Newswise — Canton, NY - Building upon the success of its highly acclaimed Adirondack Semester and its nationally known environmental studies programs, St. Lawrence University will launch a Sustainability Semester in the spring of 2013.
Similar to the Adirondack Semester, students in the Sustainability Semester will live and take courses together that address themes of human sustainability such as land and water use and food production from a variety of disciplines and perspectives.
"In many ways, the Sustainability Semester is the natural next step for a campus that has such a history of caring for the environment and supporting the regional community," said President William L. Fox. "Our pioneering Environmental Studies program, over 40 years old, has a national reputation for educating students to be leaders in environmental professions and for helping St. Lawrence graduates be responsible citizens of their home and global communities.
"In my own student days at St. Lawrence, everyone was reading The Limits to Growth and The Greening of America, so our news today fits a natural, long-standing campus trajectory and tradition," Fox added. "We began exploring this program option as we listened to our students' passion for community-supported agriculture to provide local foods on campus as well as for creating a model for sustainable living."
The program will be located on farm property near the St. Lawrence campus, owned by the Cornell Cooperative Extension. The University will lease the property.
Plans call for 15 to 20 students to live there, with an assistant program director always on site, taking four courses together that focus on sustainability from such disciplines as environmental studies, English, philosophy, psychology and geology.
Students will also work on-site to grow food, build and help renovate energy-efficient structures, and create an intense group setting, attempting to live as sustainably as possible. In addition, students will engage with local community organizations and individuals with special experiences in land use and food production.
The semester will also include an urban component, where students spend two weeks in either Boston or New York, to explore issues such as transportation, housing, food access, pollution and environmental justice.
The University will consider the possibility of adding summer internships, a summer institute in sustainability and collaborations with community-based organizations for specific projects.
St. Lawrence's Adirondack Semester, which began more than a decade ago, takes place each fall semester in a remote part of New York State's Adirondack Park, about 50 miles away from campus. Professors who teach classes in the program canoe to and from the site, where the 12 students selected for the program live together in a collection of yurts, and also take classes together. For more information, see the Adirondack Semester website, http://www.stlawu.edu/academics/experience/adirondack-semester.
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