The World Campus Sustainability Club operates out of the World Campus but is very inclusive and welcomes all undergraduate and graduate students from any of the commonwealth campuses and academic homes. We focus on creating a supportive community through opportunities of discussion amongst our members, such as book clubs, sharing podcasts, sharing resources on a range of topics, as well as helping our members reflect on aspects of their life that they’re looking to either build more intentionally and sustainably, and inspiration on how to do that. We communicate primarily through our Discord and Listserv. Interested in joining? Visit the website! Or reach out to Mattea Derr (mkd20@psu.edu).

Awareness is such a key piece in our club’s mission of sharing knowledge and resources around the topic of sustainability. And doing this through art can be such a powerful tool as it adds emotional complexity.

For FA22, our club is launching a university-wide Art Contest! Our theme? Perspectives on climate change, the human relationship with the environment, sustainability, and what the future holds. Entries are due on November 25th.

There will be 3 winning categories, which will be announced during Sustainability Week (October 26th). Each winner will get to pick an item(s) off of the Penn State University Student Bookstore website that is valued up to $100.

We will be continuing to build out our page on our website for more information, and will have rules & regulations, as well as submission instructions up shortly. We welcome all artists, all mediums! For any physical 3-dimensional piece, a picture or video will suffice for submission. All submissions will be posted on our website as a gallery from November 27th – December 9th , so that others may look through and vote if they please as 1 of our winning categories will be Fan Favorite. All winners will be announced on December 12th, right before finals week.

If you’re a serious artist, a casual one, or a new one, we encourage you to participate. We don’t need just science, solutions, and technology to change the course of our future – we need to ways in which to inspire change and advocacy and what a better way to do that than through art (if we could do it through food, I’m sure that’d be a hit too). Feel free to share this with anyone (students, faculty, staff) that you think might be interested in participating.

Looking for inspiration?
Madeleine Jubilee Saito, (Paintings) https://madeleinejubileesaito.net/comics
Ecopoetry Anthology (Poetry) https://ginkgoprize.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2019-Ginkgo_Visual-Guide.pdf
Favianna Rodriguez (Collages) https://favianna.com/artworks/
MyVerse and Kristen Warren (Ted Talk & Live rap performance) https://www.ted.com/talks/samir_ibrahim_myverse_and_kristen_warren_how_hip_hop_can_make_climate_action_cool?referrer=playlist-countdown_session_1_urgency

Or maybe try some film inspiration for why advocacy is the intersection of this global movement and culture shift! These are pieces of art, just really big ones.

Beyond Coral - Netflix full feature available via YouTube  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGGBGcjdjXA&t=1194s
Seaspiracy   – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q5CXN7soQg
Patagonia’s Fish People  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vejz78dhfZk
Patagonia’s Treeline | Secret Life of Trees  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCEaYInJbos
Climate Justice is Social Justice  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jY2eWJ-U_VQ
Welcome to the Anthropocene https://vimeo.com/39048998
The world is poorly designed. But copying nature helps. (Biomimicry) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMtXqTmfta0
Nature Is Speaking – Julia Roberts is Mother Nature | Conservation International (CI) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmVLcj-XKnM&feature=youtu.be

More information to come! If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to club president Mattea Derr (mkd20@psu.edu)
We appreciate your time and hope to talk soon