Engineers for a Sustainable World held their third annual Northwestern University Summit on Sustainability on Friday, April 5, in the McCormick Tribune Center. The daylong event featured three different panels, two keynote speakers and a poster fair all revolving around the intersection of economics and the environment.
"Economy is one of the biggest drivers for environmental decisions," said Amanda Meyers, a Weinberg senior and the project manager for NUSOS 2013. Meyers worked with five other NU students since last spring to organize the conference.
“We wanted to do something we were really passionate about, and wanted to see where we would get a lot of help from the university,” Meyers said, referencing Northwestern’s strong pre-professional undergraduate population and large economics department. “Sustainability is not just environmental sustainability, it’s financial and economic sustainability as well.”
The panels and subsequent question-and-answer segments attempted to stay conversational and accessible. The local efforts panel, moderated by Northwestern’s own environmental economics professor Mark Witte, addressed the current state of sustainability in Chicago and at the University.
“The problem we face environmentally and sustainably, this is a problem that will not go away,” Witte said. Much of this segment focused on the private sector's role in pursuing sustainable business options, bringing in the expertise of Zipcar Chicago’s general manager Charles Stephens, Sustainable Endowments Institute Founder Mark Orlowski and Jean Pogge, CEO of the Delta Institute.
“It’s really a unique situation in Chicago. It’s really a top-down movement,” Orlowski said, going on to argue for the necessity of natural, consumer-driven actions. “It is a mass market issue, so how do we generate this mass consumer movement?”
Later panels broached the topic of sustainable business and energy, with a broad scope of panelists including a general manager from BP.
“Our team thought it was an opportunity to be quite frank and realistic,” Meyers said. “All of us are supporters of alternative, cleaner energy, but we were curious about what the BP representative would have to say.”
For the first time since its inception, NUSOS included student delegates from Northwestern and other Midwest universities, chosen through an application process.
“We had about 20,” Meyers said. “We were pleased to see there were so many applicants, we couldn’t accept everyone.”
Wesley Lien, a Weinberg junior studying chemistry and environmental science, was one of the 12 student delegates from Northwestern.
“A lot of people here tend to think that the environment and other parts of their profession they’re going into after they graduate are completely separate,” Lien said, “but I think it’s really important to have this intersection of economics and business and the environment.”
As Northwestern's chapter of ESW plans its fourth summit, the national organization is recognizing it for expanding beyond engineering projects.
"They’re impressed enough that they want to merge their national convention with the summit, so it’s going to be a three-day event,” Meyers said. “We found that out a month before this year’s event and we’re already in the planning stages.”