NJIT professor plans 2012 sustainability workshop in Canada

NJIT Associate Professor Maurie Cohen, in the department of chemistry and environmental sciences, is heading a committee to plan a two-day workshop about challenging consumerism and living well sustainably. The event, which will be held March 8-10, 2012 at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, will be sponsored by the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI), a network of academics around the globe. This is the third workshop that SCORAI will organize.

Support for the workshop has been provided by the Garfield Foundation, which recently awarded the group a $40,000 grant, said Cohen. The event is being convened in collaboration with the Liu Institute for Global Issues at UBC and the Vancouver-based One Earth Initiative Society.

The theme of this year's two-day workshop is "Challenging Consumerism: Toward Living Well Sustainably." Its aim is to inspire both transdisciplinary academic debate and a dialogue with practitioners and policy makers. The first day of the event will be dedicated to academic papers, and the second to a multi-stakeholder dialogue among the academics and other attendees with a focus on sustainable consumption-oriented practices, local experiments, and campaigns.

SCORAI is a network of academics and practitioners working to address challenges at the intersection of material consumption, human fulfillments, lifestyle satisfaction, and technological change. It was inaugurated at an October 2009 workshop held at Clark University, and in April 2011 it held a second workshop in Princeton, New Jersey. SCORAI currently comprises approximately 300 members and is rapidly growing beyond its initial focus on North America, to include European and other global participants.

Provided by New Jersey Institute of Technology