The Environmental Club at Indiana University East is sponsoring a Sustainable Living Fair on Tuesday, October 20, from 2-8 p.m. in the Whitewater Hall Community Room. The fair will include discussions, movies, lobby displays, and giveaways.

The Sustainable Living Fair is free and open to the community.

Lobby displays include sustainable food, sustainable seafood, renewable energy, storm water pollution prevention, recycling and composting, local bike trails, and community supported agriculture. Dull Homestead Conservation and Renewable Energy Center will be bringing their demonstration apparatus that uses solar energy to produce hydrogen from water. Hydrogen is a fuel that produces no carbon dioxide, greenhouse gasses or other air pollutants. The apparatus can be used to fuel hydrogen cars or as a substitute for natural gas.

Peggy Branstrator, senior lecturer in biology and earth science, is the advisor for the Environmental Club. She said the club is hosting this event to bring together various community groups and people who are working on sustainability projects and to make information available to the community. 

A schedule of activities for the day include:
“The Food We Eat” 2 p.m.
Wazir Mohamed, assistant professor of sociology at IU East
“Sustainable Design” 4 p.m.
William Brown, director of sustainability for Indiana University

The Future of Food, the film will be shown at 3 p.m. and 6 p.m.

Wazir Mohamed, associate professor of sociology at IU East, researches the intersections of Atlantic slavery, particularly the rise of slavery in the age of abolition, the second slavery in Cuba, Brazil, and the United States with the persistence of ethnic divisions and marginalization of the descendants of slaves in the African Diaspora of the Caribbean and the Americas.

This summer, Mohamed traveled nationally and internationally to lecture on globalization and current land conflicts in third world countries. He also conducted archival research at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He examined the archives of the activities of the London Missionary Society in 19th Century British Guiana for his book project. These activities have been facilitated through funding from the New Frontiers grant project of Indiana University and through a summer fellowship from IU East.

Mohamed is the recipient of the Graduate Student Excellence in Teaching Award and a Teaching Award in the Education Opportunity Program, both awarded from Binghamton University.

Bill Brown is the first director of Sustainability for Indiana University where he catalyzes sustainability initiatives in academic programs and campus operations. He also teaches a class in sustainability leadership through the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs and leads IU’s innovative sustainability internship program.

As an architect specializing in green architecture since graduation from Ball State University, Brown has been a leader in the national green architecture movement, including service with the founding steering group of the AIA National Committee on the Environment. He participated in the Greening of the White House in 1993 and later founded Sustainable Evansville to bring those design principles back home to Indiana.

Brown’s projects as an architect include dozens of public schools and libraries, culminating most recently in the design of two net-zero-energy public library branches.

Brown currently serves as the Chair of the Indiana Chapter of the US Green Building Council
and Secretary of the American Institute of Architects Indiana Chapter. Brown is a recipient of two national AIA Presidential Awards, one US Green Building Council national award and he was honored with an Award of Outstanding Achievement by the Ball State University College of Architecture and Planning Alumni Board in 2006.