CSU to start school for the environment

By: The Associated Press

Posted: 7/23/08

CSU is creating a school for the environment to prepare students for the emerging green economy.

The university's new School of Global Environmental Sustainability will include professors and researchers from multiple CSU departments and could start offering new courses as early as 2010, according to a university statement.

CSU, which already promotes itself as the "Green University" on billboards and other advertisements, will spend $350,000 to launch the program but hopes to raise $100 million for an endowment over the next 10 years.

"Think about it as a hub for all the environmental classes on campus," said Dr. Diana Wall, a CSU soil ecologist who has been named the founding director of the new school. "It crosses a number of different college departments and I think that's what really has professors excited."

Once the new campus-wide program is under way, students with business, liberal arts, science and other majors will be able to add environmental courses to their curriculum, she said, and make them more marketable for the renewable energy market, an industry some studies say could create as many as 40 million new jobs by 2030.

"There is a growing need to address these problems and students want to make a difference," she said. "They are wondering what do I need to take and we need to analyze what they need to take."

A professor in the Department of Biology and senior research scientist at the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, Wall has worked extensively in the Antarctic Dry Valleys researching.