RINDGE — Today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. By the 80th anniversary, Franklin Pierce University hopes to achieve carbon neutrality.

Franklin Pierce Sustainability Coordinator Michelle Comeau presented the university’s plan and her involvement with it to more than 100 students and faculty assembled at a Sustainability Fair on Wednesday.

According to Comeau, the university is on track to reduce its carbon footprint by 58 percent from 2007 by the year 2020. In 2007, the university produced 7,364 metric tons of carbon.

“It will be my job to track it all,” Comeau said.

Currently, the university’s action plan involves a three-pronged effort. Most of the carbon came from electricity and oil, so those were the issues Comeau said the university attacked first.

The first step was to eliminate or reduce unused or inefficient electricity related systems or heating systems.

Comeau said certain dorm boilers were discontinued and others were upgraded to biomass boilers.

The second goal was to upgrade inefficient energy use, changing light bulbs, using smart strips, which shut down appliances when they are not in use, and extending the biomass boiler program.

In addition, the university is looking toward LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified buildings and using solar-powered hot water for certain buildings on campus.

The third goal is behavior change. Comeau said this is the most difficult, involving education initiatives, carpooling, recycling and, potentially, four-day work weeks.

“The idea is, if we put one, two and three together, we will be carbon neutral by 2050.

Comeau told students and university staff that they could help by recycling clothes and other items on moving days as well as by participating in the university’s new cross-discipline sustainability certificate program or by joining the Eco Club.

Writer Sy Montgomery of Hancock was the afternoon’s keynote speaker. She spoke about the different kinds of teachers she has had around the world. Some of them were native people in Australia and Africa. Some of them were animals.

Montgomery was born in 1958, and learned in the 1960s about pollution, knowledge of which was just becoming available to the public.

After working for five years as a newspaper reporter, Montgomery took an offer to study emus without pay, which began her lifelong love of studying animals.

“I could have lived anywhere in the world, but New Hampshire is still 90 percent forested and has 90 percent of its wetlands still intact,” Montgomery said. “It has been a great place to venture from and see the world.”

Montgomery has gone on to write many books about animals, including a children’s book about snakes.

“Kids and snakes make a great combination,” she said.

As a child herself, Montgomery was drawn to animals and the natural world. Some of her greatest friends were birds and crickets.

She expressed concern, however, that current practices stamp that love of nature out of children.

“You have to pay attention to the natural world,” Montgomery said. “Otherwise our kind can’t survive.”