Alongside current debates over how to handle the pandemic, global citizens have not left behind the pressing issue of how to address the preservation of the plant. Now more than ever, everyone has a key role to play in reversing the insurmountable damage that has been done to the earth. The University and its students are making strides address the issue at home, doing their part to clean up campus as best as possible.

Jack Reicherts, sophomore in Engineering, is working with the Student Sustainability Committee to help make this change on campus.

“We’ve got a lot of projects that align with those sustainability themes from the Illinois Climate Action Plan,” Reicherts said. “Our system is set up that we feed our different applications into five working groups. We’ve got food and waste, air and water, education and justice, energy, and transportation and infrastructure … We try to pick projects that align with those themes.”

The Illinois Climate Action Plan was just signed last month and sustainability groups like SSC are hoping that this will be a needed push for people at the University to get more involved. Reicherts is excited to see what kind of new ideas will be inspired by this newly passed legislation.

“I’m hoping that the updated plan will drive a lot of students and faculty to come up with bolder, more interesting projects for the SSC.” Reicherts said.

Andy Sima, senior in LAS and the treasurer of Students for Environmental Concerns, voiced similar hopes for the future of the University and society at large.

“We have been pressuring the University to remove their investments from the fossil fuel industries, and recently those divestments made it into the Illinois Climate Action Plan that was signed off by the chancellor,” Sima said.

Additionally, Sima and his team have been considering how best to bring together all different groups involved in sustainability on campus in order to be able to work together and better direct the efforts of everyone involved.

“We are working on potentially building a climate change environmental science coalition through the University to get a bunch of organizations and RSO’s on campus involved in environmental science and sustainability into one place to talk about who’s doing what and what work needs to be done,” Sima said.

The issue of sustainability is not just for those in STEM fields to face, though. Samuel Yoo, assistant director for the Student Sustainability Committee, emphasized that this is an ongoing battle that can only be won with everyone’s efforts.

“Everyone has a role to play in leading the sustainability effort — business, the college of law, the arts, music, the humanities,” Yoo said. “I think all of these fields that don’t traditionally view themselves as leaders in sustainability, the mission is so giant and nuanced that you really need an all-hands-on-deck type of approach.”

It can be very easy to become complacent as sometimes it seems this is not an imminent threat; however, Yoo mentioned that this problem cannot be approached just by looking at how individuals are being impacted. Yoo said those from lower incomes will be unable to recover easily from the environmental impacts. This is not only an issue of climate change and sustainability, but also of injustice.

“It affects even us here in the Midwest … even in Illinois, looking at a city like Chicago … there are varying levels of elevation in this mostly-flat city,” Yoo said. “What happens is, when you look at elevation maps, most of the neighborhoods that are lower income are going to be at the places of lower elevation. The more ‘posh’ neighborhoods, the ones with more money, they typically are going to be at higher points of elevation in the city.”

“Why this matters is, with global warming, one of the symptoms that we’re already seeing is a huge uptick in flash flooding and severe thunderstorms,” Yoo said. “When you get all this rainfall, where does this flooding go? It goes to the places in the city that are of the lowest elevation, and those neighborhoods, those schools, those businesses are the ones that are getting flooded. They’re the ones with the least resources to be able to recover.”

As the climate continues to worsen as a result of pollution, it becomes increasingly more important that everyone is able to see that they are very valuable in this effort to reverse the damage that has been done.

“I really think it’s on the younger generations to see this and feel empowered to do something about it … because if we don’t, things are going to get a lot worse a lot faster,” Yoo said. “This is really important work- no matter what your interests or your area of expertise is, everybody has a role to play in it.”

[email protected]