Duke Student's Site Answers Consumers Questions
By Robyn Walker, (MEM ’10), Nicholas School Communications Assistant
Where can you go if you have a burning question about an environmental issue? Duke University student John Ullman hopes a website he helped develop can provide the answers.Ullman, a first-year Master of Environment Management student at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, is the founder and president of a non-profit organization called OurEarth.org, a national grassroots initiative whose goal is to provide people with community-based information about environmental activities.
The organization has created a Web site, www.ourearth.org, that acts as a portal for individuals looking for advice or answers on environmental issues and opportunities in their area, including recycling, energy conservation and local organizations.
“The idea came from my own frustration during my junior year of college about five years ago, when I was really struggling to find ways to recycle items in my community,” says Ullman. “It just seemed so logical that such a resource should exist and since it did not, I thought that well, maybe I can make it.”
Ullman, with the help of a few friends and some books about Web design, created the first version of the OurEarth.org Web site in 2006.
“The basic idea for the organization is to transform the way that people find environmental information on the Web,” explains Ullman. “So everything that people are looking to find, whether it’s recycling, energy or water, we’re trying to bring it all to one place, and provide local information on a national scale.”
Ullman maintains and updates most of the Web site himself, but he has an extensive network of board members and student volunteers from universities and organizations around the country who help gather information and provide content and support.
The site also encourages visitors to get involved and post their own information to the Web site, and Ullman says he hopes more students at Duke and other area universities decide to get involved.
“This organization is really driven by people,” says Ullman, “and we’re really hoping to ramp it up. By next year, we have a goal of getting 100 to 200 college students to join our effort. It really is about building a community.”
Ullman says the Web site is getting up to 15,000 hits each month, and he hopes that the launching of a new and improved site on Earth Day, April 22, will bump the count up even more.
Currently, the Web site provides information about household hazardous waste collection events and recycling information for communities across the United States. One of the new features the organization will introduce on the site later this summer is a national college directory that will include a list of environmental degree programs, student groups and campus sustainability offices, which Ullman hopes will be a great resource for current or perspective college students. And, Ullman says, this is only the beginning.
“The site we have right now is a really young site,” says Ullman. “Hopefully in two or three years when we’re where we really want to be, I hope we’re the number one environmental site on the Web, and I hope it’s one of those things where people think ‘I have an environmental question but I know where to go!’”