Guest Speaker: Joe Medeiros

Global warming and the mulitple ailments of the environment make headlines every day. By investing your future into sustainable careers, not only does it ensure that your job will be needed and be keeping up with the times but you'll be helping to turn our global environmental situation around--as everyday work! When I was growing up and even still I have impossible expectations of myself to make a huge difference for the world and the environment but then I get dissapointed when the rest of my life gets in the way. Joe opened my eyes to realize that you can adapt essentially any career path to be more sustainable. If your an artist, you can use your skills to work and develop campaigns for sustainability or for new more sustainable company practices to be advertised. If your an outdoorsmen, you can work outside and take data on the environment and the climate. Business people can adapt their businesses to be more efficient and produce less waste; for example, my sister is a dental hygienist and they throw away alot of plastic on a day to day basis...which isn't biodegradable. If they used cloth on the chairs rather than throwing away plastic for each patient, they would just have a really big load of laundry but wouldn't be filling landfills. I love the idea that you can adapt sustainability into any career path and into everyday life. On campus we've started integrating online and on ground classes to be paperless... which saves alot of resources of trees over the semester. Sustainable careers are the future, and they need to be. It is just so exciting to me that we really can make a difference in any situation we're in. If we are all careful to do so, it will make a large difference!