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The City of Goshen has a history of cooperating with the environment to improve quality of life, from creating the Millrace for hydropower in the 19th Century, to adopting the moniker “The Maple City” in a tree-planting campaign during the 20th Century, to growing a robust park system in the 21st Century. Every day we learn more about how important the environment is to our health and prosperity. If we want future generations to enjoy a good quality of life, we know that we have to do all we can to protect and increase the value of our water, our air, our forests, our ecosystem, and our climate.

The following report is the result of Goshen’s first Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory, conducted during the summer of 2017. With skilled know-how from IU extern, Bronson Bast, and support from the IU Environmental Institute and the Indiana Sustainability Development Program, data about the amounts of energy we consume in Goshen—and the corresponding amounts of emissions—have been collected.

This information about our energy consumption will help all of us – individual households, businesses, schools, corporations, local government—to think about whether we are being responsible consumers. Furthermore, it will help us to see where we can become better stewards of our energy resources, where we can become more efficient, how we can save money, and what steps to take first. Maybe most importantly, this information will help us think about the cost of our waste, in terms of dollars, and in terms of greenhouse gases that are generated by our energy use, and which are causing our climate to change.

This first Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory is a snapshot in time: we know what we look like in this moment. From now on, we will be able to look back to this date and compare. Future residents of Goshen will be able to say, “Why didn’t they make better choices? Didn’t they know better?” or “They did a good job. They recognized what was needed and got to work.”

If we want to be uncommonly great, we will need to extend the common good far into the future. This report helps show us how.

Jeremy Stutsman
Mayor, City of Goshen