Footprints in the North Country: Pathways on the Planet

Contacts:
Rob Badger, Campus Festival Chair, tel. 315-267-2624 and email: badgerrl@potsdam.edu
Roberta Greene, Campus Festival Secretary tel. 315-267-2286 and email: greenera@potsdam.edu

 

CAMPUS FESTIVAL 2010
April 21 - 24

Recently, the concept of an ecological footprint has gained notoriety as the measure of human demand on an environmental system.  As our society wrestles with economic, political and social globalization, each of us is producing an ever-expanding ecological footprint.

Wine is imported from Australia, bananas from South America and oil from the Middle East. Unintentionally, we also export exhaust from our cars into the atmosphere, where it is caught up in weather patterns and transported to the rest of the planet. Recognition of our global ecological impact is leading to a movement of “Going Local” to see how much of our food and energy needs can be produced locally.  As we look around us to see what we can develop locally that will decrease our ecological footprint, we realize there is another footprint – a societal one – with which we are very richly endowed, and don’t mind exporting to other parts of the planet.

In the North Country, we have world-renowned musicians; internationally recognized physical, biological and social scientists; and excellent writers, artists, philosophers and educators.  Graduates from The Crane School of Music and The School of Education and Professional Studies teach elementary to high school students throughout the country, helping prepare them for the future. Science graduates have an impact on energy production, preservation of wildlife habitats, environmental reclamation and development of new drugs.  Social science graduates have an impact on social and government policy wherever they may settle.  Most of our students are not from St. Lawrence County, and few remain here.  After graduation, they return to their former homes or move far afield to spread their learning and expertise, our North Country footprint, to the rest of the world.

Therefore, the focus for the 2010 triennial SUNY Potsdam Academic Festival will be a local one: Footprints in the North Country:  Pathways on the Planet.  The goal is to examine the footprints that we make here in the North Country ecologically, socially, scientifically, philosophically, educationally and artistically, and, when appropriate, examine how these have a positive, productive impact on the rest of the world. “We” represents all of us in the North Country, not just SUNY Potsdam, including the other universities and the community as well. With a purposeful intent to be inclusive, we will welcome outside talents and troubadours with whom to rub shoulders and share the stage, and we will be more-worldly for the experience.  But our focus will remain local: local theater, art, music, literature, environment, science, politics, philosophy, economics, whatever else suits our fancy and, of course, food.