Congratulations are in order for NEIU senior Kate Ekman, recent recipient of a $2,300 Clean Air, Cool Planet grant from the National Wildlife Federation (NWF). Since moving from her home state of Wisconsin and enrolling at NEIU several years ago, Kate has gravitated to the center of our campus’s environmental movement. In addition to working towards her goal of an undergraduate degree in Environmental Studies, she is chair of the Green Fee Committee, treasurer for the Green Cycle Group and works in several capacities as an environmental liaison with Facilities Management.
The Clean Air, Cool Planet project is designed to calculate the greenhouse gas emissions of a given college or university, as well as integrating this research into a comparison case-study designed to measure where they stand against other schools in the project. Ms. Ekman’s grant will allow her to collect data, research and attain those goals right here at Northeastern Illinois University.
The NWF’s aim is to enlighten universities as to the quantity of harmful gasses that they are emitting in an effort to convince them to gradually reduce these emissions. They are also urging many university administrations to sign a university president’s compact, thereby joining over 200 other signatories who are working towards reducing their own emissions through the guidelines of the compact.
Although NEIU has already signed the Illinois Lieutenant Governor’s pact on global climate change, the guidelines of the compact that the NWF is promoting are more stringent and comprehensive, and a study that measures this campus’s greenhouse emissions has never before been undertaken.
Section 5.6 of NEIU’s Millennium Goals pledges to bring positive environmental change to the campus, so Ms. Ekman will be contractually required to publish several papers for the administration based on her research. According to her, “The administrators that I discussed the project with were really supportive.” In addition, the comparison case study component will double as a paper for her research class, and she also hopes to present at least some of her results to the student body at next year’s Green Week.
Most of the $2,300 grant will be used to hire a programmer to help calculate the impact of those who commute to school everyday, and the rest will be spent on the promotional and printing costs of the educational aspects of the project. Along with the cash grant, the NWF will be providing Ms. Ekman with a specially designed computer program that mathematically measures greenhouse gas emissions. Once the immense task of gathering hundreds of pieces of data together is complete, she will enter the figures into the program and it will automatically calculate our university’s global warming profile.
After graduation, she hopes to use this valuable experience to find a position as an environmental coordinator at a college or university, or perhaps move on to graduate school. In the short term her goal is to reach out to the administration. In her own words, “Mostly, I hope that this project will help the school plan what it is going to do to become more environmentally sustainable. It will also give me something to present at the Student Research Symposium, which is something I’ve wanted to do for a while.”