When we first cre­ated the office of envi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­ity the charge was to cre­ate a cul­ture of sus­tain­abil­ity through­out Howard County.  That con­tin­ues to be our charge and two things became imme­di­ately clear.  The first is that there were many orga­ni­za­tions, insti­tu­tions, and indi­vid­u­als who were already doing this work and that they needed to be thanked, encour­aged, and sup­ported.  The thank­ing piece of it is another blog (one I promise to write) but this post is focused on the sec­ond issue:  the largest of the com­mu­nity insti­tu­tions would need to buy in to mak­ing us a sus­tain­able com­mu­nity for us to achieve success.

This post is to declare that the largest insti­tu­tions have stepped up to the plate and deserve recog­ni­tion. I gen­er­ally loathe just spit­ting out a bunch of links and say go get ‘em, but in an attempt to keep this things below my stan­dard 800 word opus’s occa­sion­ally, I do that below.

The Libraries – I don’t have a link that talks about their work but they have begun mak­ing the libraries sig­nif­i­cantly more energy effi­cient, one of the branches (East Colum­bia) cur­rently has and two more are get­ting solar power. (Click HERE to learn about the solar project and watch the energy col­lec­tion live.) The library also has a demon­stra­tion rain gar­den and stay tuned for infor­ma­tion on a prod­uct they will be loan­ing that will help you make your home more efficient.

The Hos­pi­tal – Howard County Gen­eral Hos­pi­tal just recently com­pleted and opened a build­ing that not only achieved LEED Sil­ver cer­ti­fi­ca­tion but was spe­cially rec­og­nized by the Green Build­ing Coun­cil as “Pio­neer­ing Sus­tain­abil­ity in a Med­ical Facility.

The School sys­tem – 35 Howard County Schools have been offi­cially cer­ti­fied as “green schools” which is nearly half of all of the schools in our County.

Howard Com­mu­nity Col­lege – Fac­ulty, staff, and stu­dents have embraced sus­tain­abil­ity and begun to inte­grate it into oper­a­tions, behav­ior, and cur­ricu­lum.  Also, of course, they are our part­ners in GreenFest

The Colum­bia Asso­ci­a­tion – CA has really, of late, focused in on the sus­tain­abil­ity issues of energy use, stormwa­ter man­age­ment, and open space man­age­ment as well as the gen­eral oper­a­tions of their ameni­ties and facilities.

Con­grat­u­la­tions to all these groups for their suc­cesses.  It’s been great  to see these projects evolve over the past few years, and I think I can speak for all of us at Office of Envi­ron­men­tal Sus­tain­abil­ity that it has been an honor to be your partner.