Brandon Greenblatt // 30 September 2015 //  #GoingGreen

My name is Brandon Greenblatt, and I’m a sophomore at Georgetown University in Washington, DC majoring in International Affairs. For the next eight months, I will be interning virtually with the United States Embassy in Berlin working on this project, Going Green: Education for Sustainability. I’m incredibly excited about the opportunity and look forward to working with you all on such an exciting and important project.

          One of my roles as a member of the Going Green team will be to contribute to this blog, helping to inform both American and German high school students about sustainability efforts in the United States. My education at Georgetown University focuses, to a large extent, on the political and economic aspects of international relations, and you’ll see that influence reflected in my blog. Over the coming months, I will write about many environmental and energy initiatives in the United States, from the Keystone XL Pipeline debate to President Obama’s recently-updated climate change plan to the plastic bag tax here in Washington, DC. I hope to inform you all about the scientific relevance of these topics, but I’ll also try to approach everything from political and economic angles as well. Some questions I’ll be asking myself, and hopefully questions that you’ll begin to consider, are:

• If it’s in everybody’s interests to protect the environment, why do politicians from different political parties present such conflicting approaches to sustainability?
• How might a scientist’s understanding of the environment differ from that of a politician or an economist?
• What sustainability movements exist on the local, state, and federal levels of the United States’ government? How do public citizens interact with the government in promoting environmental awareness?
• What does sustainability look like where I live, here at Georgetown University and in Washington, DC? And how do college students across the United States exhibit environmental awareness?

Finally, if you are ever interested in communicating with me directly, please don’t hesitate to reach out!

Looking forward to a great year, und viele Grüße!

Brandon Greenblatt