- Goals
- Mission
- Vision
Our Goals
1. Develop leaders with scientific understanding and the ability to effectively manage complex sustainability problems and facilitate change in accordance with our common mission to preserve and protect resources, livelihoods, and cultures.
2. Build effective partnerships among public agencies, academic institutions, non-profits, and other organizations to address our commitment to multi-institutional collaboration.
3. Integrate, assess, and enhance scientific and educational efforts across disciplines with a focus on our mission to develop leaders who possess multidisciplinary skills and embrace key principles of sustainability.
Our Mission
Facing together the challenges of an uncertain future, we impact global sustainability by developing tomorrow’s leaders, fostering collaboration, and enhancing science and education.
Our Vision
The RMSSN is a replicable model that demonstrates effective multi-institutional collaboration in education and research, and develops a diverse mix of future leaders who are prepared to address sustainability, uncertainty, and change on a global scale.
- What is Sustainability?
- Meeting the Challenge
Sustainability Definitions
The Rocky Mountain Sustainability and Science Network recognizes that sustainability has different meanings with varying ecological, economic, and social implications to different people and cultures. However, as one considers the many definitions of this very potent word in our global vocabulary, several themes and ideas are consistent.
A Few of the Most Common
To create and maintain conditions, under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony, that permit fulfilling the societal, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans.
Meeting the needs of present generations without jeopardizing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs – in other words, a better quality of life for everyone, now and for generations to come… a vision of progress that integrates immediate and longer-term objectives, local and global action, and regards social, economic and environmental issues as inseparable and interdependent components of human progress.
Sustainability encompasses the simple principle of taking from the earth only what it can provide indefinitely, thus leaving future generations no less than we have access to ourselves.
Sustainability may be described as our responsibility to proceed in a way that will sustain life that will allow our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren to live comfortably in a friendly, clean, and healthy world.
Do you have a different definition?
We'd like to hear it. Email your definition to the RMSSN Coordinator.
Meeting the Challenge
Can diverse organizations with differing missions collaborate to develop a new generation of resource leaders who possess the necessary scientific and leadership skills needed to address regional impacts of climate change and energy demand? If so, how?
In the intermountain west, the impacts of climate change are manifested through large scale phenomena such as the pine bark beetle outbreak, increased wildland fire, long-term drought, and invasive species.
In addition, resource management on public lands will be affected by emerging and growing energy needs across the region. All these issues, many of which interact with changes in land use, are impacting public lands and communities that depend on natural resources for recreation, jobs, and economic stability.
These issues need to be addressed by future leaders who are educated about and committed to the sustainability of resources, livelihoods, and culture of the intermountain west. These leaders must be prepared to constructively engage with and balance the interests of a broad range of stakeholders.