Faced with the widespread destruction of the environment, people everywhere are coming to understand that we cannot continue to use the goods of the earth as we have in the past. …[A] new ecological awareness is beginning to emerge. …
"The ecological crisis is a moral issue."  Pope John Paul II  The Ecological Crisis: A Common Responsibility, nos. 1, 15, December 8, 1989

Villanova Commitment to Sustainability
80th Anniversary of the Mendel Medal Celebration

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, in conjunction with the College of Engineering and in close cooperation with the University’s President’s Climate Commitment  is sponsoring a year of academic commitment to Sustainability as part of the 80th Anniversary of the Mendel Medal Celebration. This commitment is focused on academic study of Sustainability and curricular development. Sustainability is a long-term approach to environmental protection and process improvements. Villanova’s Commitment to Sustainability acknowledges the connections between the economy, the environment, and social responsibility.

The principal objectives of this year long academic commitment are to:

• Educate students, faculty, and staff through a series of cross-campus programs,
• Provide a yearlong, focused educational experience, thus elevating our awareness of global environmental and sustainability issues.
• Find ways to infuse an emphasis on sustainability into the curriculum and thus provide students with a different prism through which to view how they fit into the global community.
• Seek to educate our local community by informing constituents both on- and off-campus of the importance of this issue for the world as a whole, as well as for the local community.

Sustainability is a minimum condition for a flourishing planet in the long term. Locally, sustainability is important to ensure that the social, environmental, and economic systems that make up our community are providing a healthy and meaningful life for everyone at Villanova. In a global sense, sustainability ensures development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations. There is little question that sustainability is one of the world’s critical issues. It has become clear that if sustainable practices do not become pervasive, then the human community is in serious trouble. A key component of managing sustainability is having good information; and this is a central component of this year’s Commitment to Sustainability at Villanova.

“To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed."
Theodore Roosevelt, seventh annual message, 3 December 1907