The Green Cardinal Initiative is a group of students, faculty, and staff at Saginaw Valley State University who are interested in creating a more sustainable future. This website allows students, alumni, faculty, staff and community members to sign up to be a Green Cardinal and to join in the conversation. Based on funding from the Allen Foundation, SVSU’s WIRED grant from the Department of Labor, and the SVSU Foundation we are working on several projects including, recycling waste from our Dining Services into organic fertilizer, creating sustainable hydroponics systems for inner city urban areas, developing renewable options for fossil fuels, Vermiponics, and raising environmental awareness on campus and throughout Mid-Michigan. Please join us by registering as a Green Cardinal !
As many of you know, the Green Cardinal Initiative has been active in Saginaw helping establish and promote urban food programs. We've worked on environmental education programs, helped establish a community garden, and experimented with community based small scale hydroponics system. We aren't the only group interested in urban agriculture and there is movement around the state in this area. John Hantz, a wealthy money manager from Detroit, is committing $30 million dollars to start a for-profit urban farm in Detroit. Can agriculture, a mainstay of Michigan's economy, really help save declining urban areas? Click here to read about Mr. Hantz's Detroit project. http://money.cnn.com/2009/12/29/news/economy/farming_detroit.fortune/index.htm
Sign up for Dr. Boles' two-week trip to El Salvador for Spring 2010. The course includes a 12-day tour of El Salvador’s colonial towns, archaeological ruins, eco-tourist locales, museums, and a four-day stay in the visitor dormitory of an organized community of low-income farmers who have pioneered a remarkable holistic, organic, and self-sufficient community development movement. Cost: $1950-2200. For details: www.svsu.edu/~boles
How are you going to spend your summer?Flipping burgers?Sitting in a classroom?Watching the world through the glass of some tour bus?
Or…
Are you going to spend the night on the Great Wall of China?Use Global Positioning Systems to travel in small groups through Beijing?Learn about Chinese culture while eating Peking duck with a group of fellow students?Study the environment by working on an organic farm in a remote part of southern China?
This is not your ordinary study abroad trip…
If you want to understand how the development of the most populous country in the world is changing China’s economy, environment, and culture, this is the trip for you.
