#ThinkFWD on Campus Sustainability

To think forward is to take a good look at the present and then apply all of your ingenuity towards cultivating a better future. With the population rushing towards 7 billionand no magical cure to global warming on the horizon, we need ideas. And who better to ask than college students? They understand the urgency and have fewer built-in limits to their imagination. Besides, it’s their generation that will live with it if we fail.Should we just recycle? Throw up a solar panel? Go meatless? Lobby a lawmaker? We need new ideas. Wednesday, October 26 is Campus Sustainability Day, a day when campuses around the nation challenge themselves to help address our shared problems. If you’re looking for inspiration, check out the #ThinkFWD Team – a group of fifteen students from my class here at The George Washington University. They have been looking for ideas and innovations and are talking about them in video, the blogosphere, and social media.

The best ideas are often bottom-up, not top-down. Today’s technology lets everyone spread their message or share their innovation with the push of a handheld camera and some clicks on a website. So find a great idea and tell the world.

We’re working with colleges and other institutions around the nation--and the world--to encourage them to upload the best to Planet Forward. Everything from green cafeterias to cutting-edge biofuel research. We’d like to hear from you. We’re working with the EPA’s P3 project, and with Second Nature’s Campus Sustainability awards, Climate Leaders. The most successful projects can be seen here on Huffington Post, on the PBS Nightly Business Report and in Planet Forward webisodes.

You can follow the class on a live Twitter stream of discussion using the #ThinkFWD hash tag.

Check out their videos here>>