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The seed of sustainability has grown at UCLA over the past year and now it is branching into the chancellor’s office.

As part of an effort to continue to educate students about the importance of sustainability, Chancellor Albert Carnesale recently signed a charter establishing the Campus Sustainability Committee as a permanent advisory body to his office, with a full-time professional campus coordinator.

“We want to continue building a culture of sustainability at UCLA and to provide leadership in addressing sustainability issues, especially in higher education,” Carnesale said in a press release May 15.

The goals and responsibilities of the committee as outlined in the charter are “to engage the campus in an ongoing dialogue about sustainability; to integrate sustainability with existing campus programs in education, research, operations and community service; (and) to instill a culture of sustainable long-range planning and forward-thinking design.”

According the University of California, sustainability “refers to the physical development and institutional operating practices that meet the needs of present users without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, particularly with regard to use and waste of natural resources.”

“It’s changing the way people think,” said committee cochair Mary Nichols, director of the Institute of the Environment.

Dorothy Le, Ecology, Economy, Equity Association chair, defined sustainability as “a way to live your life in (a) common-sense way so that your children and grandchildren can be healthy.” This includes being

environmentally cautious and realizing that the Earth’s resources are finite.

“It’s being recognized as ... an important objective of the campus,” said cochair Crystal Durham, a staff assistant to the committee and 2005 UCLA alumna who helped draft the charter.

The public announcement of the charter signing was postponed to coincide with the launch of the Web site, committee representatives said.

Committee cochairs and other representatives said the charter, which was signed April 20, makes sustainability an official priority of UCLA.

The charter was the brainchild of the Campus Sustainability Committee, which existed prior to becoming an official advisory group. It consists of student, faculty and staff representatives, who will advise the executive vice chancellor on matters of sustainability.

Many groups are currently represented in the committee but it will continue to expand, Durham said.

The charter will reinforce sustainability practices already in place at UCLA, such as energy and water conservation, said Le, one of two undergraduate representatives on the committee.

Nichols said the charter provides the principles for projects at UCLA from new buildings to new courses. Though the charter sets guidelines rather than rules, Nichols said she felt it reflected the sentiments of the students, faculty and administrators.

Since the charter was signed, the committee has put together a report of UCLA’s numerous sustainability activities and created a Web site to educate people about the campaign, Durham said.

Le said she is optimistic about what the charter means for sustainability at UCLA in the long run.

“It basically supports what we’ve been doing all along, and having the high level administrators in support of it is going to make it go smoothly (in the future),” Le said “It has the potential to affect everyone. ... We all live on the same earth, and it’s a really unifying vision.”

So far the charter has not had much impact at the student level, but as departments apply sustainability practices to everyday activities such as printing paper, using cleaning supplies and finding more environmentally friendly means of transportation, awareness will increase, Le said.

She said students need to understand that what they do today will have consequences for their posterity.

“We’re not going to be able to live in the ... world if we keep doing what we’re doing,” Le said. “Now that we’ve done all the easy stuff, I think we need to change how people use their resources (and) think about it.”

For more information on the

Campus Sustainability Committee

and sustainability, go to

http://www.sustain.ucla.edu.