For most, sustainability is a buzzword people like to use when talking about environmental matters. For juniors Joanna and Laura Calabrese, it’s a mission.

If you’ve seen anything around the campus advocating clean energy, sustainability or conservation, chances are the Calabrese sisters had something to do with it. The two are driving forces behind green efforts in the Student Government Association and Clean Energy for UMD, an environmental political advocacy group. Many see them, with little opposition, as College Park’s leading environmental advocates.

But trying to save the world is no easy feat. They’re hard people to track down, especially together. The fraternal twins live on opposite sides of the campus but happen to cross paths every so often in the Stamp Student Union’s Student Involvement Suite, where they both spend most of their time.

Joanna’s busy and looks it. She walks quickly and stands closely when she talks. She gets things done.

Laura is just as busy and just as efficient, but she’s more deliberate, more organized. She walks at a more relaxed pace and spends more time conversing.

Laura, the organizational director of Clean Energy for UMD, has a much quieter public persona – she made her reputation behind the scenes as a meticulous organizer and attentive administrator, a foil to Joanna’s more public, hands-on approach.

“I don’t enjoy being in the spotlight,” Laura said.

Does Joanna?

Laura checks to make sure Joanna is distracted by a friend who stopped to chat. She chooses her words carefully.

“She’s not motivated by the spotlight,” Laura said. “She’s just more comfortable there.”

During her tenure as senior vice president of the SGA, Joanna started a “green group roundtable” to help facilitate open communication between campus environmental groups. She is also helping to organize a “green fund,” designed to help distribute private donations to environmental groups on the campus.

“Joanna is better at getting things rolling,” said their father, Richard Calabrese, who is a chemical engineering professor at the university. “But Laura is better at getting it done.”

They caught green fever early. As six-year-old Girl Scouts in Laurel Troop 553, Laura and Joanna cleaned streams, planted trees and stenciled warnings on storm drains. In middle school, they traveled with a group to Big Ugly, W.Va. – a community, true to its name, that was deeply impacted by destructive coal mining methods – to help convert an abandoned elementary school into a community center by collecting hundreds of books and computers to set up a library there.

“We had this sheltered suburban upbringing, and then we were driving down this road and there were all these broken, tilted trailers, and it was just a desolate place,” Joanna said. “It was just mind-blowing for us.”

After an adolescence of joint projects, however, Laura, now a sociology major, was eager to remove herself from “the whole twin thing” in college. She joined Community Roots and the College Democrats in an effort to separate herself from Joanna. But by fall 2007, Laura was back working with Clean Energy for UMD because, “in the end, the green movement was the thing [she] really wanted to support.”

Meanwhile, Joanna, an environmental science and policy major, decided to get political. In 2007, she ran unopposed for SGA agriculture legislator. After serving a year in the organization, Joanna ran for SGA senior vice president against her former roommate, Wanika Fisher, and won – allowing her to further her environmental agenda.

But their environmental work isn’t confined to campus borders. Earlier this year, Laura helped organize 153 students to attend Power Shift 2009, an international conference on global warming and climate change in Washington. The conference concluded with what organizers claim was the largest lobbying day in U.S. history. She calls this her proudest accomplishment, not only because of the message sent but because events like this inspire people, she said.

“People like Joanna and I are created at Power Shift,” Laura said. “I’ve seen it happen, where someone hears a speaker and just decides ‘All right. There’s no choice. This is what we have to do.'”

But the two acknowledge that not everyone is enthusiastic enough to go stumping for Mother Nature. They maintain that education is a vital component of the green movement.

“As much as I love the activism side of sustainability, it’s also important to understand the impact of what you’re doing,” Laura said. “It’s easy to say, ‘global warming is bad, go green,’ and say, ‘yeah, I’m green,’ but then you have a lot of people that don’t really understand what that means and don’t know if they’re actually being sustainable.”

“There’s a difference between being noticed and being understoods,” Joanna added, nodding.

“We’ve got people’s attention,” Laura said. “I think we’ve been very successful, at least on this campus, at getting noticed. Now that we’ve got people’s attention, though, what are we going to do with it? We need to think beyond recycling and light bulbs.”

The pair’s plans for the future are still hazy. Laura plans to continue working with Clean Energy for UMD, and Joanna wants to use her SGA experience to become an “independent leader.” She has voiced interest in serving as the environmental affairs liaison to the SGA or working on the Campus Sustainability Council to help oversee implementation of the university’s Climate Action Plan.

“I’ve done more in the past two years than I had in my whole life,” Joanna said. “I’m very humbled by that.”

The pair is also very emotionally invested in their work – they’re protective of it and say, as their final year at the university approaches, they’re actively looking for someone to accept the torch.

“I have days,” Laura said, “when I sort of feel that the green movement really started when we got here and is going to end when we leave.”

Given the level of underclassman involvement, both Joanna and Laura acknowledge their fears are unfounded, and Davey Rogner, the SGA environmental affairs liaison and co-founder of Clean Energy for UMD, is confident the movement will continue.

“They’re two great people, but it’s important to point out that they’re not the only people involved,” Rogner said. “This is the most pressing issue of our time. There are intelligent people everywhere. There’s no doubt about it: This will continue.”

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