Rebecca Arce received a project grant of $1,403 to assist in funding the 2014 Transatlantic Student Symposium. The Symposia are a series of gatherings of students around the world to discuss environmental, cultural, and educational sustainability. The universities who participated included OSU, Humboldt-University Berlin (Germany), and the University of Warsaw (Poland).
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The 2014 Transatlantic Student Symposium was a joint seminar conducted between three Universities, Oregon State University, Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin, and University of Warsaw. The three universities worked to build a syllabus of topics that were centered on sustainability, be it cultural sustainability, educational or environmental sustainability. The seminar ended with a field trip to the American Southwest, in addition to a conference where students presented research papers of the seminars theme.
The seminar was a wonderful opportunity for all involved to develop a cross-cultural understanding of the meaning of sustainability and how sustainability can be achieved. One of the biggest issues we, as a group struggled with, was the question of what is sustainability and if we can achieve it in an ever-changing world? We had many great conversations amongst ourselves and with members of the Southwest community that work in agriculture, education, advocacy, and eco-tourism, to name a few. The greatest impacts that we felt were in regards to the contamination of the water due to coal and uranium extraction and the unspoken tragedies that have been witnessed by the land and the people that inhabit the land. For example, we visited the Japanese Internment Camp Memorial site, which now is the site of a dog park on the outskirts of Santa Fe, New Mexico and the uranium spill that contaminated parts of the Navajo reservation in Church Rock, New Mexico. For the American students, we were faced with our dark history that is rarely talked about and scarcely known. Our European counterparts shared the concern of unspoken history and were shocked by the amount of waste we generated and the lack of fresh food options in the region. From all our perspectives and experiences there was a sense of agreement that environmental justice and sustainability cannot be achieved without social justice.
– Rebecca Arce
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