Motivation for a lot of the young people involved in green jobs for the future began at Sustainable Saunders, a building on the UH Manoa campus that is virtually self-sustaining. The Blue Planet’s Ivory McClintock says the next generation has a vested interest in sustainability.
"If not us, then who. And so I selected that. I need to do something that I can actually contribute to giving back to Hawaii and be a steward of the land rather than taking from it – so that’s where I sort of shifted to sustainability efforts," said McClintock.
Many businesses have already joined the campaign.
"Reporting your environmental and your social impacts in the same token. There’s a raising of awareness but we’re doing things in a new way…the triple bottom line, that’s plants, people, profits or economy, equality and environment," said Tamara Armstrong of KYA Design Group.
As we said, much of this impetus for green jobs, for a different future, began at Sustainable Saunders.
"There’s a group of really passionate students and we covered every different discipline and we decided to take one building called Saunders Hall and make it the model sustainability for the campus and maybe the state and within one year, without spending a cent, we were able to reduce the use of energy by $150,000," said author and engineer Shanah Trevenna.
Vance Arakaki works with Tamara at KYA Design Group.
"What we do is form partnerships, we form programs and we get to cultivate services amongst each other and really, together, this movement is going to happen," Arakaki said.
And it will be because of the dedication of these young people.
"I actually went back to school and studied all sorts of courses on sustainability and knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life learning and teaching about it and become a professor and I scanned the world literally about where I wanted to take that passion and Hawaii was the answer because I truly feel it can be the model for the world," Trevenna said.
See the original article at: KHON2 Local News
