The Call to Adventure: Sustainability as Transformation

Dartmouth, MA – Susan Jennings, Director of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s Office of Community and Campus Sustainability, will deliver the key-note address at the 30th Annual Meeting of the Lloyd Center for the Environment, Thursday, May 7th, 6:30 pm at the Dartmouth Grange Hall, 1133 Fisher Road in Dartmouth.

Ms. Jennings’ address, “The Call to Adventure: Sustainability as Transformation”, will explore the extraordinary times in which we live, times which call on us to redefine almost all our thoughts and actions.

In his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the late American mythologist, anthropologist and writer, Joseph Campbell, described how, in mythology, the hero begins in the ordinary world and receives a call to enter an unknown world of strange powers and events. He saw us all as potential heroes, if we choose to answer the historical “Call to Adventure” that we face.

Ms Jennings will explore how climate change, fossil-fuel depletion, economic collapse and political uncertainty are also the seedbed of revolutionary structures and technologies that glimmer on our horizon and may be our own “Calls to Adventure”. Sustainability, she notes, is the path through our collective trials that can allow us to transform ourselves, our institutions, and the world as we know it.

It is the mission of the UMass Dartmouth Office of Campus and Community Sustainability to advance sustainable thinking and practices throughout the campus and the region.

A founder of the Office of Sustainability, Susan Jennings was named its Director in July of 2008. She studied at the University of Keele in Staffordshire England and is a graduate of Washington and Jefferson College. Before coming to UMass Dartmouth in 2000, she ran a business in Kennebunkport (Maine) for 14 years.

She currently serves on several local boards and task forces related to sustainability.

In addition to the key-note address, the George G. Haydock Award will be presented, as it is each year, to an individual, selected by the Staff and Board of Directors of the Lloyd Center who, in the spirit and tradition exemplified by long-time Lloyd Center supporter and nature enthusiast, Dr. George G. Haydock, is deemed to have personally made a most outstanding contribution to protecting the fragile nature of our coastal environment.

as appeared in The Chronicle