1102 Instructors teaching the Environmental Perspectives project are invited to focus the project on the Going Green Tampa Bay initiative. This page is designed to give instructors suggestions about how to tailor the project to fit this opportunity for real community service. This should be quite simple; many instructors will choose not to change much from the original project description, which includes a 1000-1500 word essay, a letter to a representative, an annotated bibliography, and a media design.

The benefits of participating in the Going Green project is that it gives students a real audience for the bulk of their writing, and it offers a sustained way for students to put their in-depth research to various uses.

Much of the following is adapted from text by Dr. Maya Trotz, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at USF.

Overview:

“SUSTAIN-A-BULL” is a USF campaign to raise awareness and encourage action on issues promoting sustainable healthy communities on the USF campus and beyond. It is a part of a larger Tampa Bay project called “goinggreentampabay.com” which involves USF, the Hillsborough County City-County Planning Commission and Tampa’s Urban Charrette. The project kicks off on April 7th at USF and ends on April 22nd, Earth Day, in downtown Tampa. On Saturday April 12th, a “GREEN EXPO – Getting Green by Going Green” will be held at the USF Sundome. This adapted assignment is designed to contribute to the SUSTAIN-A-BULL campaign with opportunities for students to share their work with participants at the GREEN EXPO.

“Sustainability” is a widely used term equated with the betterment of humanity and seen as something that we must strive to address. As students at USF, one of the nation’s largest universities, you can make our world more sustainable from actions like changing your personal habits to those of your family and friends and the university and Tampa Bay environment. In fact, you can change the lives of people throughout the world given the wide reach of the internet and sites like youtube, facebook and myspace. In this assignment you will explore a sustainability challenge on campus or in Tampa and identify ways to solve the problem, including what needs to be done from a policy or marketing perspective.

Suggested Essay Assignment (which the instructor may of course adapt):
Write a 1000-1500 word essay, piece for your local newspaper or page on the Going Green Tampa Bay Wiki that:

1. Identifies and explains a sustainability challenge (examples include the high use of bottled vs tap water on campus, low use of mass transit to and from campus)
• Include history, scope or scale of the problem, how it relates to other issues, causes, consequence
2. Demonstrates how global events affect the local environment and conversely, how local events affect the global environment.
3. Discusses the role of the individual. For example, in transportation, your environment affects you personally, i.e., car accidents, increase in asthma due to air pollution. Also, you affect your environment, i.e. provide measures of the average American’s annual generation of CO2, SOx, NOx, VOx through automobile use.
4. Provides a range of solutions from the practical to the visionary.

• First, what can individuals/business/industry do today with existing cost effective practices or technology to lessen environmental impact?
• Second, what is the Hope for the Future in the form of research, best practices, products and services? Convey that the need for sustainability is not an abstract problem but is real and urgent. It will require big changes in how we live (personal, corporate and political responsibility and leadership) but it is do-able. The goal is within reach.

Suggestion for Media Design:

The suggestions on the project page ("You may design a tri-fold color brochure, a poster, a power point presentation, or a webpage") are all still valid options. But now, instead of simply sharing this work in class, students will focus their media designs on the April 12 Going Green Tampa Bay Expo in the Sundome. There are at least two ways they can do this:

1. Putting together a brochure, poster, or other display for the Expo. (These students are encouraged to participate in the Expo by explaining their project to passersby.)
2. Working on a media project to share on the Going Green Tampa Bay Wiki. This could mean extensively editing and adding to a series of pages, creating a video or audio work that represents their research, creating a PowerPoint that community members could use to inform small groups about their topic, etc.