Welcome to your first day on the job. Our clients are heavily invested in the performance of a vast endowment which you will be overseeing. This endowment is an enormously diversified portfolio with incomparably-complex instruments—we call it “Earth”. Said endowment comprises all of this world’s natural systems and actors, from the depths of its crust to the outer reaches of its atmosphere.
Tag Archives: greenspace
Olin’s sustainability column
Green Space: February
Paper or plastic? This debate never seems to end– Whole Foods and others have banned plastic bags, but Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) data shows that plastic bags are actually less impactful than paper.
An Island of Sustainability
Singapore is a country many of you have probably heard of, possibly as the current home of Eduardo Saverin, or for their authoritarian laws. However, the centralized authoritarian government has also taken many impressive steps towards turning Singapore into a sustainable city, steps that could only be taken because of the nature of the government.
Green Space: December
Swarm Theory & Sustainability: What does it take to be sustainable? Top-down political action? Bottom-up grass-roots movements? More electric vehicles? These approaches are all too narrow. As I see it, the direction of the global human society is the weighted sum of each individual decision.
This concept is swarm theory applied to sustainability: like fish in a school, each individual bases actions on a small set of rules, and individual actions move the group. The mass’s direction is determined by initial conditions and the values held by each unit. Embedding the necessary tenets is the role of education, both formal and otherwise.
Helping Olin be Sustainable
This summer, we worked with Facilities to improve sustainability and stewardship at Olin. Our overarching goal was for Olin’s monetary, environmental, and proprietary resources to be managed and maintained more responsibly. We realized that we could work on many sustainability and stewardship efforts, but they would founder if we did not achieve community-wide involvement. Thus, our true goal was to not only begin sustainable projects, but also to make it easy for everyone to get involved.