Practicing sustainability must be a collective effort toward common challenges. Such sustainability challenges that we all are part of include climate change, food insecurity, and ocean pollution. As a researcher working with Indigenous Peoples in the Arctic and tropical parts of the world, I have witnessed these issues and am somewhat optimistic about the solutions.  

 

We need a change. The change from unsustainable to sustainable. Why can’t people change? The unsustainable world we created is a product of our unsustainable thinking. Your actions are the children of your thoughts. To practice sustainability, you have to think sustainable. Going beyond conventional teaching approaches, we train our students to think sustainably by engaging in various projects and leadership activities. Co-learning is a critical component to this approach.

 

Sustainability is an integral part of my research. My research is aimed primarily at the social dimensions of human-nature systems. I am particularly interested in climate change adaptation, with a major focus on how Indigenous communities and their local food systems experience and adjust to change.

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Sustainability is one of the 21st century’s grand challenges that requires leaders to develop and implement practices that enable humans to thrive economically and socially over generations while ensuring healthy ecosystems that provide for current and future populations.   

At Virginia Tech, students work with faculty in co-learning environments to promote sustainable practices. The course, Practicing Sustainability, is the capstone course in the Pathways to Sustainability minor. It is a platform where students work collaboratively to synthesize and integrate knowledge from their prior sustainability coursework to put into practice the principles and application of sustainability science. They do so via student-designed and student-led applied projects examining specific local and regional sustainability issues on the Virginia Tech campus, in the New River Valley and the Commonwealth of Virginia. 

 

The Department of Geography is proud of the student accomplishments represented here and are confident that our students are poised to make demonstrable progress towards a sustainable future that contributes in meaningful ways to achieving Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations.