SustainRT now has a blog!  Check it out: http://olos.ala.org/sustainrt/.  If you would like to share how you are promoting sustainability in your library or community, please consider contributing a post for the blog. Submissions for the blog should be between 500-1000 words and will be subject to review prior to posting. Please send submissions to sustainrtblog@gmail.com.

The New York Library Association just did two very cool things:

1. Issued a white paper from their Sustainability Initiative outlining the work of a recent retreat of “co-creators” that are helping to shape the future of what sustainable thinking for libraries in New York looks like and
2. Officially formed the NYLA Sustainability Initiative Committee

This follows the passage in 2014 of the NYLA Resolution on the Importance of Sustainable Libraries, the forerunner of the American Library Association’s Resolution of the same name passed in June 2015, and the 2015 convening of the Sustainability Initiative Retreats, sponsored by an impressive list of leaders throughout New York State:

• Public Library Systems Directors Organization of New York State (PULISDO)
• Leadership & Management Section of the New York Library Association (LAMS)
• Public Library Section of the New York Library Association (PLS)
• Suffolk Cooperative Library System (SCLS)
• Suffolk County Library Association (SCLA)
• Sandpebble Project Management

Can’t wait to see what happens next!

ALA’s Sustainability Round Table sponsored a great webinar featuring Miguel A. Figueroa of the ALA Center for the Future of Libraries: “Sustainable Communities and ALA’s Center for the Future of Libraries”

Check out the Center’s Trends on:

• Collective Impact
• Resilience
• Fast Casual
• Urbanization
• Sharing Economy

On Monday, October 19, 2015, ProjectARCC and ALA SustainRT co-hosted a tweet-up using #SustainLIS to discuss how we as archivists and librarians can reduce our professional carbon footprint and implement sustainable practices in our institutions. Check it out

The Sustainability Round Table of the American Library Association (ALA) is collecting information on books, articles, websites, blogs, social groups, and projects that fall under the umbrella of Sustainable Libraries. Please use this form to suggest resources or projects that will become part of our SustainRT Sustainability Database.

Fill out the form here: http://goo.gl/forms/JMP8ua7GT6

Contact Eileen Harrington (eharring@umd.edu) for more information.

I’m supporting the Kickstarter campaign for Free For All: Inside the Public Library, “the first major documentary project about our nation’s most beloved and most threatened public institution. It captures dramatic personal stories from library users across America, highlighting the diverse communities that depend on public libraries and the surprising ways libraries are reinventing themselves to serve more people than ever.”

It is more critical than ever that the importance of the public library to local communities gets conveyed in a BIG WAY. The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project study, The New Library Patron, had a key finding that I’m pretty obsessed about: “Libraries have a PR problem.”

If we’re going to have a sustainable future, that means community, governmental and corporate financial support of libraries. Telling our story is the work to be done to inspire investment.

A documentary, telling the story, conveying the value in the words of those who have lived it, whose lives have been changed by libraries, will be a massive addition to our arsenal of advocacy tools.

Help this film become a reality by investing in their Kickstarter campaign!

Last month I attended the Living Future unConference in Portland, OR. The conference is arranged by the International Living Future Institute, the administrator of the Living Building Challenge^™, “the built environment’s most rigorous and ambitious performance standard.”

We’ve talked about the Living Building Challenge (LBC) here on SustainableLibraries.org before when I went to visit the Omega Center in Rhinebeck, NY back in 2010 [Louise & the Eco Machine] It was my first exposure to a building certified under LBC, and with good reason, Omega, at the time, was one of just two building in the world that had met the challenge.

I was not sure what to expect at the Living Future unConference, it was somewhat unlike any other conference I’ve been to, and in other ways, very much like other conferences I’ve been to. There is a built-in community that is following and engaging with the International Living Future Institute that I was new to. Many session presenters referenced back to information shared at previous conferences, which was a little disconcerting as a first-time attendee. However, overall, presenters had great, real-world examples to share that drove home the innovation, dedication and intelligence being applied to the built environment all over the world.

[photo used in the opening session plenary, Living Futures unConference 2014]

I was glad to be reminded that many people are striving to make the world a better place. To make buildings healthier, to make better choices for people who work, live, play and live near those buildings or near the locations where building materials are sourced.

The unConference theme was “Beauty and Inspiration,” a tagline that, admittedly, almost made me not want to go. But as I listened to Maya Lin (designer of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC) the first evening and Jason McLennen (author of one of my favorite books on sustainability, The Philosophy of Sustainable Design) the next morning I started to really get into the idea of beauty as it relates to sustainable design.

What do we hear so often when people speak about their time in nature or when those we respect write and reflect on nature’s impact on our lives? It is how awestruck people are by nature’s beauty or the elegant solutions found in nature or the mindfulness brought on by time spent in nature. Very often when we think of “sustainability” it is driven by a desire to preserve that beauty, those solutions and that mindfulness. Beauty is often inspiration, and thus a fitting tagline for the conference, a reminder of what is at the heart of the decisions we are making about our library buildings, operations, policies, collections, programming and more – the improvement of the human condition.

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike. “

-John Muir, The Yosemite (1912), page 256