Scott Paul, CC ’04, Calls for Sustainable Development

Scott Paul, CC '04, knows a thing or two about the jargon of international environmental advocacy. As a student advocate of sustainable development projects, he spends much of his time navigating United Nations bureaucracy and attending and designing agendas for a number of programs. But through all the red tape and mission statements advocating 'capacity building,' which he argues is a meaningless phrase, he never allows himself to lose sight of his vision of sustainable development through a synthesis of economic prosperity, social well-being, and environmental integrity.

According to Paul, these three goals are interdependent. It is just too easy to tell people 'don't cut down that forest,' but people need the income that forest provides, and you can't eliminate the only income source of someone who makes less than a dollar per day," Paul said.

Paul's vision of global governance is evinced in the way he decided to debut SustainUS--with a conference and a challenge to President Bush to take them up on a bet that if SustainUS could reduce harmful carbon dioxide emissions by 20,000 tons then President Bush would have to appoint five SustainUS members to accompany him to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg from Aug. 26 to Sept. 4. First, he organized large kick-off event at the same time as student activists and international experts would be in the city for PrepCom3, a global governance conference. Next, he contacted a wide range of student activist groups and invited them to table at the summit he was organizing--on the condition that they helped defray the costs of the event and that they publicize the event through their pre-existing networks.

"At the time, we didn't have the resources to recruit people off the street," Paul said. The groups that ended up co-sponsoring the event with SustainUS, like Greenpeace, OXFAM America, and the World Federalist Organization "are so well connected and have strong grassroots networks," Paul said. The bet was then announced at a press conference outside the UN.

Paul has brought his grand, global vision to his Columbia peers through a variety of avenues. He is the new political organizer at Columbia/ Barnard Earth Coalition and is the founder of an on-campus group called Students for Better Global Governance.

He spent this past spring organizing the Youth Summit on Sustainable Development, where he successfully brought a wide group of youth and student activist groups to New York City at around the same time when the UN was holding preparatory committees to set the agenda for the World Summit on Sustainable Development.

The Youth Summit on Sustainable Development also served as a coming-out party for SustainUS, an organization designed to unite American youth sustainable development activists, but with no fixed agenda.

Paul says that while he travels through international circles and meets with UN delegates from places like Kazakhstan and Colombia he has gained an even greater appreciation of the on-campus environmental network. "I really like the way we operate, we try to understand the preexisting systems instead of trying to reinvent the wheel," Paul said. He also praised EarthCo's hesitance to protest and demonize political opposition, calling the group "cooperative" and "proactive."

SustainUS has also drawn heavily on the Columbia activist scene in that many Columbia students have signed up for their pledge to take concrete measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

This is perfectly natural, says Paul. "Everyone in EarthCo cares about environmental issues on a global and national scale," he said. While his peers in the organization may not be as active as he is when it comes to international advocacy, Paul says he enjoys the sense of mutual respect that is found in the coalition. Nearly everyone in EarthCo has taken the bet Paul helped organize to act globally while Paul says that he totally supports the group's Morningside Park cleanup efforts and its plans to plant bulbs on Broadway.

In addition to praising the environmental networks on campus, Paul was also very happy with his academic life on campus. Paul is a history major concentrating in human rights, and while he is fascinated by world history he claims it serves as a "backdrop" to his human rights concentration.

"[The human rights concentration] is not big, but the faculty members are great and they're working to expand course offerings," Paul said. He also praised the speakers that the faculty have brought in to speak to students.

Paul's admiration for the human rights faculty is reciprocated. Professor Peter Juviler, who teaches in the Barnard political science department, called Paul "one of the University's outstanding examples of student volunteerism."

Professor Juviler has been in charge of screening applicants for an on-campus human-rights fellowship competition for about seven years and says he is familiar with many students' involvement in human rights activism. Paul stands out among the crowd, however. "Scott was the first undergraduate to serve as a project supervisor for a fellow undergraduate," he said. Juviler added that people who serve as undergraduate project supervisors are generally full-time employees of non-governmental human rights organizations, often with M.A. degrees.

Paul lives in Chappaqua, which he said was laudable for its commitment to earth-friendly policies on a municipal level, in particular their electric car program, where residents who use the train to commute to New York City have access to electric cars to take them from their homes to the parking lot at the train station.

This summer, Paul will be spending a bit more time away from campus than he usually does. That's actually saying quite a lot, since he normally divides his time among recruiting students from college campuses across the country, designing agendas and an infrastructure for his burgeoning organization, and working as a ski instructor for disabled people at Ski Wyndham on weekends.

Over the next few months, however, in addition to gearing up for an upcoming conference, Paul will be working two days per week at the East-West Institute studying policy research and development in central Asia. "I'm really looking forward to working there," Paul said.