Humans of Tyson 2024
Sara Goldstein
Undergraduate Fellow, Team Humans
Rising WashU senior, Sara Goldstein of Team Humans, has identified a previously unexplored way to measure human impact on Tyson’s landscape: greenhouse gas accounting. Self-discovery and accounting are perhaps disparate. But not in Sara’s case. She details her independent project below.
“As part of my Environmental Analysis major, I took a class called Ecological Economics with Froggi VanRiper and realized how businesses’ ESG (environmental, social, and governance) initiatives act as linchpins to a lot of other environmental problems. One of the core themes in my minor [the Business of Social Impact] is about how measuring an organization’s initial impact, and monitoring that impact as its activities shift, is the way to make lasting, effective change. What gets measured gets managed. You don't know the scope of the problem until you sit down and you do the math.
Math and accounting are not my passions. In fact, they are far from it. But when I started putting these quantitative skills into practice for a project that I care so much about, I realized that I am fully capable. Looking through Tyson energy receipts and dedicating myself to calculating our carbon emissions, I’m putting the pieces of the puzzle together and having it serve an end I really care about. This project has been so empowering and has taught me a lot about myself. I never thought that I would be so happy going through old gas bills and electricity bills and find so much meaning in it.”