Cultivating sustainability through undergraduate research and writing

The Stanford Undergraduate Sustainability Scholars (SUSS) fosters engagement with sustainability by supporting undergraduates in creative and persuasive communication targeting an audience of their peers. Our broadest goal is to incubate new ways of talking about and representing sustainability, such that individuals and institutions are motivated to act and cooperate. We do this by working in two areas: 1) in our inaugural year we sponsored two sustainability scholars who carried out ambitious research projects exploring some intersection of the Stanford campus and sustainability 2) we run a blog, SUSSing Sustainability @ Stanford that is an expansive forum for undergraduate writing, art, and projects pertaining to sustainability. This essay details the evolution of the SUSS program and describes a model for supporting undergraduates to reflect on, synthesize and communicate about sustainability-related issues. SUSS is sponsored by an undergraduate writing program; this is critical because many challenges of sustainability will be solved not only through science and policy, but also through writing, communication, and rhetoric. SUSS helps students develop rhetorical and communicative skills to become ambassadors and coalition builders for sustainability, on campus and beyond.