Campus Ecology

Years--and years--of sustainability

Xarissa Holdaway — 2009-07-14T12:58:38-04:00

A new article in Inside Higher Ed profiles a growing trend: hosting a themed "year of sustainability" on campus. The story notes, "with multiple campuses, including Davidson College, New Mexico State, Villanova University and University of Denver having just finished up their years, the results have been varied, and some question whether the concept is more than a gimmick."

The schools featured took different approaches, including everything from reducing food waste and increasing recycling to creating new graduate programs or minors that focus on sustainability.

The story goes on to quote NWF's director of campus and community leadership, Julian Keniry, who says, "Sustainability is something that needs to be the purpose of education across operations and disciplines and sustained over time. The idea of focusing on a one year theme doesn't lend itself to a [sustainable approach]. But it might be a way to catalyze thinking that could lead to long term work."

The point almost seems too obvious to make. A "year of sustainability" shouldn't be a discrete event, but rather a kick-off to bolder steps. By definition, sustainability is about the long-term, about making communities and campuses more flexible, more resilient and more useful over time. If treated as a fad, it will fail.

So it's encouraging to see that none of the facutly or staff interviewed for the story thought of their efforts as a one-off. Says Kealy Devoy, Davidson's sustainability fellow, "We haven't achieved 100 percent on most of the goals, but I don't consider that an issue because we're not going to just stop."

More schools setting up green workforce training programs

Xarissa Holdaway — 2009-07-09T11:35:01-04:00

The Charleston Regional Business Journal reports that Virginia Tech has teamed up with Trident Technical College to develop curriculum in the green sector. According to the article, "the two schools will develop curricula on green building, green engineering technology and other energy efficiency-related areas. Virginia Tech will also help Trident develop a comprehensive energy efficiency retrofit program."

While many schools have set up such collaborations in order to get access to solar panels or other renewable energy equipment for their students, Trident's focus will be on weatherization and energy audits, as one of six energy efficiency training centers in the state of south Carolina. Money for the training program is coming from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Learning with Thoreau

Xarissa Holdaway — 2009-06-22T12:06:19-04:00

A short-and-sweet story at the Chronicle of Higher Education notes that even English majors can get their hands dirty at Furman University:

"The course was about Henry David Thoreau's Walden,
but instead of simply reading the memoir and discussing it in a traditional classroom setting, David Bernardy took his class to a wooded area near a 30-acre lake on the college's campus to build a cabin similar to the one Thoreau had written about in his book," says the report.

Thoreau might have approved. Considered a pioneer of nature writing, he is often referenced by modern environmentalists and social justice advocates who admire his commitment to deliberately living well with less, his thoughts on equality, and his willingness to spend most of his time out in the natural world, providing for himself and learning about his environment. Walden is as much an examination of the ways people should live as a memoir, and the questions Thoreau poses are as valid today as when they were written, particularly in the face of large-scale environmental collapse. So, as this group of students read Thoreau and then put themselves in a similar place, doing similar work, one imagines they were able to gain more from the text than they would have by simply reading it in an American Lit course.

Drew Woten, a sophomore in the course, believes it was a success. He said, "It helped us come to appreciate what he did, and to learn what it's like to really use your hands and use engineering and construction, as well as problem solving." He adds that Thoreau would have found it "silly for someone to sit in a classroom and just listen to lecturing."

More and more, faculty are deciding that students need these chances to learn differently. Bernardy says, "I think anytime you can help the students understand the text through something tangible and experiential, you create pathways of understanding that go beyond typical classroom learning."

Image credit: bjearwicke/stock.xchng

Back to the blogosphere

Xarissa Holdaway — 2009-06-12T15:53:00-04:00

Sorry we've been a little quiet lately. To ease you back, here's a piece done by one of our members at the Chronicle of Higher Education about using the university's progress towards sustainability as a teaching tool:

"The mission of colleges and universities is to prepare students for the world they’re entering, and to do so, they need to offer students more practical experience. But students interested in sustainability are often limited to joining a recycling club or making posters about the merits of biking. Good efforts, to be sure, but the challenges of sustainability span the gamut. Students interested in environmental law, green building, water conservation, xeriscaping, habitat protection, fair trade, education, sustainable agriculture, urban planning, business, and a host of others could all find ways to be involved in the process of making a college sustainable."

Reusing: Better than Recycling

Xarissa Holdaway — 2009-05-06T11:21:57-04:00

Every spring we see a rash of stories on end-of-the-semester cleanouts in dorms and student apartments. As students leave for the summer, dumpsters fill up with perfectly good lamps, textbooks, furniture and clothing. However, schools are trying to make the mass exodus from campus less like a dump and more like a treasure hunt by creating student reuse depots, rescuing items from landfills, and donating useful materials to shelters and thrift stores. Here are a few:

Mills College, in Oakland, CA, set up a Reuse Depot in Reinhardt Hall, re-purposing concrete slabs and wooden shelves from the city landfill to hold all the stuff donated by students. "Shoppers" can choose from canned food, textbooks, clothing, binders, purses, gardening tools and more. Students from the school's environmental club run the Depot during the semester, and coordinate a drop-off to local charities at the end of the semester.
Suffolk University makes it easy with a Dump-and-Run program, which saves the university money that it would otherwise spend on trash-hauling. Donated materials are given to local organizations for the homeless and the hungry. In the spring of 2008, the program diverted 5,500 lbs worth of items.
Arizona State makes an event out of ditching the dumpster, with games, de-stressing activities, music and prizes. Last year they collected more than 10,000 lbs worth of materials, and also accept items that are hard to recycle, such as electronics and toner cartridges.
Hamilton College has an annual Ham's Cram-and-Scram which takes back unopened food and other goods from students and donates most of them to local shelters and consignment stores. Paper and other materials are typically recycled, and reusable items like furniture are kept to be resold to students at the beginning of the next fall semester.
NYU's Sustainability Task Force runs Green Apple Move Out, which collects and donates discarded items from dorms and the law school, and hopes to encompass every dormitory on the campus in the next five years.

'Trayless' Trend Continues

Xarissa Holdaway — 2009-04-29T11:46:59-04:00

This may only happen once, but we've scooped the New York Times. Today's article on trayless dining at universities is good, but nothing earth-shattering if you read ours (Students Have Their Hands Full Saving Food, Energy and Water) in the fall.

The energy and environmental benefits of trayless dining are pretty straightforward. Our story cited that in the United States, "more than 25% of food produced for consumption goes to waste, and food leftovers are the largest component, by weight, of the waste stream in the United States." So, when students lose access to trays, they take less food, and therefore less is wasted, which saves money and also reduces the amount that will eventually produce methane in a landfill if not composted or treated with an anaerobic digester.

But not everyone eliminates the trays out of concern for the environment. The NYT story highlights Skidmore College's trayless program, which began "between the spring and fall semesters in 2006, when the cafeteria, the Murray-Aikins Dining Hall, underwent a $10 million overhaul. For the most part, when students returned in the fall, they were so dazzled by the transformation of the cafeteria that they hardly noticed the missing trays. The renovated dining hall has three slate fireplaces and a half-dozen food stations, including a do-it-yourself griddle for eggs. Three of the chefs are graduates of the Culinary Institute of America, and all the pasta, granola and baked goods are made on site. Officials said their decision to go trayless was mainly about atmosphere, though they welcomed any ecological benefit. 'In our thinking, the trays were institutional, along with the conveyor belts, and we really wanted to move away from that,' said Christine Kaczmarek, director of business services at Skidmore."

Of course, Skidmore is only one school to join a growing trend towards trayless dining, which Jonathan Bloom tracks at Wasted Food. The Sustainable Endowments Institute says that 126 of the 300 schools they monitor have experimented with trayless dining, and one ARAMARK study examined meals at 25 colleges and universities to find that on trayless days, food waste was reduced by 25% to 30% per person, or about one-quarter to one-half pound of food per person per day.

Richard Johnson, the Director of Sustainability for Rice University in Houston, Texas, also blogged on dropping trays, saying, "Back in the kitchen, the H&D staff reported that plate waste had dropped 30% (the same amount as had been achieved by the educational campaign in 2005), and that the use of water, energy, and cleaning chemicals to wash plates and trays had dropped by almost 10%. They were intrigued. On a typical day in this particular dining hall, they would spend about $1000 per lunch period on food costs, not including the labor for preparation or associated utilities. What if they could reduce the amount of food that they needed to prepare? And not just for lunch, but for dinner and breakfast too (which together cost about another $1,000 per day just for the food)?"

He continues: "We have come to discover that removing the tray is akin to removing a keystone, unleashing a variety of benefits. In addition to those already discussed, there are additional energy and labor savings related to reducing the quantity of food to be cooked. Arguably, trayless dining also improves the health of students by discouraging over-eating. I continue to hear from students that they pay more attention to the food that they consume now that the trays are gone."

Image Credit: Dr. Ann C. Wilkie, University of Florida-IFAS

New Office at Interior Department Will Engage and Employ Youth

NWF — 2009-04-29T10:41:13-04:00

Yesterday, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar formally announced the creation of an Office of Youth within the Interior Department to create and manage programs that are intended to get youth working outside again.

“The new office will build our programs, expand opportunities for young people, teach them to hunt and fish, and help us coordinate our efforts across the bureaus,” Secretary Salazar said.

It is hoped that these programs will introduce youth from all backgrounds to America's national parks and forests, instilling an ethic of nature conservation and volunteerism, as well as creating new opportunities for employment. Salazar, who headed a similar youth program in Colorado, says, "Still today, I hear from the kids who went through that program –- many tell me they would never have gone to college, let alone landed a job in natural resource stewardship, if it were not for that program."

Heather White, Director of Education Advocacy for National Wildlife Federation, notes that this kind of program will address a vital need to connect kids and families to nature. "In the past 20 years, time spent in the outdoors by youth has been cut in half. Meanwhile, the average 8 to 14 year old spends 6.5 hours a day plugged into some type of electronic media," she says. "Engaging youth outside is important to our public health, our economy, and the future of conservation."

Image credit: stock.xchng/markvanpay

Can an Ever-growing Campus Be Sustainable?

Xarissa Holdaway — 2009-04-27T10:45:44-04:00

We're a little late to the party on this one, but last week's Chronicle of Higher Education feature on space planning and long-term sustainability is full of good stuff.

The issue of space planning on campus is always a sticky one, with individual professors, departments and research teams doing their best to preserve their own interests, which could be anything from always teaching at 10am in a particular room to defending unused extra storage space. And as the cost of building and Scott Carlson reports.

Aside from personnel, facilities budgets are the biggest on campus, and wasted space, even if it’s just a few rooms, can cost a university millions of dollars over a building’s lifetime. The situation gets worse when energy or construction prices spike, as at the University of Michigan, which lost $100 million in state appropriations and was forced to respond with an immediate assessment of its construction and renovations plans, slowing its space growth rate from 2% per year to 0.5%.

And cost is not the only source of difficulty. Sustainability plays a part as well. Schools that have signed the President’s Climate Commitment have promised to work towards significant greenhouse gas emissions reduction, but may find that their need to grow conflicts with the need to conserve. Carlson reports, “campus growth is also still seen as an exciting sign of progress…the State University of New York at Buffalo recently announced a plan to add or renovate some seven million square feet in the next 20 years. Every new building will add to the university emissions.” SUNY-Buffalo, which has signed the ACUPCC, will likely find that no matter how energy-efficient these buildings are, they will hinder or slow its progress towards carbon neutrality.

So what’s to be done?

"Some colleges, for reasons either economic or environmental, are considering a halt to their growth. Administrators at the University of Minnesota, which has signed the climate commitment, are just starting to discuss a no-net-growth policy: If the university builds something new, something else has to come down. That could be a difficult step to take on a campus with lots of historic buildings. And even if such a policy gained traction at Minnesota, it may have to come after the university puts up a new football stadium, a biosciences building, a center for magnetic-resonance research, and other projects already in the pipeline,” writes Carlson.

The idea of no-net-growth is unappealing to many, even if the new spaces end up being better, more efficient, and more useful to students and faculty--which is in no way a guaranteed result. But as the idea of a national cap-and-trade emissions plan gains traction, making energy and construction companies account for their climate costs, the decision may come down to necessity rather than desire.

What do you think of a no-net-growth policty? What are the drawbacks, the benefits? Is it a crucial part of a sustainability plan that includes carbon neutrality?

YouTube Launches EDU Channel

Xarissa Holdaway — 2009-04-15T11:17:51-04:00

Curious about the finer points of the clean energy grid? Looking for new ideas on campus low-impact farming or biomass plants? Just need to relax by watching students throw paint on each other in the name of art?

YouTube's new higher education site might have you covered. Already, more than 20,000 videos have been uploaded from universities like Wesleyan, Harvard, Dartmouth, UNC-Chapel Hill, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Minnesota and Virginia Tech. Topics cover everything from quantum physics to curing kleptomania, in a variety of formats, such as full-length lectures, short interviews, or webcam anecdotes.

The site offers to extend the reach of the university beyond traditional students, which sounds like a good idea to us, especially when it comes to keeping up with the latest research on renewable energy and sustainability. In fact, even though the site was only launched a few weeks ago, 85 results come up for the term 'clean energy,' and 'sustainability' pulls almost 300.

Tune in and Chill Out!

Jennifer Fournelle — 2009-04-09T14:38:19-04:00

On April 15, National Wildlife Federation will unveil the winners of the 2009 campus Chill Out competition! These campuses are incredible examples of how the students, faculty and staff at colleges and universities are leading the way towards a sustainable and clean energy future.

We’re announcing the results in a free webcast - Chill Out: Campus Solutions to Global Warming that you can screen on your campus or on your laptop. Tune in to hear from colleges that are leading the clean energy movement and lowering their carbon footprints.

Speaking of footprints, we made sure to keep this a low carbon production, going well beyond the industry’s sustainable filmmaking guidelines. In fact, we were recognized by the Environmental Media Association’s Green Seal Program for using the film industry’s best environmental practices.

This year’s webcast features an all-star cast of students, faculty and staff from all over the country, along with some Hollywood faces—Comedian and host of Planet Green’s Wa$ted Annabelle Gurwitch, Academy Award Winner Producer Lawrence Bender, Actor Efren Ramirez (Napoleon
Dynamite), Actor Michael Welch (Twilight), Actor Jose Yenque (Traffic) and many more!

Register to see how we greened our production, who were this year's competition winners, and what real ingenuity and leadership on campus looks like. We recommend you use Chill Out as a mobilizing tool, on its own or as part of your other Earth Day activities. We’ll even send you an organizing kit via email to help you plan. The webcast will be available at 9am on April 15, so you can download and view at your own convenience. The program lasts 30 minutes and is designed for students, faculty, staff and administrators.

(Oh, and there are prizes for a lucky few, like a Kaplan Test Prep course or an Mp3 download from The Steps. Just thought you’d want to know.)