The future of the world depends on the collective action of its citizens, according to a Global Citizenship Symposium held Thursday in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union.

The symposium, which was lightly attended, boasted a panel of speakers with diverse backgrounds, ranging from sustainable architecture to anthropology, sustainable agriculture and environmental activism. But all had the same message: We must change in order to sustain our lives. The panelists included Hsain Ilahiane, associate professor of anthropology, Kevin Nordmeyer, partner for RDG Planning and Design, Fred Kirschenmann, director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, and Gerry Schnepf, director of Keep Iowa Beautiful, an anti-littering organization.

Krishna Athreya, professor of mathematics, gave a message about the state of the world and why solutions to global problems must be found. She identified the main problem in the world as poverty.

“One of the examples of violence that Mahatma Gandhi identified was poverty,” she said.

Athreya also talked about the Millennium Project, a global agreement made in 2000 to reduce extreme poverty. The project called for each country to give 0.7 percent of its gross domestic product to fund the end of poverty by way of giving access to education to every child in the world. She said currently the United States has only given 0.2 percent of its GDP to end poverty, which works out to about $10 billion per year, or about “half of what we spend on ice cream in the U.S. a year.”

Nordmeyer’s presentation, “Global citizenship and purpose-driven design,” centered around what the architectural design community can do to stop global pollution and to create buildings and communities that act as nature does.

“We’ve created this terminal situation that we must undo,” Nordmeyer said.

Nordmeyer presented research on sustainable buildings that ranged from the pre-industrial-era designs, which worked with nature to naturally ventilate themselves, to the post-industrial-era building, which “tried to insulate itself from nature,” by way of air-conditioning and piping rainwater to other places. Nordmeyer’s research showed how the building of the next era should function like a tree. Trees’ leafy waste biodegrades into the ground as food to perpetuate itself, which Nordmeyer said is how a building should function. He presented blueprints for a redesigned College of Design building that reuses its own waste water.

“In nature, waste does equal food,” he said.

Ilahiane presented on the impact of technology in Morocco. His research centered around the explosion of the mobile phone in the area and how it has actually helped the poor in the shanty towns to go from “nada to Nokia” in the span of seven years.

“The mobile phone arrives on social tides. It acts as a glue,” he said.

Ilahiane’s research in the area shows the impact of the mobile phone to become “the sixth pillar of Islam,” which is how a local plumber viewed it, he said.

Schnepf spoke about litter and the impact of the “small things” that create larger problems. Schnepf said littering costs the public sector in Iowa $13.5 million each year in cleanup alone. He pinpointed badly ingrained behaviors as the root of littering, which has almost taken on the guise of an innocent crime among the masses.

“We found out that the average litterer is a Mountain-Dew-drinking, Snickers-bar-wrapper throwing, Marlboro-butt throwing and fast-food eating person,” he said. “Do you know anyone like that?”

Schnepf has created a hotline that citizens can call to report litterers, which prompts a mailed warning message that is not a ticket, but “a warning message that says ‘You’re being watched.'”

Kirschenmann spoke about the effects climate change will have on agriculture in the future.

“Using oil, natural gas and coal as the core of the life that we’ve created for ourselves is now essentially over,” he said. “We have to redesign our future.”

He said that by 2040, drought and more severe storms in the Midwest will cause surface runoff of topsoil to increase by 20 percent, which will make farming extremely hard.