Wake Forest University
ER-15: Sustainability Research Identification

Wake Forest University
Guidelines for Sustainability Course and Research Identification

Guiding Principle for Teaching and Research for Sustainability

In working toward Wake Forest’s campus sustainability goals, we also seek to fulfill our motto, Pro Humanitate – for the betterment of humanity. As a guiding principle, we stimulate and facilitate curricular development and research efforts in sustainability-related areas, including the promotion of service learning and the empowerment of faculty, students, and staff to engage the campus community, university operations, and university lands as living laboratories for sustainability.

Definitions

Wake Forest University’s Center for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability (CEES) defines sustainability as “a process of cultural adaptation toward the preservation and prudent use of all forms of natural and human value – nature’s capital, human capital, human-created capital, social capital and cultural capital – to ensure that present and future generations can enjoy a quality of life that is as good as, or better than, that which we enjoy today.”

As a field of academic study and research, sustainability explores the dynamic relationship between current and historical environmental, social, and economic systems to assess and predict the potential health and wellbeing of those systems. It calls for the integration of techniques, methods, and modes of inquiry from the natural sciences, social sciences, professional schools and humanities. These interdependent areas of study not only inform theories of sustainability, they challenge faculty and students to critique historic and current frameworks for natural resource use and valuation, examine the breadth of the human experience, and propose solutions-based, future-oriented scenarios that provide opportunities for practical application of knowledge.

The Wake Forest Center for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability requested that faculty members identify themselves and their research activities during the center's development. The research activities are organized according to the center's three core areas.

The center proposal, a link to which is provided here (http://sustainability.wfu.edu/academic-research/center-for-energy-environment-and-sustainability/), features the funded research of those faculty who identified their research as relevant during the proposal process (see table 2). As the center grows and develops, center staff will be able to create a more robust and detailed inventory of the sustainability-related research across campus.