Ducks @ Oregon - University of Oregon

Environmental Leadership Program.... I'm in!

Trafton B.

October 25, 2009 - 5:26 PM

Big news this week coming out of the Environmental Studies department, you're looking at the newest member of the Climate Equity Team in the Environmental Leadership Program. I never had too many doubts about being accepted or anything because pretty much anyone that expresses a concerted effort in the program gets in, but it's nice to make it official. And I'm really, really excited about the rest of the year.

First of all, let me explain the ELP briefly. We have a few different projects in environmental education and mapping/monitoring like Canopy Connections, Wonderful Wetlands, the X-Stream Team or Turtle Monitoring Team. Each team is lead by a graduate student and made of 5-6 undergrads. Being an Environmental Studies major, as opposed to Environmental Science, I'm interested in working on one of the environmental education teams. But the odd thing is that I've been looking forward to joining the ELP since freshman year, but I never really found a team that really stuck out for me. As the fates would have it, we just opened a new team this year, called the Climate Equity Team, that is PERFECT!

We're going to focus our education and actions around the connection between climate change and the amount of carbon emissions resulting from traveling and transportation. So, we're working with five local schools to teach about global warming and helping students perform transportation audits to reduce their own carbon footprint at home on their way to school. We'll ask them things like how they get to school. Are they close enough to walk? Are there bike lanes or bike racks near their school? We're going to be working with Safe Routes to School, which is a great program that focuses on making it possible for students to ride their bicycles to school because it's better for the environment and it promotes physical activity, which is hard for a lot of students to get enough of nowadays. I'm really interested in transportation planning and I enjoy teaching and working with kids a lot, so like I said, this team is pretty much perfect for me. Hopefully I'll learn some good skills that I can put to use for a career after I graduate.

There's a link to the Environmental Leadership Program on the side of my blog if anyone is interested in learning more. Hopefully after this year is over, I'll be in some of those videos as well.

On a separate note........how ‘bout them Ducks, huh? Our football team is on a role and next Saturday (ie - Halloween) ESPN Gameday is coming to Eugene for the Pac-10 heavyweight showdown between the #4 USC Trojans and your #10 Oregon Ducks. It's going to be a crazy night to say the least. Be sure to tune, I'll be one of the 60,000 strong at Autzen Stadium. Which reminds me, I need to log in to get my student ticket right now.

Peace, love and Oregon Football.