I was invited to give a talk in a second year class in Kibbutzim College (סמינר הקיבוצים) today. The college is a teacher’s seminar, graduating students with a B.Ed. The class I talked to is dedicated to sustainability, and is part of a concentration on design (students can have their B.Ed with different foci). The invite came from Yair Engel, who is an industrial designer, the representative of Cradle to Cradle in Israel, a board member of the Heschel Sustainability Center, and an all around great guy.
The talk touched upon CIRS’ research agenda and functioning as a “living lab”. The students were very impressed by the building’s net positive features and “feel”. I also talked about the rationale for public engagement on sustainability, described some of the ways that the City of Vancouver was engaging the public on its plan to become the greenest city in the world by 2020, and demonstrated MetroQuest, a sustainability decision-support tool which was one of my dissertation’s case studies.
Students were mostly engaged, curious and opinionated (who would have guessed that Israelis are opinionated?…) After meeting Yair and other members of the Israeli sustainability community in this trip, I’m starting to think that maybe there is hope for a more sustainable Israel.
