The UW–Madison Sustainability Writing Awards are intended to inspire conversations about how writing can bring together people with different experiences to reflect and act within the context of the global climate crisis. Thanks to the generosity of donors, in the fall of 2022 the Office of Sustainability offered three $200 scholarships to undergraduate, graduate, and professional students who submitted essays on the topic of resilience. The topic drew a range of writing about resilience from ecological, personal, political, educational, and technological perspectives.
In this episode of the SustainUW Podcast, host Kylie Schedler speaks with the three winners of the 2022 competition: Andrew McDonnell, who wrote of how our resilience—in the smallest, most unexpected ways—makes us “agents of history"; Ben Yang, who considered the idea of legacies through the story of his Hmong grandmother; and Allyson Mills, who identified resilience in mallards she watches endure a storm at a pier on Lake Mendota.