No matter what’s she’s done and where’s she’s gone, she’s drawn to planting seeds and growing food.
Beth at SkyRoots, her farm on Whidbey Island.
Achieving financial sustainability through regenerative agriculture is tough, but it’s a worthwhile endeavor for Elizabeth Wheat, who runs SkyRoot Farm and teaches at UW’s Program on the Environment.
A recent recipient of the College of the Environment’s outstanding teaching award (she also received the UW’s excellence in teaching award back in 2010) and a Husky Green award earlier this year, Elizabeth Wheat is known and adored for her enthusiastic teaching style and love for food, farming and community.
Students gush about her, and many at UW enjoy her farm’s CSA produce.
Listen to UW Sustainability’s podcast to get a taste of the infamous Beth Wheat’s energy, to understand more about regenerative agriculture, and to hear what it’s like to be both a farmer and an educator.
On balancing her dual roles:
“Balance is not my aim, it’s a structural revolution in our food system, and this sense of urgency is what drives me forward and fuels me.”
Regenerative agriculture restores ecosystem function on an agricultural landscape. One of the primary tools is the management of organic matter on the soil.
Sky Root is focused on the life of the soil. On 20 acres of land on South Whidbey Island, Beth integrates animals into their production. Chicken, goats, ducks and worms all facilitate the growth of the vegetables on the farm.
Program on the Environment student Ziyi Liu interned with Seattle Neighborhoods Greenways for his Capstone project, to learn why so few people bike in Seattle’s Chinatown International District, and what factors prevent people from traveling on two wheels.
Ziyi’s research question asked: “How does bike infrastructure affect cycling safety in the Chinatown-International District?”
His findings revealed that safety was a huge concern, and that in the International District there are very few protected bike lanes, compared to other busy neighborhoods in Seattle. With added infrastructure and smarter design, biking could become more accessible to residents.
“A protected bike lane is not only for cyclists, but it’s for everybody—it’s about the community and community happiness.” – Ziyi Liu
Ziyi’s findings indicate that building a connected network of protected bike lanes encourages more people to bike, and gives better transportation choices to individuals of all ages and abilities especially in parts of the city with lower car ownership. Ziyi also looked at the demographics of who bikes in Seattle and found some upward trends.
Program on the Environment’s Spring 2018 Capstone Symposium featured 38 projects that addressed an array of environmental challenges students worked on for 9 months. From greening UW’s sport facilities to assessing water quality, piloting waste management plans and exploring the impact of environmental education, students shared their work with passion and finesse.
The symposium, held twice a year, drew colleagues, faculty advisors and students from across campus as well as parents and community (Capstone) partners. Students excitedly shared tidbits of what they learned on Twitter, under the #POEcap hashtag.
After tallying the evaluations of volunteer judges, Capstone instructor P. Sean McDonald determined the winning presenters, who were honored at the June graduation celebration:
Danielle Bogardus, Best Oral Presentation
E.W.W!! Education, Waste, and Water: A case study in the Las Piedras Region of Peru
Since her freshman year, Danielle has been working with Hoja Nueva, a non-profit founded by fellow alum Samantha Zwicker. For her Capstone Danielle worked to develop a waste management toolkit for the communities within the Madres de Dios region of Peru, as part of an effort to combat the negative impacts of unsustainable landfills on the community’s health and the environment. The toolkit includes waste auditing, water sampling and mentality survey strategies and has resulted in the implementation of improved waste management practices in three communities in the region.
Danielle recently founded her own non-profit, Connect Three, to continue the work she has done in Peru addressing waste management and water quality in developing communities. A pilot project in Ethiopia is already underway.
Tyler Ung, Honorable Mention Oral Presentation
Raising environmental awareness in a digitized world: The effectiveness of visual art and photography
Tyler worked with the UW Center for Creative Conservation to highlight how visual art and photography can be an effective medium to raise environmental awareness and spur behavior change. He taught himself photography and super-imposed stencils he drew of human impacts on the natural environment, taking inspiration from Seattle, China and India. His science-based art project was part of his research that included the effective use of the art as a new model for sustainability and environmental education.
Tyler believes the integration of art to tell the story of different cultures, histories and environments is a powerful tool for shifting us towards a better future.Tyler’s art project, A Mind’s Meadow: Beauty Beyond Suppression is on display this summer at Axis in Pioneer Square, Seattle.
Summer Cook, Best Poster Presentation
Full circle in the remote tropics: 5 ways to optimize permaculture in unconventional settings
Summer also interned with Hoja Nueva for her Capstone and went to Peru to work with the community to develop community-centered permaculture plots in Puerto Nuevo, located on the Piedras River in the Peruvian Amazon. Her case study sought to eliminate dependence on imports and sustain healthy, arable soil, a challenge within the region due to the difficulty growing crops in nutrient-poor soil and resulting insufficient access to adequate nutrition in diets.
Summer tested approaches for developing a community-centered permaculture planting plan. She conducted interviews with community members about current diet and desired fruits and vegetables and identified two potential planting sites, then tested each for macronutrient concentrations and soil fertility/microclimate parameters. She found five main methods to incorporate while designing a permaculture plan in the remote tropics and the plots, when complete, would provide nutrient-rich food for the communities.
Predicting the effects of climate change on flatfish distributional shifts into the Chukchi Sea
Staci interned with NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center to crunch some data and get an idea of which fish species would be able to thrive in the Chukchi Sea, a habitat that is changing rapidly due to rising temperatures. Working with resource selection models, Staci’s data results suggest that populations of Pacific halibut and arrowtooth flounder are likely to increase due to rising sea temperatures. The implications of these flatfish species moving northward could potentially transform the food webs and ecology of the Chukchi Sea.
The Program on the Environment will host our Spring 2018 Capstone Symposium on May 23 at the Fisheries Sciences Building. We welcome all to attend and support students as they present on the culmination of three quarters of hard work.
The Capstone Course Series is a highlight for many students, and serves to catapult some into their first jobs or even their dream careers. Through internships, research, social media training, students come out of the experience well-equipped to communicate about the problem they sought to solve, and to tie their academic learning with specific research questions.
See below for the schedule and some sneak peeks from each session!
This event is open to the public and we encourage students interested in learning about the Capstone, as well as members of our community, to join us. There will be beverages and snacks. For those who can’t attend in person, follow our live tweets on Twitter: #POEcap.
Spring 2018 Symposium Schedule
Wednesday May 23
4:30PM Welcoming remarks/housekeeping
Session A – Poster I: Agriculture & Food systems, Green business & Sustainability, Natural Science & Conservation
4:35 – 5:15PM Summer Cook – Full circle in the remote tropics: 5 ways to optimize permaculture in unconventional settings Lexie Gray – Greening sports: How athletic facilities can implement change to save money and the environment Nazmah Hasaan – Improving accessibility of the UW Sustainability Climate Action Plan website David Hedin – Visions of restoration at Daybreak Star Cultural Center Elena Hinz – Contaminants, comparisons, and consequences: The three c’s of a water quality assessment Shunxi Liu – Community engagement programs can align with the co-creation mission in higher education sustainability Carla Marigmen – Improving the efficiency of operations and behaviors within athletics facilities Staci McMahon – Predicting the effects of climate change on flatfish distributional shifts into the Chukchi Sea Jennifer Mitchell – Achieving campus sustainability: What practices universities are doing to become leaders in campus sustainability Colin Piwtorak – From top to bottom and back again: How citizen science at all levels can be used to its greatest potential Clyzzel Samson – How low income food bank clients’ concern for the environment and food waste is underestimated Lex Savanh – Developing an alternative to cable ties for bird tagging Uyen Tran – Sustainable finance and investment in higher education institutions: Reasoning and best practices Brandon Wech – Trees aren’t just for the Lorax anymore: Measuring Northwest permaculture efficiency Yunbo Xie – Promoting sustainable moves in a citizen science project and correlating volunteers’ motivations with their ongoing status Hualian Xu – Endangered species “summer chum”: A way to save them
Sneak peek: Uyen Tran interned with UW Sustainability to examine sustainable finance and investment in higher education institutions. She conducted a competitive analysis along with two other students of the STARS (Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System) ranked colleges and looked into which higher ed institutions use SRI stocks and why that’s significant.
Session B – Capstone lightning talks
5:20PM Introduction Danielle Elizabeth Bogardus – E.W.W!! Education, Waste, and Water: A case study in the Las Piedras Region of Peru Frieda Elise Luoma-Cohan – From the lab to the classroom: The use of non-traditional teaching tools in science communication Samantha Anne Orcutt – The dirty side of business: How communication is key to streamline waste management practices Yushan Tong – Value and use of Discovery Park by Chinese communities in Seattle Tyler Sing Ung – Raising environmental awareness in a digitized world: The effectiveness of visual art and photography Ha Young Yoo – Returning to the roots of sustainable ecotourism: Indigenous Knowledge is power rooted in ecology
Sneak peek: Danielle Bogardus has spent 4 years conducting work in a remote area of Peru, with an alumna’s non-profit, Hoja Nueva, on assessing and developing a waste management toolkit for remote native and migrant communities in Peru’s Las Piedras region that don’t have systems in place to dispose of waste. Danielle will seek to replicate and scale this toolkit in other communities after she graduates.
6:15 – 7:00PM Sean Adair – Assessing the impact of environmental education on childhood awareness and relationship to nature Maggie Brown – Benefits to food recovery: Improved resource conservation through effective outreach methods Sungkun Choi – Back to the science Sara Clark – A necessary evil? Various perspectives towards salmon hatcheries Saruul Delgerbayar – Hazardous waste generators in tribal communities of Alaska Marlee Grasser – Puget Sound high-risk facilities in relation to environmental justice Bridget House – Bluff erosion mitigation: Should it be incorporated into restoration strategies? Katie Hunger – Sorting trash, there’s gotta be a better way! Soondus Junejo – The need for mandatory environmental screening in daycare settings in order to minimize the health risk for children Ziyi Liu – How does bike infrastructure affect cycling safety in the Chinatown-International District Shelby Logsdon – Park or ride? An analysis of Washington State park transit accessibility Chance O’Neal – The age of information: Improving the reliability of environmental websites
Rachel Pemberton – Underserved and overlooked: The roles of race and income in environmental advocacy Gloria Piekarczyk – We’re all part of the problem, but who wants to be part of the solution? Ellen Short – What’s gender got to do with it? How ecofeminism could save the planet Chelsy Sirnio – Early outdoor education: Reconnecting children with nature
Sneak peek: Saruul Delgerbayar worked with the EPA on hazardous waste generators in rural villages of Alaska. Saruul assisted with EPA’s pilot program to backhaul hazardous waste from tribal communities lacking waste management systems and conducted interviews to identify the types of hazardous waste generated, to inform regulations that would benefit the communities’ overall health.
A snapshot of Saruul’s Capstone research findings.
This summer, July 1-6, Seattle and the University of Washington will host the Special Olympics USA Games. Anticipated to attract more than 70,000 spectators, athletes and coaches from across the United States, Seattle is presented the challenge of planning this large-scale event with sustainability at the forefront of its operations; this includes tackling areas like waste management, food production, transportation, and education and outreach. Going above and beyond green operations, the Special Olympics plans to create a legacy of sustainability so that visitors of Seattle, regardless of their prior practices, may take home with them and share their positive experiences in sustainability, fostering sustainability in their communities as well.
The Special Olympics USA Games needs your help to realize these important sustainability goals!
The UW Seattle campus will host more than 4,000 athletes and coaches as well as host eight of the fourteen Special Olympics USA Games events. Special Olympics USA Games needs volunteers to make sure that the USA Games are a success and that the athletes, their families and spectators have a great time.
Program on the Environment’s Winter Sustainability Studio worked directly with the Special Olympics volunteer team to envision sustainability initiatives to implement during the games, and one recommendation, Cupanion, a program aimed at reducing single-use liquid containers, may be in use. Learn more about the games sustainability goals.
How you can get involved
There are a variety of volunteer opportunities including joining the games’ Green Team. Green Team volunteers will help support games and activities highlighting sustainability initiatives, and help people properly recycle and compost at key waste stations.
To volunteer, go to the Special Olympics USA Games UW Volunteers site and click “register.” On the next screen you’ll need to choose the “Access Coded Companies and Groups” option and then enter the code DAWGS2018.
Look for “University of Washington Green Team” to help with sustainability efforts, or choose any of the many other volunteer opportunities available. You’ll need to sign up for the volunteer shifts you’d like to help with, as well as a training & orientation session.
The Bonderman Travel Fellowship award affords students the extraordinary opportunity to travel across the world independently for a minimum of 8 months, to at least 6 countries (spanning 2 regions) in the world, with the aim to enrich students experiences and open their eyes to different cultures, customs, perspectives and lifestyles.
Frieda Cohan, 2018 Bonderman Fellow and Husky Green Awardee.
This year, we are proud to congratulate Frieda-Luoma Cohan, one of fifteen UW students to receive the fellowship. Frieda recently won a Husky Green Award for her leadership in stewarding an outdoor learning space on campus and coordinating recycling efforts at UW football games, and also returned from a Spring at Sea oceanography expedition.
Frieda grew up in Mt. Vernon, WA and has been deeply influenced by her experiences in outdoor schools and field classes, as well as other instances of non-traditional experiential learning and she is thrilled to be given the opportunity to explore the world in an immersive education setting. As she travels, she hopes to explore the very different ways in which science education is presented in each community she visits, how this learning process inspires a connection with the natural world, and how communities foster a sense of place in education. She is excited to be stretched out of her comfort zone, and to absorb, learn, be humbled, and share. She plans to visit Morocco, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Bhutan, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam.
Congratulations to this year’s Husky Green Award winners from Program on the Environment, Frieda Cohan and Beth Wheat!
2018 Husky Green Award winners Frieda Cohan and Elizabeth Wheat.
This year, our program is thrilled to spotlight these two enthusiastic leaders who are walking the walk on sustainability, through environmental stewardship of green space and gardens and heartfelt teaching.
The 2018 Husky Green Awards recipients were honored on April 20 on Red Square as part of UW Earth Day celebrations. The awards are in their ninth year of recognizing leaders on the UW campus who demonstrate their dedication to the environment.
Frieda is an Environmental Studies major and plays an active role in the community. She took part in an independent study garden build project last year to help design the program’s Sustainable Learning Space, a recently restored garden space dedicated for outdoor learning. She took on the role of garden steward, helping to maintain the space by clearing the trails and planting native species. Frieda recently returned from Spring at Sea, where she spent three weeks aboard the R/V Revelle learning about oceanography and feeding her passion for marine conservation.
“A big part of sustainability to me is creating safe and welcoming spaces for discussion and dialogue, ensuring that all people feel empowered to take action.” – Frieda Cohan
As part of her leadership on campus, Frieda is co-president of SAGE (the Student Association for Green Environments), and co-organizes activities and events such as last year’s Art to Inspire, a group effort to gather the UW community to celebrate art as a vehicle for raising environmental awareness.
Frieda digging up some dirt during the construction of the Sustainable Learning Space.
She has coordinated recycling efforts at UW football games as part of her involvement with SAGE and last year UW Athletics recorded their highest waste diversion rates ever.
After she graduates, Frieda will help onboard the next Sustainable Learning Space garden steward and then embark on a grand adventure to travel through SE Asia and parts of Africa, an experience made possible by her recent award as a Bonderman travel fellow.
In her own words: “Over the last few years the environmental community at UW has become my home, and the unwavering compassion and strength of my peers, faculty, and staff never ceases to inspire and guide me. A big part of sustainability to me is creating safe and welcoming spaces for discussion and dialogue, ensuring that all people feel empowered to take action. And though the natural world is a shared experience, its beauty and significance remains unique to each beholder, and each reasoning for protecting it is critical.”
Beth at SkyRoots, her farm on Whidbey Island.
Beth is a lecturer at Program on the Environment and teaches a variety of courses, including The Urban Farm, Attaining a Sustainable Society, Introduction to Environmental Studies and Agro-ecology of Cascadia. Awarded the UW’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2010, Beth exudes passion and inspires students to mindfully navigate the world when making decisions that impact others.
In her own words: “Sustainability means confronting our privilege and asking ourselves how we arrived in the place where we are in regards to our relationship with the planet and with each other. We can’t solve the issues facing our planet today without consciously confronting the economic and societal institutions that brought us here. Working on sustainability in this context with our students is a source of great joy for me!”
Beth’s interest in agriculture grew after working on the UW Farm as a graduate student and today she sits on the board of the Farm and frequently takes her class onto the farm at UW, to increase students’ awareness around sustainable urban agriculture. She also takes students to her own farm, SkyRoots, on Whidbey Island, to demonstrate how small-scale integrated farms can provide sustenance, while giving back to the earth and to the farmers. A shared meal and laughter always follows.
“Sustainability means confronting our privilege and asking ourselves how we arrived in the place where we are in regards to our relationship with the planet and with each other.” -Beth Wheat
Read more about Beth’s teaching path and love for sustainable agriculture on the Whole U Faculty Friday spotlight.
Today we celebrate Beth Wheat, committed Program on the Environment lecturer and founder of SkyRoot Farm on Whidbey Island, who will receive a Husky Green Award at the Earth Day festivities on Red Square.
In Whole U’s Faculty Friday spotlight, Beth shares her love for growing food, a love that was born when she was a graduate student at UW, and grew to become a full fledged passion.
She shares this passion with us all, through her partnership with the UW Farm; through the classes she teaches: The Urban Farm, Sustainable Societies and Agro-Ecology of Cascadia; and through SkyRoot, a 20-acre integrated animal and vegetable farm on Whidbey Island. The farm takes an ecosystem-based approach to land management and agriculture (which includes using goats to maintain the blackberries, ducks to control the slug population and poultry to build the soil and manage the weeds).
Beth often takes students to SkyRoot Farm as an active-learning experience to show them how urban agriculture practices can benefit the environment and human health. She believes that changing how small-scale farms operate can contribute to solving the climate change problem—capturing carbon in the form of organic matter and storing it in the reserves of soil. In her teaching practices, she impresses upon her students the importance of connecting to their heart space, and how the trade-offs they face in our modern society can be influenced by the difference they want to make in the world.
“Working a small farm is one of the most powerful jobs a person can do in that it leads to health in a lot of ways—there’s a cascading impact.” – Elizabeth Wheat
Please note – this event has been canceled and may be postponed at a later time.
Our final Rabinowitz Speaker Series: Society’s Role in a Changing Environment, co-hosted by Program on the Environment and School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, is next week, Wednesday, April 4.
Please note the date change! Join us from 4:30–6pm in Wallace Hall Commons. Faculty talks are followed by Q&A and time for mingling. Light refreshments served.
Our April speaker is Department of Philosophy professor, Stephen Gardiner. The title of his talk is: The Peculiar Ethics of Geoengineering.
Stephen is Professor of Philosophy and Ben Rabinowitz Endowed Professor of Human Dimensions of the Environment at the University of Washington, Seattle. His main areas of interest are ethical theory, political philosophy and environmental ethics. His research focuses on global environmental problems (especially climate change), future generations, and virtue ethics.
Stephen’s talk will expand on his research on the ethics around geoengineering-
Abstract:As efforts to address global climate change directly, through sharp reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, continue to stall, some scientists argue that we must prepare for grand technological interventions into the climate system (‘geoengineering’), including by commencing small-scale field testing. Geoengineering raises a large number of ethical issues (e.g., concerns about welfare, rights, justice, and political legitimacy). However, early policy framings often marginalize such issues, and so avoid important questions of justification. Since it is widely held that climate engineering has become a serious option mainly because of political inertia, there are also important contextual issues, especially around the paradoxical question, “What should we do, ethically speaking, given that we have not done, and will continue not to do, what we should be doing?”
With today’s technology, distance is no longer a barrier, and collaborating with learners halfway around the world is a tangible reality.
Understanding this potential for enhanced learning and wanting to equip students with a global mindset, Dr. Kristi Straus piloted the UW’s first “Global Flip” in collaboration with Dr. Xi Lu at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. For students learning about sustainability, understanding the ways that the U.S. and China contribute to unsustainability, as well as the unique American and Chinese approaches to solutions, is vital. With Kristi’s class focusing on sustainability, forging a relationship with a university in China made sense.
The resulting experience was exciting and eye-opening for Kristi and the students.
Launching UW’s first Global Flipped Classroom
Shunxi Liu
Dr. Kristi Straus enjoying a lecture at Cabot (China).
Kristi was a Teaching Technology Fellow in 2014, and one of the first Evidence-Based Teaching (EBT) pilot members. She became an EBT coach in Spring 2016, supporting other faculty in understanding the research about effective teaching and then implementing changes in their classrooms. Through her leadership in these areas, Kristi was approached by the UW Office of the Provost about piloting the “Global Flip.”
Flipping the classroom allows students to engage in active learning and discussion in the classroom, while watching recorded lectures at home. This method aims to enrich learning and encourage more meaningful interaction among the instructor and students. In the Global Flip, Dr. Straus used the Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) method, where students from Tsinghua and UW watched the same lecture videos and then interacted at their own Universities, and virtually, across the Pacific.
The course content grew out of Kristi’s popular ENVIR 239: Sustainability and Personal Choices class which encourages students to ponder sustainability in their own lives and become more aware of choices they make.
Shunxi Liu
UW students (left to right) Congshan Amanda Bai, TJ Gascho, Yushan Tong, and Shunxi Liu in China.
The Global Flip empowers students to think more deeply about unique sustainability challenges faced by different societies and how culture shapes the resulting solutions that could emerge.
The culmination of this Autumn quarter class was a ten-day study abroad experience in Beijing, collaborating in person with the Tsinghua faculty and students whom they’d learned with virtually all quarter.
Dr. Straus took 15 UW students (including Environmental Studies, International Studies, and Environmental Sciences majors) to Beijing over the 2017 Winter Break.
Global engagement to be a world of good
Through frequent online collaborations, students from UW and Tsinghua University in Beijing grappled with questions such as: What does sustainability mean to us? What does unsustainability look like in our countries/cities/cultures? What problems do we face and how can we solve them?
Shunxi Liu
Dr. Lu and Dr. Straus leading a shared lecture, teaching an interactive class about salmon, hydropower and the removal of the Elwha Dam in Washington.
Students at Tsinghua University watched the lectures that Kristi taught at UW, setting up an incredible situation where students had in-person sessions at their own schools as well as access to an international, multi-cultural online learning environment, emphasizing collaboration between students in China and the U.S.
Says Kristi, “It is certainly innovative, helps us to learn together across boundaries, uses technology and the skills of our students while also teaching our students multicultural and multi-disciplinary collaboration and problem solving, virtually. I can’t imagine more important skills for this generation.”
The ten-day study abroad to Tsinghua University in Beijing was the culminating experience of the course. UW students collaborated with the Tsinghua students, visited water treatment centers, solar and wind farms and waste management facilities, and discussed the viability of renewables meeting the country’s long-term energy needs. They heard from well-known researchers across China and saw first-hand how Beijing is doing from a sustainability perspective.
In addition, students learned about Chinese culture and history, visiting the Forbidden City and the Great Wall, and shared traditional meals with Tsinghua students.
Field trip to Gaobeidian Waste Water Treatment Plant with UW and Tsinghua students.
The UW Program on the Environment China class outside the School of Environment at Tsinghua University.
Part of the field trip to Gaobeidian Waste Water Treatment Plant.
Dinner at Suhu, a vegetarian restaurant in Beijing.
Another shared lecture with Dr. Lu and Dr. Straus.
A sunny but cold day for visiting the Forbidden City.
For Program on the Environment student Shunxi Liu, participating in the study abroad experience was a great opportunity to converse with engineering and environmental management students in Professor Xi Lu’s global sustainability class at Tsinghua University and view Beijing through a sustainability lens.
“I see this program as planting the seed for future environmental collaboration between the U.S. and China, and I’m excited I was part of it!” – Shunxi Liu
Learning about sustainability in a global context
In 2016, China made the environment a priority. The Chinese government has set ambitious goals for reducing carbon emissions, and they’ve made headway.
UW Program on the Environment student, Shunxi Liu.
UW students and Kristi remarked that the air pollution in Beijing was undetectable. “Maybe it was a combination of the good weather and the rapid implementation of China’s new regulations, but it was noticeable.”
Even more impressive were the tours where students learned about China’s hefty investment in sustainable technology and its rapid shifts in policies to adjust for air quality, even on a daily basis. Indeed, Beijing is focused primarily on environmental sustainability, just one of many contrasts to the efforts in the U.S. which look at economic and social impacts in addition to the environment.
One highlight of the whole experience for Shunxi was a field trip to an industrial area in suburban Beijing, a region which was among the most polluted areas in China. “They are working on integrating circular economy methods to reduce factory pollution and it’s incredible to see in action!”
Other noteworthy trips included visiting a cutting-edge renewable energy power plant. “We saw that China is putting a lot of effort on interdisciplinary scientific research in order to tackle our global environmental challenges,” reflected Shunxi. The Chinese government is also moving towards distributed solar systems to every household.
Shunxi Liu
Field trip to Yanqing photovoltaic power station, China.
All in all, the learning was profound, and the students exhibited patience and adaptability in their new environment, soaking up Chinese culture, knowledge, and way of life. Between the online intercultural collaboration and the short-term, affordable study abroad program, this unique course helps bring global perspectives to students who may not otherwise get it at UW, which increases access and equity at our University.
Kristi’s course will run again this Fall quarter and Winter break 2018. Interested students can apply now.
