Driving Local-to-Global Impact

From studying how to sustain life on our planet to how to sustain our planet’s life, Binghamton research stretches from campus to distant sites.

Close to home is the 75-acre bird sanctuary, Nuthatch Hollow, bequeathed to the University’s Environmental Studies Program by local businessman and environmentalist Robert Schumann. The site’s variety — from forests and streams to scrubland and grassland — offers one of several living laboratories on the Binghamton campus, supporting important faculty work and student projects from the environmental sciences to the First-Year Research Immersion program. Nuthatch Hollow will soon become home to one of only 15 certified Living Buildings in the world. Built on the principles of restorative design, it will yield net-positive energy, while becoming a productive research hub for the University’s Sustainable Energy Trandisciplinary Area of Excellence.

More than 5,000 miles away, Professor Carl Lipo, Associate Dean of Harpur College, has led a team immersed in years of research on Easter Island, or Rapa Nui. Their findings have rewritten the accepted history of the indigenous community, showing that the location’s famous monumental statues indicate a flourishing culture of cooperation and collaboration that continued well past the arrival of Western fortune hunters. Lipo and his colleagues have gained unique insights into maintaining a source of fresh water less susceptible to the impacts of regular droughts. Just as it once an isolated people surrounded by ocean, these findings can guide modern freshwater management and resource planning.

“There’s a natural tendency to think that people in the past aren’t as smart as we are and that they somehow made all these mistakes, but it’s really the opposite,” says Lipo. “Their successes created the present. Even though their technologies might have been simpler, there are so many lessons to be gleaned about the context in which they were able to survive.”

To have a conversation about investing in sustainability projects at Binghamton, please contact Rebecca Benner, Associate VP for Advancement and Campaign Director, rbenner@binghamton.edu.