Sustainability in Norway
Pictured Above: Sierra Garrett in Tromsø, Norway, February 2024
In January and February of 2024, SOU Honors College Scholar and Sustainability major Sierra Garrett was able to travel to Norway with Honors College Director, Dr. Cherstin Lyon, to attend the Arctic Frontiers Conference in Tromsø, Norway (above the arctic circle) and to visit other sites throughout Tromsø, Lillehammer, and Oslo, Norway in January and February of 2024.
This opportunity came as a follow up grant from Fulbright Norway to Dr. Cherstin Lyon (Director of the Honors College at SOU) as a result of her Fulbright Hays award from 2022. Dr. Lyon extended an invitation to Sierra to accompany her on this 2024 return trip to Norway due to Sierra Garrett’s participation in SOU’s Democracy Project trip to the four Nordic countries of Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway over the summer of 2023, her major field of study in Sustainability, and her work across various offices on campus on topics of sustainability. Sierra works as the Student Director for the Institute for Applied Sustainability and as the Zero Waste Coordinator for Sustainability, and used portions of her trip for her Sustainability internship. Most impressively, she shared what she learned with a broader academic audience at the Washington Oregon Higher Education Sustainability Conference in March 2024. Sierra will be traveling as a student leader with the Democracy Project again this summer when it visits India, the world’s largest democracy.
Pictured Above: Sierra Garrett presenting at the recent Washington Oregon Higher Education Sustainability Conference, March of 2024.
Pictured Above: Sierra Garrett (left) with Dr. Lyon (second from right) in Lillehammer, Norway, January 2024.
Also traveling with Dr. Lyon were Savannah (second from left), a student from Oregon State University studying Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation studies with a Marine Biology emphasis, and Chella (right), SOU Honors College B.F.A. alumnae and current instructor for the Honors College.
When asked what this experience meant to Sierra, she said: “When I discuss these trips with people, some just see it as a way to travel around the world, but they fail to recognize the ways that my life has changed because of it. I have more confidence in my particular fields of interest and I’m much more ready to make changes on my campus knowing that other people around the world are making change at the same time as me. These opportunities were never just about becoming a traveler, they were about becoming a student of the world.”
Pictured Above: Sierra Garrett aboard a ferry from Denmark to Norway, July 2023
