Evergreen State College, The
PAE-20: Inter-Campus Collaboration on Sustainability

The Curriculum for the Bioregion initiative—with its goal of better preparing undergraduates to live in a world where the complex issues of environmental quality, community health and well-being, environmental justice, and sustainability are paramount—is completing its sixth year this fall. Under the leadership of Jean MacGregor, six hundred faculty members at 32 institutions in the Puget Sound bioregion have participated in project-related activities. The Curriculum for the Bioregion initiative aims to better prepare undergraduates to live in a world where the complex issues of environmental quality, community health and wellbeing, environmental justice, and sustainability are paramount. This faculty and curriculum development initiative is based on the idea that we live out our lives in specific places but the choices we make and the actions we take have both local and global consequences. Learning sustainability concepts and practices experientially in our local places can help us perceive larger global forces and connections and in turn, understanding global connections can inform our local understanding and actions. During the past year, two summer field courses on “Restoring Puget Sound” were held, one in Seattle for faculty members from King County campuses and one in Tacoma for faculty from Pierce and Thurston Counties. These courses, taught in the field both on and around Puget Sound, involved 50 faculty members and an equal number of resource faculty—experts drawn from citizen organizations, government agencies, and tribes. UW Tacoma continues to be a key partner in this Puget Sound work Also this past year, the initiative convened a faculty learning community, “Math and Sustainability” in partnership with the Math Across the Community College Curriculum project. Multi-disciplinary faculty teams collaborated on sustainability learning activities involving quantitative reasoning. Curriculum for the Bioregion recently received a congressionally directed grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE) to continue activities in the Puget Sound bioregion. New inter-institutional interdisciplinary faculty learning communities are being formed this fall and plans are underway for workshops throughout Washington state.

AASHE, ACUPCC, WA state Interagency Sustainability Task Force

The Evergreen Office of Sustainability convened a group of regional public agency and higher education sustainability officers in the fall of 2009 to begin developing a regional network for information sharing and professional development.