I think John's suggestion is a great one. Often the challenge is in making people wish to change their behavior, not in identifying what changes could be made. A focus on the environment through the core committments grant could be very useful.

SLU recently received a "Core Commitments" grant from the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). The Core Commitments program (http://www.aacu.org/core_commitments/index.cfm) focuses on finding ways to give issues of personal and social responsibility a higher profile on college campuses. We are in the early stages of planning our project, which will last for three years. I'm on the committee, and I would definitely like to see us build issues of ecological responsibility into our work. Part of what we will be doing is running a series of community dialogues on issues of personal and social responsibility. To me this seems like an ideal place to do some outreach for the Environmental Action Plan.

Opps

-in both the Ecology and Eco connections statements I would urge us to include the understanding of how and why populations of humans and natural organisms change and influence each other. I would even go further and suggest that understanding how to control human population growth and impacts is the key to all the planets ills but I suspect that's still viewed as "extremist."

1. Goals - provide students and the larger SLU and local communities....(i.e. I think fac, staff, and administrators, even board members could use some Ed on this...they are all opportunities that are key to the success of this initiative)

2. Opps - lead in statement suggests that ecol knowlegde is the key so could we reorder the list below so that #2 and 3 come as #1 and 2? Then proceed onto the current #1 (new 3), which then flows logically into #4 (footprint)? I would also suggest an item in this list that asks educators to find opps to teach or investigate these topics in their classes.

3. what can students do? They can address all 4 and they can work with their advisors to find the proper classes that give this background (many of which also garner distribution credits). The rest of us should at least do the footprint analysis (perhaps include a link to a footprint calculator site so visitors actually spend more time and thought on this)

shouldn't this have more of a cross-relationship with the educational initiatives under waste stream? I certainly did not think, when I first clicked on this topic, that this was the type of information that I would find (the education in the ecosystem sense).

I'd also like to see an explicit statement indicating SLU's responsibility to the local community in terms of environmental literacy. We ought to be doing some structured outreach to help local people come to understand these issues as well.

Can we be any more specific at all about current opportunties on campus for student to actually learn the stuff we list here? For instance, students who take intro bio, natural world, ecology, intro envs, and perhaps many other courses should be learning some basic ecology. Could we be specific as to what opportunities already exist and give some clear examples of how these educational objectives might be achieved? This material could be included in appendices.

Perhaps making proper recycling, as an example, a hip and sexy thing to do would reach more people.