Bucknell Renames Sustainability Center the Ecology Center at 20-Year Mark

Bucknell University renamed its Center for Sustainability and the Environment the Ecology Center this month, marking two decades of environmental work in Lewisburg with a rebrand university leaders say better captures the scope of what the center actually does.

The center, originally established in 2005 as the Bucknell Environmental Center with backing from roughly 50 faculty and staff members, has carried three different names across its history. Early programming concentrated on campus greening initiatives and the Susquehanna River before adding an environmental humanities focus. In 2015, it became the Center for Sustainability and the Environment and simultaneously launched the Coal Region Field Station, which has since been described by university leaders as a model for community-engaged learning.

Center leaders said the latest name change reflects the broad ways the center engages environmental issues through science, technology, the humanities, and community partnerships. University officials added that the updated name better captures connections between natural systems and human communities, and that existing programs focused on science, technology, and community engagement will continue under the new identity.

The word "ecology" itself carries specific weight in that framing. According to the Newsitem, center faculty director Professor James Mark Shields, comparative humanities and Asian thought, noted in a news release that the term traces back to the Greek oikos, meaning household or dwelling place, and was coined by biologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866 to describe relationships between living organisms and their environments.

Bucknell plans to formally highlight the transition at its 13th Annual Sustainability Symposium on Thursday, March 26, running from noon to 5:30 p.m. in McDonnell Commons. The symposium theme this year is "Tree Networks: Trees as Social, Ecological and Technical Beings," with Dr. Beronda Montgomery delivering the keynote address. Montgomery is the author of "When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America's Black Botanical Legacy."

The kind of fieldwork the center has long supported continues in parallel. Watershed Sciences and Engineering Program Scientist Sean Reese has been conducting mussel research in the Susquehanna River alongside Kit Jackson, Class of 2024, and Professor Stewart Thomas of Bucknell's electrical and computer engineering department, work that illustrates the center's cross-disciplinary reach across the natural and applied sciences.

The renaming was announced in a university post authored by Mike Ferlazzo on March 16, with local coverage from Newsradio 1070 WKOK following on March 18.