Jenita McGowan, chief of Sustainability for the City of Cleveland, will be the first speaker in AU’s College of Arts and Sciences’ biennial Symposium Against Indifference. The theme for this year’s series is “Environmental Sustainability.”McGowan will discuss “Building a Green City on a Blue Lake” on Monday, Sept. 28, at 7:30 p.m. in the Trustees’ Room of Myers Convocation Center. The event is free and open to the public, and is co-sponsored by the Morgan Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and the Environmental Science Program.
McGowan will speak about Sustainable Cleveland 2019, a 10-year initiative to engage Clevelanders from all walks of life in creating a more sustainable city. This initiative seeks to develop new strategies that allow Cleveland to use sustainability as an innovation engine for economic growth, while also reducing the city’s ecological footprint with solutions that save the city money. She will discuss how everyone can take action to promote sustainability at home, at work and in the community.
This year’s symposium coordinator is Dr. Jeff Weidenhamer, trustees’ professor of chemistry, who said the events comprising this year’s symposium will explore issues related to creating a sustainable world, from climate to environmental pollution to agricultural practices and more.
“As Dr. Patricia Saunders, director of AU's Environmental Science program, states in her introduction to the symposium (http://cas-symposium.blogspot.com/), ‘Environmental sustainability is about people. The environment is where we live, and we make choices about how to go about doing so and who and what else matters…our choices make a difference’,” Weidenhamer said.
