About Me
Hi! I’m Lydia Brubaker. I am a senior at Muhlenberg College with an Anthropology Major and a Sustainability Studies Minor. On campus, I spend a lot of my time being involved with Disciplemakers Christian Fellowship (DCF), where I serve as the Communications Director and am a member of the Leadership Team. I am also a Dana Scholar, which is an Honors Program at Muhlenberg that encourages intersectionality and civic engagement among scholars. I served as a Dana Intern during my Sophomore year, co-leading the Dana Anti-Racism Initiative and co-organizing a school-wide panel on Predominantly White Institutions. One of my interests I’ve been able to explore at Muhlenberg is photography. I have taken several photography classes, learning both the analog and digital formats. During my junior year, I even did a photography mentorship with Kim Hoeckele, Muhlenberg’s Assistant Professor of Art and Photography. The body of work that I created over the course of my mentorship was a photo-series inspired by food and block-chains, featuring colored photos I took of foods in the different stages they exist in prior to being on a consumer’s plate.
My passion for sustainability began in high school, when I took AP Environmental Science. My teacher ended each unit with a documentary, and films like The Biggest Little Farm, Chasing Coral, and Food, Inc tugged on my heart strings, as I learned about what the Earth offers us and how we must start taking better care of it. When I started at Muhlenberg, I had no idea what I wanted to study. Through a series of trials and errors in trying different courses, I eventually realized my place in academia is Anthropology, where we “make the strange familiar and the familiar strange.” However, I also enjoyed all of the science classes I took, like BIO 160, Ecology of Marine Organisms, Topics in Environmental Science, and Political Ecology. I found that all of these classes fell into Sustainability Studies, and that was when I started my minor. Since then, I have been involved in various sustainability efforts on campus, such as the program Weigh the Waste, the club Food Recovery Network, the opening of the Fahy Commons, and the class Local Sustainability.
As part of my Cumulative Undergraduate Experience for my Sustainability Studies Minor, I am researching the country of Palau, with the intention of exploring its unique sustainability issues, as well as any of its adopted or potential solutions in order to advance sustainability objectives. In this project, I will define sustainability; outline Palau’s history, population, government, economy, natural resources, education, and healthcare; and detail any of Palau’s stated sustainability commitments, policies, agencies, or commissions. I will also look specifically at Palau’s sustainability in each of the following areas: air, water, transportation, energy, natural resources, and waste. The purpose of this domain is therefore to document each of my steps along the way, so that at the end of this project, all of my findings will be recorded here.
Here is a Twitter (X) account that I made to gather information and resources throughout this project: https://twitter.com/lyd_sustainable. My handle, to find the account by search, is @lyd_sustainable.