Building a ‘Green Community’ Effect

A Master Plan for all of us to follow

Small steps can make a big difference

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing”: Albert Einstein1

As the above quotation illustrates, Albert Einstein –undeniably, one of the great minds of the 20th century– felt that one of the most important things we can do as human beings is to continually question things. When considering, therefore, the topic of sustainability, I thought about some of the important questions that needed to be asked, and came up with the following:

a) Do you know how to participate in the Universidad Veracruzana’s Master Plan for Sustainability? 2
b) Do you know how to keep the air and water clean where you live, work, or study?
c) Do you know how you can save energy in those same places and how you can do similarly in any other place you happen to be?

In this brief space, I intend to provide some answers to these questions. First, it’s important to define what we mean by ‘sustainability’. In general terms, this can be defined as: “the quality of not being harmful to the environment or depleting the natural resources, and thereby supporting long-term ecological balance.”3
At the Universidad Veracruzana (UV), many of us are trying to take care of the environment, and to make our world a better place in which to live. It is also our natural inclination to try and convince you as a student, teacher, researcher, or administrative worker, to join us in this effort.
That’s why the UV, since 2010, has been putting into effect the Master Plan for Sustainability. The Plan contains the Vision, the Mission, the General Objectives, as well as the Specific Objectives, that coherently embody the collective actions that the UV has already been taking, and intends to continue taking, in the area of sustainability.
Within the Master Plan there are three axes which are meant to be the steps leading the way to sustainability. These are:

a) University system of environmental management (SUMA)
b) Communication, participation and education of the university community (COMPARTE)
c) Inclusion of the environmental dimension of sustainability as a component in, both, academic research, and in instruction at the technical, undergraduate and graduate levels (DISCURRE).

The answers to the questions posed above can be found in Axis B, COMPARTE. As individuals who are part of a large university community, each of us can participate in helping to bring about a more sustainable environment via a wide variety of activities. One example is by taking advantage of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to spread the word about environmental-related activities happening in the different UV regions.
Another example is by refusing to smoke or litter (and by encouraging others to do likewise) in university buildings and on university premises and grounds. Saving energy by turning off lights and computers when they are not in use, and carpooling to work or school are two other examples of how we can work to construct a more sustainable environment. Both actions help to conserve energy, while the latter also helps to reduce dangerous greenhouse emissions, whose harmful gases pollute and destroy our natural resources.
At first, these may seem like relatively small steps, but when multiplied by each of us and then taken together, they become a substantial ‘green community’ effect whose results go far indeed in helping to make the world in which we live a much healthier and cleaner place.

Luis Ángel Pérez Tejada Domínguez,
Maestro de Inglés del Centro de Idiomas, Región Veracruz

Editado por David
Ewing Ryan, Docente de la Dirección de Centros de Idiomas y de Autoacceso dewing@uv.mx

1 http://www.alberteinsteinsite.com/quotes/einsteinquotes.html
2 http://www.uv.mx/noticias/eventos/plan-maestro-sustentabilidad-web.pdf
3 Retrieved April 20, 2012, from: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sustainability