GreenBuild National Bus Tour

Categories	Outreach & Teaching, Speaking, Sustainability
When?	November 2012

Taking the Show on the Road: Promoting Sustainability from New York to California

In November, 2012, Cornell University Sustainable Design (CUSD) and the US Green Building Council (USGBC) partnered up to organize a cross-country bus tour! The tour started at Cornell University and ended at the International GreenBuild Conference and Expo in San Francisco, California. Along the way, we hosted workshops with 6 other schools for K-12 students. Fellow CUSD leaders and I met with Rick Fedrizzi, the CEO and founder of the USGBC, in April 2012 and subsequently spent several months planning an elaborate trip that would take us 3,250 miles across the country.

8 Cornell students including myself were joined by sustainable student leaders from other universities along the way. Each stop focused on a different sustainable building topic including things such as indoor environmental quality, and renewable energy. Workshops for primary school students at each stop focused on a unique topic, and allowed us to instill the importance of understanding sustainability in our younger peers. After nine days of travelling and teaching, we arrived at our final destination, the GreenBuild International Conference and Expo in San Francisco, where a recap of our of exploits were shown at the plenary address to 15,000 attendees. At the Expo, we had the opportunity to present about both CUSD and the Bus Tour.

Videos from the Tour

Timelapse of the Cross-Country Trip

During the bus trip, I mounted my DSLR to the dashboard of the bus and hooked it up to a timelapse unit. It snapped a photo out of the front of the bus every 60 seconds. At the end of the Tour, I put all the photos together to make an epic cross-country timelapse. Check it out below (note that is includes quickly flashing images and might be difficult for some people to watch as a result):

Epic Bus Tour Rap Video Parody

Have you ever seen the “I’m on a Boat” (it has profanity – NSFW) music video? Well, we’ve made “I’m on a Bus”. Check it out below! Don’t worry – it’s clean.