Focus Frostburg 2025

Focus Frostburg 2025 will take place Wednesday, April 23, at Frostburg State University’s Lane University Center (LUC). The full day event features films, programs, discussions and hands-on activities highlighting issues of sustainability and climate awareness. All presentations are open to the campus community and the larger regional community.

Events kick off at 10 a.m. in LUC room 111 with a film titled Renewal, which captures the vitality and diversity of today’s religious-environmental activists. From within their Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and Muslim traditions, Americans are becoming caretakers of Earth. Their stories of combating global warming and the devastation of mountaintop removal, of promoting food security, environmental justice, recycling and land preservation and of teaching love and respect for life on Earth are the heart of Renewal.

Following the film at 11 a.m., attendees will have the opportunity to learn about how climate anxiety has spurred an international environmental justice movement. Presented by Dr. Kara Rogers Thomas, this workshop will explain this new documented mental condition and how it’s encouraging young people to take a stand and fight for a better future.

At noon at the Clock Tower, the FSU Tree Campus Higher Education group will proclaim Arbor Day in celebration of how important trees are to the campus, the state, the country and the world. Also at noon in LUC room 113, there will be another short film shown titled A Thousand Pines, which shows the lives of migrants who depend on the controversial guest worker visa program, following a crew of workers from Oaxaca, Mexico over the course of a season planting trees throughout the United States. The crew struggles to balance the job’s physical demands and its extreme isolation while remaining connected to their families back home. Director, Producer, Noam Osband will be joining the session for a brief question and answer period. Osband is a filmmaker, radio producer, and anthropologist. His first feature was the nationally-broadcast film Adelante, and his documentary, The Radical Jew, won Best Short Documentary at the Charlotte Film Festival and the Tallgrass Film Festival. He is also a radio and print journalist, whose bylines include The Atlantic, BBC4, Criminal, and Freakonomics Radio.

Head back to LUC room 111 at 1 p.m. to hear from Dr. Elesha Ruminski and Renee Mason about Sustaining Civility in 2025 and Beyond: Renewing the Choose Civility Campaign. Allegany County’s chapter of Choose Civility is undergoing a strategic planning process to update its vision and structure. Attendees will learn about the mission of this grassroots effort and can contribute to its reframing during this listening session.

At 2 p.m. in LUC room 113, visitors can learn about STATCOM technology, which is capable of both generating and absorbing variable levels of reactive power continuously, as opposed to the discrete values of fixed and switched shunt capacitors or reactors. Presented by Dr. Tariq Masood and Dr. Jamil Abdo, this workshop will show how with a continuously variable reactive power supply, the voltage at the STATCOM-connected bus may be maintained smoothly over a wide range of system operation conditions. This enables the provision of sufficient power quality to the electric energy end-users and can significantly reduce the chances of network failures.

Join Tracy Edwards and her geography students from 2-4 p.m. in LUC Atkinson Room to explore key Maryland environmental, energy and climate action sites in the state. Take your shoes off to “tour” these sites on a giant map of Maryland.

At 3 p.m. in LUC room 111, hear from Jeffrey Simcoe, Executive Director of the Frostburg Outdoor Recreation Economy Institute (FOREI), about growing the regional outdoor recreation ecosystem in a way that impacts the community’s health and prosperity. This presentation will frame the regional outdoor recreation economy, introduce FOREI’s programs and highlight the benefits of outdoor recreation.

From 3-5 p.m. in the LUC Atkinson Room, sustainability students will showcase information on their Spring 2025 Engagement Initiatives, including an EcoBrick build at 4 p.m., Nature Forward’s Taking Nature Back, FSU pollinator garden progress and experiences with state parks and the Department of Natural Resources. Also present during this showcase will be Maryland DNR representative Seth Moessinger with a station on fisheries science in Maryland’s cold-water streams and rivers.

Wednesday’s activities culminate at 5 p.m. with an analysis of trash in local streams and waterways through GIS mapping and crowdsourcing. A team of local elementary and middle school robotics students developed a GIS mapping app for recording trash collected from streams and waterways. They worked with FSU students during the fall of 2024 to collect data from local streams and areas around storm drains. Which item is the most frequently found in the trash pickup? Come to this session to find out and learn about how you can utilize the app to help in trash pickup and prevent our waterways from being polluted.

The full schedule will be posted to https://www.facebook.com/frostburglglg and https://www.frostburg.edu/lglg. For more information, contact Dr. Kara Rogers Thomas at krogersthomas@frostburg.edu.