 Comm ave) in room 453 at 12:30!

The Lecturer is Zygmunt Plate, of Boston College's Law School. Below is more detailed information:

As a White House staffer once said, “A disaster is a terrible thing to waste.” The BP Deepwater Horizon blowout will be a doubly disastrous calamity if it doesn’t produce systemic changes for the future, as the 1989 wreck of the Exxon Valdez markedly failed to do. Twenty years ago the State of Alaska Oil Spill Commission discovered that pervasive systemic flaws made that disaster not just possible but probable — but the lessons were largely cloaked behind the figure of a captain with a drinking problem. This year, after suffering another terrible oil incident—this one almost 20 times larger than the Exxon Valdez spill—the question for national energy law and policy is whether, this time around, we’ll rediscover and implement the hard systemic lessons largely avoided two decades ago.

About the Speaker

Zygmunt Jan Broël Plater, Professor, Boston College Law School. A.B., Princeton University; J.D., Yale University; LL.M., S.J.D., University of Michigan. Professor Plater is a member of the bar of the District of Columbia and Tennessee, and teaches and writes in the fields of environmental law, property and land use law, and administrative process, with further interests in comparative international law and public interest litigation. He has taught on seven law faculties; has been a consultant on environmental and land use law issues in Ethiopia, Costa Rica, Colombia, Nepal, and Japan; and has worked on national endangered species legislation and litigation in the USA -- most notoriously six years spent litigating the case of the endangered snail darter fish vs. TVA’s Tellico Dam in federal district court, appeals court, and in the Supreme Court, and through extended administrative and congressional hearings. Professor Plater worked as chair of the State of Alaska’s Oil Spill Commission legal research task force responding to the Exxon-Valdez disaster, 1989-1990, has been a legal consultant in many environmental law cases, has authored many law review articles, and is lead author of the widely-adopted environmental law coursebook ENVIRONMENTAL LAW AND POLICY: NATURE, LAW, AND SOCIETY (3d edition 2004 from Aspen Publishing). In 2000, by vote of Boston College Law School’s graduating senior class, he won the school’s Faculty Excellence Award. In 2005 he was awarded the 2005 David Brower Lifetime Achievement Award at the 23d International Public Interest Environmental Law Conference, Eugene Oregon.

Warren Towers "Green The Patio" Project

Nelson Feliciano, one of the residence directors for Warren Towers, came up with a wonderful idea to turn one of the roof patio areas into an urban green space for the campus! He is looking to form a group of dedicated students to help with this project, so if you are interested, please indicate the times you would be available to meet at 
http://doodle.com/participation.html?pollId=7k2tp2gacvrcb3zu. 


This is a wonderful opportunity to bring a little bit of nature into the city and create a green place for people to relax, so please sign up! Hope to see some of you at the first meeting!


-Alex

EcoReps Turn Off the Lights

Still interested in becoming an EcoRep? Wondering what an EcoRep is? Click here to learn more.

Nairika Murphy will be hosting an EcoReps meeting Tuesday, October 26 at 5pm in the Howard Thurman Center, located in the basement of the GSU. November kicks off Sustainability@BU's "Turn Off the Lights Campaign" and at the meeting they will be brainstorming awesome events to get everyone on campus involved.

Becoming an EcoRep is a great leadership opportunity, a great chance for networking, and a fun way to stay connected with all things environmental at BU.

Questions? E-mail Nairika at nairika.sustainability@gmail.com.

(P.S. There will be free brownies and cookies at the meeting!)

LIVE! Online Streaming of Deep Waters: Inside the BP Oil Spill with Professor Cutler Cleveland

10.14 events!!!

As you all may know, tomorrow is the Cutler Cleveland lecture in PHO 205 @ 6pm. The photonics building is located at 8 St. Mary's Street. We would really appreciate it if members would do some baking so that we can collect a suggested donation for ESO. Tabling at the GSU will continue tomorrow from 1-4. Please try to make it to help out! We really appreciate your time.

Also tomorrow:
"Come on down to the Women's Resource Center (in the basement of 775 Commonwealth Avenue) with YOUR favorite dish to share. (Vegan friendly is optimal, vegetarian if not). Also, bring your newest issues and activist ideas to discuss, as we will be both eating and talking about what our next big moves in Boston should be.

Come out, share with us, and let's keep building our activist community."

Here's a link to the Facebook event:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=138945989484405

Hopefully we'll see most of you on Thursday!
Cheers!

Potential Movie Screening/ Discussion

Hey all,

Check out this trailer. If we can get rights to show this movie I think it would be great for our campaign but we will have to have a great advertising campaign/maybe charge admission. Let me know what you think at our next meeting!

http://www.onewater.org/movie

-Meredith

some bad news on deep-water drilling

Follow the link to see the latest news about the moratorium on deep-water drilling.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/white-house-to-lift-ban-on-deep-water-drilling/?emc=na

Hi All!

Here is a lecture series going on at BU that you should really try to get to this semester! Space is limited, so be sure to RSVP at pardee@bu.edu:

more information can be found at:

http://www.bu.edu/pardee/research/sawyer-energy-transitions/

http://www.bu.edu/pardee/news-events/

http://twitter.com/BUPardeeCenter/

World Challenge- Please Vote!!

So this company is competing in the BBC's World Challenge and if they win they will get a lot of money to further the project. They construct buildings (mainly homes and schools) out of recylable materials! If you want to learn more about the company their website is: www.longwayhomeinc.org/en/index.

Please Vote here: www.theworldchallenge.co.uk/2010-finalists-project06.php

You can look around at the other finalists, but this company will do the most good with the money and is the most relevant to ESO!

Hope you all have a great long weekend!

-Alex

Meeting Minutes

Hi all!

Unfortunalty, I tried to upload meeting minutes via video (as promised!) but I'm having some technical difficulties, so hopefully for next time!

Here are the happenings of yesterday's meeting:

Up-coming events:

On Sunday, 10/10/10, there will be an open house for a Green house (meaning a zero emission house) in Jamaica Plain. The event includes tours of the house/garden, food, music and you can even help out with the garden if you like!

Another BU green group (leadership campaign/SJSF) are leaving as a group at around 1:30 (most likely in front of Warren) to take the T out there.

here is the website for more info:

http://www.350.org/en/node/16674

if you are interested please email Samantha (Sam) Akiha at snakiha@gmail.com

At the meeting:

Sorry to say that the greeroof is not a plausible option for our group. After talking to a green architect at Sustainability@BU who is currently pushing for a greenroof on 100 Bay State Rd. the administration is not going to retrofit any green roofing and is focusing on other avenues (light sensors, white roofs etc).

Instead we had a discussion about moving forward with out Think Outside the Bottle Campaign, but we will be taking it in a new direction! We brainstormed ways to educate the student body and work up to a greater event/week with out plastic. Next time we will start outlining specifics of the campaign and begin working on it!

Also, be sure to do class raps for the Cutler Cleveland talk if you signed up! Also we will be doing some chalking in classrooms for the event, email Becky at rlmorgan@bu.edu if you are interested.

FINALLY - put up the event picture as your facebook profile picture for more publicity! (it's the one with the BP logo on a previous post)

'till next time!

Hannah, ESO e-board

You Down With TOTB?

What's that, you say?

Think Outside the Bottle (TOTB) is a nation-wide campaign started by Corporate Accountability International, the same people fighting for healthier lunches in our public schools and challenging big tobacco companies. The goal of the campaign is to spread awareness about the environmental impacts of supporting bottled water companies and advocate for improved public water supply systems here and around the globe.

As BU students, ESO adopted the campaign on campus in the Spring of 2010 with the goal of reaching out to the BU community and joining the cause to stop the purchase and sale of bottled water here on campus. So far, we've distributed free "BU Taps That" water bottles and have participated in awareness festivals on campus.

What's going on this semester?

We are increasing our presence on campus by hosting water taste tests in the GSU every Thursday, performing water fountain audits in the major buildings, surveying students on their knowledge of bottled water, and communicating with faculty and administrators about the future of bottled water contracts on campus.

How can I get involved?

Visit http://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/students-think-outside-bottle to learn more about the campaign. If you're interested in getting involved or simply have a few good suggestions, e-mail us at environmentalstudentorg@gmail.com.

As always, ESO meetings are every Thursday at 7pm in CAS 442.

GSU Tabling Information

Hi everyone,

Here are a few links that I promised to send out.  I strongly suggest taking an hour and watching the documentary and reading the article.  This information will help you speak to people when you table on Thursdays.  We will provide you with some materials to show people and we will also have our advertisements to give out for the Cleveland lecture.

Thank you all for your help!

http://www.documentarywire.com/flow-for-the-love-of-water/

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Health/story?id=728070&page=1

Deep Waters: Inside the BP Oil Spill with Professor Cutler Cleveland

October 14^th at 6pm, the Environmental Student Organization will be hosting an informal lecture by Professor Cutler Cleveland, founder of the online Encyclopedia of the Earth and leading expert on the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. He’ll discuss the ins and outs of the largest oil spill in history –what went wrong, how the government and private business fell short of preventing the disaster, and what we can learn from its destruction. There will also be free food and complimentary coffee if you bring your own mug.


PHO 205 is located in 8 Saint Mary's Street, Boston MA.

RSVP for the event on Facebook here.

Meeting Minutes

Hey guys! Here are the going-ons of our last meeting:

Upcoming events:

There is the Boston Local Food Fest on Saturday, October 2nd at the boston harbor. SMG's undergrad chapter of Net Impact will be meeting at 11:30 am in front of SMG and going over as a group - feel free to join them! The festival will have free food, beer tasting, and local food groups.

On Monday, October 4th in the GSU alley @ 5:30 pm there will be a pot luck with all the green groups on campus! Bring something yummy and your own plates and utensils!

During the Meeting:

-The Cutler Cleveland talk: We've continued with our advertising campaign - we passed around a sign up sheet for people to talk in their ecology related classes. We also passed around sign up sheets for tabling at the GSU next Thursday from 1 to 4 (tabling would be for both our bottled-water campaign and the Prof. Cleveland talk). If you want to get involved in either and did not sign up send us an email! Also, we made some paper cranes at the end of the meeting.

- The Green Roof: We are pushing forward with the green roof! Be sure to come back with facts about precedents/current construction of green roofs in boston/other universities. Also, if there are any faculty members who would be interested in supporting us, try to get in contact with them this week.

Have a good weekend!

Presidential Lecture on Energy and Environmental Sustainability 9.29.10

Hey everyone.  I just saw this in my inbox and it looks like it will be an interested lecture.  Follow the link to see what it's all about and when/where it is.

http://www.bu.edu/phpbin/calendar/event.php?id=100744&cid=17

What you may have missed...

Here's the minutes from yesterday's meeting:

- Synapse, BU's undergraduate science magazine, came to talk to us! They are looking for an array undergraduate authors to submit their ideas or research for publication. This is a great opportunity - if you are interested, email them at BUsynapse@gmail.com.  The website is bu.edu/synapse.

- We decided we were going to look into the possibility of a green roof on Stone Science Building for this semester's big project! We also discussed the idea of breaking into smaller groups if people feel passionately about other issues/projects to work on alongside the green roof.

- Over the next few weeks we will be working on advertising for Professor Cleveland's BP oil spill talk that we are hosting on October 14th

- On November 6th there will be an esplanade clean up, which we will sign up for as a group. Also, we will be planning a trip to go apple/pumpkin picking in late October!

- Last but not least, we worked on making some paper cranes (out of scrap paper, of course) to advertise for the BP talk.

See you all next week!

Mountain Top Removal

Hi everyone,

Anna brought this very important issue to our attention at the second meeting last week.  Please take a few minute to view this website about some civil action that will take place in Washington D.C. this weekend: http://appalachiarising.org/

If you are curious about what mountain top removal is and why it is so terrible take a look at this site:http://mountainjustice.org/facts/steps.php


See you all on Thursday!
-Meredith

Last Meeting's Happenings

Hello all! Here are the notes from our last meeting (9/16/10):

We discussed some issues we'd like to focus on this Semester. For our next meeting we will vote on the top three, and work on those. Here were some of the ideas we bounced around:

- Water conservation on campus (pushing for a green roof, replacing sprinklers with soak lines, reducing bottled water use on campus)

- Getting Power driers installed

- Getting more composting in areas other than the GSU

- More recycling in South Campus

- Reusing/renting books within departments

- planning workshops about how to reuse everyday dorm items

- planning a trip to Powershift in D.C.

Some upcoming events include in the Boston area and around campus:

- Bountiful Brookline on Sunday. Our former President Rachel Weil would love some volunteers for this, so email us if you are interested!

- On Monday there will be the first of a series of lectures about "Energy & Society" in SMG rm 424. Send an email to pardee@bu.edu to register!

Finally - Be sure to collect paper and aluminum cans so we can use them to make pin wheels and paper cranes to advertise for the BP oil spill talk by Cutler Cleveland on October 14th!!!

In case you missed it!

Hi all! In case you missed our first ESO meeting, here are some of the high-lights:

- For this upcoming year we are planning some great stuff like a "Think outside the bottle" campaign, tours of the Emerald Necklace and the Arnold Arboretum, Esplanade clean ups, apple picking, movie screenings and other opportunities to volunteer and participate/create events on campus. We would love input and participation across schools and class year!

- Our next meeting will be this Thursday, September 16th in the CEES lounge, which is on the fourth floor of the Stone Science building - come join us!

- We have a table set up for the Sustainability @ BU festival at the GSU plaza on Thursday, September 16th from 11 to 2:30. We would love to have volunteers to come at 10 am to help set up, or any other time you are available.

- October 14th we are organizing a talk by Professor Cutler Cleveland about the BP oil spill. Stay posted for the specific time and location!

- We will have a table at the Fall Activities Expo this Wednesday, September 17th, from 3 to 7, so feel free to check us out there also!

1st Meeting of Fall 2010!!!

Our first meeting of the semester will be held in CAS 211 at 7pm September 9. There you'll meet this year's e-board and learn about all the things we'll be working toward this fall. Bring your friends, and feel free to bring any suggestions for volunteer opportunities, events, or awareness campaigns you'd like to get involved with!

If you haven't already, join us on Facebook and YouDo.

The New [and Improved!] ESO Blog

Thanks so much for visiting the ESO blog, where'll you find all the up-to-date information regarding meeting dates/locations, upcoming ESO events, what else is going on around campus, and how you can learn more about current environmental issues ripped right from the headlines.

While we get ready for our first meeting of Fall 2010, check out what ESO has done in the past. If you have any suggestions for upcoming events ESO could get involved with as well, we look forward to hearing from you! Just send us an e-mail at environmentalstudentorg@gmail.com.

Check back with us in a few weeks, when we'll formally [or rather informally] introduce you to the spanking-new e-board this year!

In the meantime, join us on Facebook and on You Do @ BU.

Best wishes,
Becky M