blueprints
The First Years Out
Tar Heels Tackle Carbon Footprints
Young alumni use knowledge
from UNC to address personal
and global environmental issues
COURTESY BRETT GANTT ’07
Liz Veazey ’04 was in Washington,
D.C., for a power summit. With
about 100 UNC undergraduates
and more than 5,000 others, she was taking part in Power Shift, the first national
youth summit on the climate crisis. She
would moderate a panel about coal
power, speak on another panel and meet
with her representative to talk about the
energy bill then in Congress.
“There’s potential for [the bill] to be
good,” she said by cell phone from the
November conference. “I definitely hope
my representative will take a stand on that
and push for better efficiency in cars and
for standards that would require states to
get a percentage of their energy from
renewable sources.”
As an undergraduate at Carolina,
Veazey led a campaign to add $4 for
renewable energy campus initiatives to the
student fee. That fee helped pay for solar
panels that now heat 60 percent of the
hot water used in Morrison dorm.
Spurred to environmental activism — and
to major in environmental science — in
an environment and society class taught
by Greg Gangi, director of educational
programs at UNC’s Institute for the Envi-ronment,Veazey made renewable energy
her focus.
She started the Southern Energy Network, which works with Southern college
students addressing global warming and
energy efficiency on their campuses, and
helped start the Energy Action Coalition,
a group of organizations in the U.S. and
Canada that work on clean energy and
global warming. For two years after college, she did this work on a volunteer
basis; now she gets paid for it.
Not all Carolina graduates make envi-
Brett Gantt ’07, rides his bike to graduate school classes at N.C. State University, where he’s studying atmospheric science. When he does drive, he takes his hybrid car, a graduation present.
ronmental issues so central to their lives,
but clearly environmental awareness is on
the rise among both young alumni and
the general public. In the wake of An
Inconvenient Truth, Live Earth and Al
Gore’s Nobel Prize, and in the face of
ongoing droughts in North Carolina and
elsewhere, conservation is in the spotlight.
“Living green is the hip thing to do
these days,” said Brett Gantt ’07.“We need
to keep asking how what we do will
affect the environment and the Earth.”
That can be relatively easy in a college
environment, but young alumni sometime
find living green becomes more complicated as they face decisions about where to
live and work, whether to buy a car and,
if so, what kind, how far they’ll commute,
‘Red’ is Green
Carbon Reduction (CRed) is the focus of
The Community Carbon Reduction Project at
UNC. UNC’s Institute for the Environment
provides information about sustainability, the
carbon cycle and carbon reduction at
www.ie.unc.edu/content/research/cred/index.html.
Environment-related lesson plans and other
resources can be found at
www.ie.unc.edu/erp/
resources.cfm.
