View the  to learn more about priority topics to be covered and our featured expert speakers!

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Even with campus closures, Learning Gardens are continuing to flourish! The Rock Creek Learning Garden is the largest Learning Garden at PCC. It comprises 3.5 acres of fruit trees, vegetables, an observation bee hive, a worm nursery, a cob oven, and other sustainably designed structures in a garden dotted with sculptural works of art all initiated by students at PCC. This summer, the Rock Creek Learning Garden Coordinator – Miriam Latzer has created a virtual tour of the garden! With 9 videos total, Miriam explains gardening techniques used at Rock Creek, highlighting features, such as the Three Sisters – Corn, Squash, and Beans.

Below is the third video explaining RC’s ways of harvesting!

Below is the second video explaining the Three Sisters Gardening technique used in the garden.

Below is the first video with an introduction to the garden and a shout-out to the students who worked with Miriam this past winter to create the current crop plan. Look for weekly blog posts for the next reminder to keep watching!

With 9 videos total, Miriam shares all the working parts of the Learning Garden along with gardening techniques and her personal favorites in the garden.

The featured activity, Virtual Bingo was a success! The bingo provided a way for students, faculty and staff to learn about PCC sustainability programs, integrated ways to make more sustainable lifestyle choices and shared how local organizations are committed to sustainable practices. Bingo participants sent in their completed cards in hopes to win sustainability prize bags! Our Instagram Challenge was a week long challenge for participants to tag @PCC_Sustain and share videos/pictures that represented the daily hashtag. Each hashtag was chosen to inspire individuals to participate in activities provided by the Virtual Bingo and tutorials created by the Sustainability Team.  Follow @PCC_Sustain on Instagram to find the tutorials on the IGTV tab.  Below are the daily hashtags and some examples of the awesome submissions!

The PCC Sustainability Team had a blast looking at all the completed Virtual Bingo Cards and Instagram submissions. This Earth Week was different than most years but we are so appreciative to celebrate from the safety of our homes. Thanks so much for engaging in any Virtual Earth Week activities. We will be announcing the winners to the Instagram Challenge & Virtual Bingo soon! Remember, we are all in this together!

At Sylvania Campus, Linda Fergusson-Kolmes teaches Principles of Biology (BI 211) and integrates sustainability in creative ways to process the material learned in biology. At times, chemical chemical processes are challenging to understand because they are abstract. This year she partnered with the Maker Space to take a box of outdated magnets from the Foundation and turn them into an awesome study aid.

Students learned about the Maker Space, how to use some of the materials and created something they could bring into Lab and share with their peers. These included all the steps in Cellular Respiration- Glucose, Pyruvate, ATP, NADH and all the enzymes, oh my!  There is nothing like some sparkly materials to remind you where the energy is!

Linda was inspired to add this activity to her course to learn about how the brain works and learning how to see these structures. The chemical details of a structure are hard to ‘see’ if you have no context. The process of making a set of magnets to order the process, slows folks down, and has them use their hands. It puts them in community with others, while they make their very own memory aids.

She’d like to thank Amy Petit at the Maker Space for helping make this happen! And to Briar Schoon and Peter Ritson for sending her the magnets to up-cycle.

Matt Glazewski is a Environmental Studies and Policy professor located at Cascade campus. Matt received his Bachelor of Science in Meteorology from Penn State and his Master’s in Public Administration from Portland State University. He has worked with the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security National Operations Center and has had roles in local government in the Portland area.

At PCC, he teaches the following courses; Individual Sustainability (ES 141), Environmental Politics (PS 297), and Global Climate Change (G 184). These courses are heavily concentrated with sustainable practices. He shares that sustainability broadly aligns to mitigate climate exchange, earth science and political science. Matt has students take a long and hard look around themselves to see if they can identify things they could personally affect to help moderate climate change. Environmental Politics introduces the politics of environmental policy making in the U.S. and examines its conflicts and underlying issues. It explores topics like interest groups, social movements, public opinion, court decisions and political culture. In his Individual Sustainability course, he teaches introduces theory, principals and practices of sustainability to be applied at the individual level. It addresses topics like water and energy, transportation options, sustainable food choices, waste reduction and its effects on the environment. The Global Climate Change course covers characteristics of the Earth’s climate system and includes past, present and future climate change. It shares future mitigation and adaption efforts for students to recognize.

Thanks for all you do Matt!

Peter decided to encompass sustainability in his course to focus on the urgency of now. He shares, “It’s impossible to talk about building design without addressing the science of climate change, rising seas and dwindling resources, and to stress the need to reduce carbon emissions and mandate buildings be sustainable and forward-thinking.”

Check out the amazing site below and pass it on!