Behrend, Beyond Focus

Behrend is a beautiful campus. No matter what the time of day may be, every hour reveals previously hidden aspects of beauty in every single nook and cranny. In an attempt to capture this, I've zoomed out from the details- and captured the campus from the highest vantage point available, the top of the Burke parking lot.

On each side, I've captured the largest lecture hall in Burke at two very different times- the left showcases a the beauty that surrounds the building itself.

In contrast, the right hides that detail to place emphasis on the light shining from within the building.

Our campus is showcases this contrast amazingly. To the naked eye, beauty abounds in nature and jagged architecture, combining to create an ideally campus. However, if one digs deeper, they'll find the beauty hidden inside, showcased by the students working tirelessly through day and night on passion projects, community building activities, and academic endeavors.

In Aldo Leopold's essay, The Land Ethic, he claims the following:

". . . a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it."

I claim that Penn State Behrend's location, so close to a lush wilderness allows every student attending the university to gain an the essence of the land ethic, even if it is unconscious. Four years of living and breathing in a community that is surrounded by such natural beauty garners an appriciation for that beauty. It also instills the question of how to preserve that beauty in quite a few students. Behrend gives them the opportunities they need to in numeorus ways.

Last year, in my very first semester, I joined a course called "Sustainability 200: Leadership In Sustainability" on a complete whim. I wanted to get through some general education classes as soon as I could, and jump into classes that were more related to my major, Economics.

Essentially, before entering the classroom, I saw the class as nothing more than an obstacle stopping me from being able to take classes I was interested in. Sustainability seemed interesting, but I was sure that taking the class wouldn't help me in any concrete fashion.

After a few classes, my professor, Dr. Mason, announced that this class required a semester long group project. In doing so, she gave our class a variety of options to choose from. Not taking the class seriously, I picked out what looked the easiest- a sustainability proposal that would be presented to the board of Erie's Metropolitan Transport Agency, the EMTA.

Spoiler alert- it turned out to be the hardest.

Over the next 4 months, I worked with 4 of my peers to challenge an ever increasing, seemingly endless task. In order to simply show the benefits of switching from CNG to Electric buses, we had to learn things we had never heard of.

After learning how to calculate individual vehicle emissions for the entirety of the EMTA's fleet, we tackled how to show that switching was economically feasible- a task that made us delve into the accounting reports of the EMTA, and figure out how much maintained and purchasing cost, and, in addition, delve into their current purchasing plan for CNG buses- which they had seemingly already planned out for the next 7 years.

And then, before I knew it, I had been sucked into the class so completely that I was dedicating extreme amounts of time above and beyond what I allotted to other classes as if it was nothing. And, so were my teammates. A semester passed, and finally, we had a presentation, along with a paper that spanned almost 40 pages, entirely consisting of tens of appendices filled with supporting data.

Our conclusion? The cost of electric buses, along with difficulties running them in winters, could only justify the purchase of five electric buses to be added to the fleet, despite the severe reduction in carbon emissions made possible whenever you replaced a CNG bus with a electric bus.

This may sound like an exceedingly disappointing conclusion to many- however, in our research, we discovered that the EMTA already had a plan in place that was close to eliminating all diesel buses from their fleet.

Based on our data, they decided that they would review the plan again, and look into expediting the rate at which they were decommissioning the diesel buses.

Even though our group was not able to achieve our own goal, or even come close, we were able to help someone else- someone who had a similar goal before us, but with a different target- replacing diesel with CNG instead of CNG with electric.

In turn, another goal was achieved. My group and I learnt a lot about the city we were now studying in. I learnt the value of treasuring the environment I was in (and why I should look forward to my general education classes more ;))

A year later, Behrend still provides many opportunities for students who wish to contribute to the environment around it. I've listed a few resources to explore for anyone who might be interested in exploring them: