Campus Ecology

New site tailors green building resources to higher education

Xarissa Holdaway — 2009-11-03T12:43:23-05:00

If you have anything to do with the buildings on your campus, Second Nature's latest offering, Campus Green Builder, is the website for you.

The site promises to act as "a one-stop online resource on campus green building that is free and accessible to all higher education institutions." It will include links to green building resources as well as experts’ directories; case studies (accounts from Spelman College, the College of Menominee Nation, East Los Angeles College, and Richland College are already live); announcements of green building and campus sustainability events, workshops, and webinars; free user accounts; and a blog for commenting and networking.

As the cost for green buildings goes down,and the standards for what counts as "green" go up, this information will be crucial. Amy Seif Hattan, director of strategic initiatives at Second Nature, notes that her experience at Middlebury taught her that with a little ingenuity and the right information, sustainable buildings don't have to break the bank:

"Supporting the local economy through green building was not only the right thing to do, but was not a significant extra expense. At the time the wood was ordered the exact cost was unknown, but what Middlebury College did know is that the timber received might actually be of higher quality than was expected. The estimate was that the wood could cost 2-3% more than non-certified wood, but that it could also save the college money."

She goes on to note that after a streak of new green buildings, the school is now focused on adaptive reuse and retrofitting old buildings for efficiency, which is the kind of thing that under-resourced schools, such as Minority-Serving Institutions, community and technical colleges, and the US Department of Education’s Title III and V institutions, which are the primary intended audience for the site, may find most useful.

Virginia takes on Senators Webb and Warner

Jennifer Fournelle — 2009-10-30T09:46:28-04:00

This past weekend at the Virginia Powershift Conference, more than 100 students gathered to take part in the International Day of Climate Action. We joined people from over 180 countries and 5200 events worldwide to show our support for climate leadership and the need to take action to fight climate change. Letters were written to Senators Webb and Warner to encourage them to vote for strong federal climate legislation this fall in the Senate.

Check out all of the 350 International Day of Climate Action photos.

Campus team at VA Power Shift 2009

Kristy Jones — 2009-10-26T10:33:10-04:00

The Virginia Power Shift was hosted at George Mason University this weekend. More than 100 students from VA campuses gathered to speak out for climate legislation and participate in workshops including introduction to anti-oppression and creative action planning and several workshops VA-specific such as Virginia's green economy, working toward environmental justice in Virginia, and understanding VA level environmental policy.

NWF's Campus Ecology team tabled at the event with Virginia Conservation Network (NWF's VA state affiliate), Repower America, and other organizations.

The VA Power Shift gave students the opportunity to learn more about the current climate bill in the Senate, learn about actions they can take as citizens to encourage their state leaders to VOTE YES for climate legislation, and probably one of the best parts of the weekend was meeting like-minded students and making new friends.

George Mason University, located in Fairfax, Virginia, is a green campus and committed to reducing their carbon footprint. GMU's President Alan Merten has signed the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment and their campus sustainability initiatives include purchasing of local foods, recycling, LEED standards for all new buildings, trayless dining, native habitat, and more. Learn more about GMU's commitment to climate leadership at: Office of Sustainability. GMU is also a NWF Campus Ecology member.

Photo credit: Kristy Jones, Naitonal Wildlife Federation

Power Shifts in Michigan

Juliana Goodlaw-Morris — 2009-10-20T20:06:27-04:00

Over 300 young people and students showed up at Lansing last weekend for Power Shift Michigan, an event intended to give activists, students, and community members a chance to take action on climate issues. Power Shift events are also taking place in other states this fall, such as Virginia and Missouri, all following up from the national Power Shift conference and rally that took place at the beginning of the year and brought more than 12,000 young people to the U.S. Capitol.

During a rally on Sunday, October 11th, Michigan students marched to the state capitol, carrying banners which said, “Senators Stabenow and Levin: We Want Bold Climate Action Now” and “Michigan wants Green Jobs Now.” Participants also signed hundreds of post cards and wrote letters to the two Senators, telling them that the youth of Michigan want strong, comprehensive climate legislation in 2009.

Not content with carrying signs, students also incorporated community service projects into the weekend's activities:

A bike co-op was started for the City of Lansing: two days after the conference the Power Shift committee was told that people have already begun to use the co-op for alternative transportation methods
An urban garden was planted that the Michigan State University students will help maintain
GreenNation was launched to address social equity through the green movement

Speakers in attendance included: Jerome Ringo, President of Apollo Alliance; Jessy Tolkan, Executive Director of Energy Action Coalition; Sam Singh, past mayor of East Lansing; Reverend D. Alexander Bullock , NAACP; Congressman Mark Schauer; and Kali Fox, Senator Stabenow’s Regional Manager.

Power Shift Michigan was covered by The Collegiate, Central Michigan Life, BusinessLansing, The State News, WLNS, and The Detroit News. The Power Shift Michigan site also has video uploads and blog entries about the event.

One Minute to Midnight: Educating for Action

Xarissa Holdaway — 2009-10-17T19:55:33-04:00

Responsibility is in the air at this weekend’s Bioneers conference. The attendees are, by and large, concerned about the impact they and their organizations exert on a stressed planet, and perhaps no one feels more culpable than teachers and education leaders.

During yesterday’s Education for Action session, Jim Baizer, science policy advisor at Arizona State University, said, “We work at institutes that are creating future leaders. They are coming up with economies that crash and lose $13 trillion. We are responsible for all these people and all these ideas.”

If higher education’s job is to prepare students for the world ahead, panelists and speakers seemed to suggest, it has so far failed to meet the challenge.

But no one is giving up. Tony Cortese, founder and president of Second Nature, said, “This is the first time in higher education that I’ve seen people saying that we need to be the first to try something and figure it out, rather than wait around and see who else can work it out first. Of course, sometimes when we try to solve a problem, we cause worse problems, because we think too much in the short-term. What we need to do is get people to look at multiple consequences, in an interdisciplinary and long-term way.”

The all-day session included workshop time for small groups, in which 70 or so faculty, administrators and students broke out to devise solutions on their specific campuses, or tell stories of projects that had already demonstrated success. One standout was UC-Santa Cruz, which has been pioneering a project that gets students to spend a semester researching a solution to a problem in their community and presenting the results to university staff.

Crystal Durham, executive director of the California student Sustainability Coalition, said, “We’ve probably saved millions of dollars in consulting fees by using the curriculum. Students run a research-based class that solves a problem. For example, they might say they want more recycling on campus. So they spend a semester working to understand how the local waste management system works, bringing in someone to talk, finding out how the university could make this happen, then at the end of the semester they present their results.” The class gives students real work to do that not only prepares them for their careers and incorporates environmental literacy into the curriculum, but also moves the school towards climate neutrality.

This is the most immediate way to influence students, said participants: the college must walk the walk toward climate-neutrality and involve youth in the process. Most attendees were already familiar with the President’s Climate Commitment, either because their school had signed, or because they were campaigning to get their president on board. More than 650 college presidents have signed, out of the 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S.

The importance of the Commitment, said Cortese, is that it moves beyond the historical segregation of environmental studies from the rest of the university: “When universities have done environmental work historically, what they’ve done is create environmental studies departments, which reach 5% of the students, and create more specialists. What’s great about the PCC is that it moves beyond these models.”

For everyone in the room, moving their institutions towards climate neutrality was a priority. Amber Katherine, a professor of philosophy at Santa Monica College, made the point that schools can no longer ignore the urgency of rising greenhouse gas emissions and increasing water, food, and resource scarcities. “What must we do at one minute to midnight?” she asked. “There is no time left, and excuses aren’t acceptable.”

QOTD: How Sustainability Rankings Influence the University

Xarissa Holdaway — 2009-10-15T15:09:34-04:00

On the heels of our earlier post on sustainability rankings comes this quote from Charlotte Strem, interim director of physical and environmental planning at the University of California's Office of the President:

"Campuses measure profits and other things differently than other organizations, and one of the major metrics is how many students want to come to a university compared to how many can. So, ratings and rankings systems make a fairly big impact: something like 62% of high school graduates say they look at how green a college is when they are investigating schools."

(October 15, 2009, at the Education for Action session of the Bioneers Conference)

New rankings show prominence of sustainability

Xarissa Holdaway — 2009-10-13T13:44:35-04:00

The Sustainable Endowments Institute's new green rankings are out, and there is some good news: With all the focus on sustainability in higher education over the past few years, grades are going up. Just over half of the schools surveyed earned an overall grade of B-, compared to only 38 percent in last year’s report. The average overall grade this year is a C+, but 26 schools received the top grade (A-), including Amherst, Harvard, Pomona, University of Washington and University of New Hampshire.

Like last year, the report comes on the heels of a variety of rating systems. Sierra and Greenopia have their own (less rigorous) versions ranking the Top 20 and the 100 largest, respectively, and AASHE has just launched its STARS tracking system for schools to join. Last year, we released the Campus Report Card, which showed improvement on the operations and facilities side of greening, but a lag in curriculum development.

SEI’s report, now in its fourth year, only covers 300 schools in its ratings, leaving out the other 3700 colleges and universities in the U.S, although 32 new schools petitioned to be added this year and are ranked accordingly. It's worth noting that these 300 schools are chosen not on the basis of extraordinary projects or the extent of their efforts—though many are pack leaders—but on the size of their endowments.

The Institute notes, “The profiled schools have combined holdings of more than $325 billion—approximately 95 percent of all higher education endowment assets. Widespread investment declines have impacted almost all schools, with the Report Card finding average endowment value dropping by 23 percent in the past year.”

Its focus on the endowment is the most useful feature of SEI’s research. That enormous pool of money allows the wealthiest schools to support new research and endeavors that might not otherwise get the funding they need. Harvard, for example, reports that it invests in renewable energy companies, and “allocates a portion of the endowment to private equity and natural resource investments that seed companies and/or ventures that may take environmental and sustainability factors into consideration.”

But highlighting only the wealthiest or the largest schools is fraught with its own issues. As the Chronicle and others have pointed out over the years, sustainability is an extremely difficult thing to track, and an even more difficult thing to grade, particularly when looking at an entire campus. For example, if the college is planning to erect a half dozen new buildings that will certainly increase the energy needs of the campus, even if they are built according to LEED standards, should the school's grade go up or down?

And what about the small schools, lacking in deep pockets but with commitment to spare?

Mitchell Thomashow of Unity College notes the importance of university investment, writing that colleges serve as dynamic economic multipliers, becoming places “where businesses and faculty work with students and community members to develop innovative entrepreneurial approaches.” However, Unity, which received a B on SEI’s report, wasn’t graded on its endowment because it didn’t meet the minimum threshold of $16 million in assets. It also received a D in the transportation category because its 24-car fleet doesn’t include any hybrids, and because “most people walk to their destinations on campus due to Unity’s small size.” Does this mean that Unity's students and staff aren't invested in their community, or that they are emitting more carbon dioxide during their commutes? Quite the opposite. But SEI's system isn't designed to take these small-school factors into account.

The hope is that as sustainability enters the mainstream, expanded systems like STARS will more comprehensively rate these colleges in a way that takes into consideration factors beyond finance, as well as providing a more common standard for measurement. Without those two factors, measuring sustainability won't be possible.

Rudders on the Rudder: Thinking Beyond Master Planning

Xarissa Holdaway — 2009-10-05T11:08:54-04:00

We talk a lot about climate and the environment here at Campus Ecology, but the truth is that long-term sustainability requires more than ecological considerations. If a school is carbon-neutral, but not financially viable, it has failed its mission. Therefore, energy efficiency and other “green” initiatives often have to save the institution money, or at least break even, to be considered at all.

The most common way to gain support for these energy projects is to prove a significant return on investment, and are therefore worthy of being included in the college's master plan. So, articles on campus greening initiatives usually include a summary like this one: an initial investment of $X is expected to pay for itself in Y years, and generate an extra $Z. The numbers often speak for themselves, as in the case of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, which saves 2.26 tons of CO2 emissions per vending machine per year using small devices that turn off the machines when idle. The Vending Misers, which cost $175, pay for themselves in one year by saving about $200 on electricity bills.

It seems like a no-brainer. One of our latest articles, Master Planning for Sustainability, quotes Terry Calhoun of the Society of College and University Planners, who says, "If you did good integrated planning, you would end up with sustainability. Why would you build a building that uses six times as much energy as it has to?"

Unfortunately, this picture is incomplete. The reality of a university’s bureaucracy can often mean that even projects with large and easy paybacks may be ignored, because complex budgeting structures are not designed to reward electricity savings in the facilities department. This may be true even if a comprehensive master plan puts environmental sustainability as an organizational priority. Leith Sharp, writing for Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, notes that, “Even if operating managers do manage to fund efficiency improvements to produce operational savings, they are rarely allowed to capture and reinvest these savings for further improvements. Instead, they will often see next year’s operating funds reduced to reflect this operating cost reduction, hardly a reward for a job well done.”

Sharp, former director of Harvard’s Green Campus Initiative, adds:

"Our institutions freely use the mantra of the “business case” to challenge and scrutinize the viability of anything new without addressing the fact that in many cases the business case is being sabotaged by poorly designed finance and accounting structures. Colleges and universities are incurring enormous additional costs by failing to reform these practices to enable good business practice to flourish … It is not clear how this has evolved, but it occurs in almost all large organizations. This division results in capital budget managers resisting the expenditure of any extra money, even when the operation savings are extraordinary. At the same time, the operating budget managers commonly do not have enough access to funds for ongoing efficiency improvements."

For a problem this complex, master planning is only part of the solution. Sharp goes on to describe the "complex, irrational, and unconscious life of the institution," which sabotages the work of campus sustainability officers and their efforts to bring the campus towards climate neutrality. As examples, she points out energy-purchasing contracts based on volume consumptions (where the unit price of energy goes up when consumption goes down) or steam return-metering. Both systems encourage individual waste, which saves money to a particular building or department, but results in overall system inefficiency.

Harvard was able to make significant progress using a revolving loan model, which funded projects with paybacks of less than five years, and reinvested that money in ongoing upgrades, efficiency projects, metering and behavioral change programs.

But Sharp is aware that this wouldn’t be possible everywhere: Harvard is blessed with more resources than most schools, and a sustainability staff of dozens of people. “The deeper lesson,” she says, “is that we should stop creating the ongoing need for revolving loan funds—by structurally connecting capital and operating budgets and institutionalizing life-cycle costing, a well-established methodology for calculating upfront and future operating costs relating to different decision-making options. I also believe that our organizations should capture and reinvest savings that result from successful resource conservation and waste-reduction efforts as routine practice to fund dedicated annual innovation budgets for financing pilot projects and ongoing efficiency upgrades.”

It’s not exactly a small request. Such redesigning of the university’s essential infrastructure might take years, and it’s a lot harder than installing add-ons to a couple vending machines, or even retrofitting an HVAC system. This doesn’t discourage Sharp. She says, “Over many years, I have observed that the common belief that people are innately adverse to change is not generally true. People are not resistant to change, they are opposed to instability, and they simply assume that change equals instability.”

To achieve this stability, Sharp argues that the sustainability staff need to act as the rudder-on-the-rudder, going beyond simple equations of return-on-investment and discussing the real risks and barriers in play. Only then, she says, can universities bring their carbon footprints “down to an equitable share of what the planet’s life-support systems can support.”

Training for Green Jobs is Crucial for the Clean Energy Transition

Kristy Jones — 2009-09-22T11:40:29-04:00

We just hosted a half day workshop with Jobs for the Future at the Greening of the Campus Conference: Leading for a Sustainable Future: Green Workforce Training.

We wanted to feature the role of community colleges in workforce training, because we feel now (as we did six months ago) that enough attention hasn't been paid to the need for the campus to act as laboratory for green jobs training. The session featured some great speakers and ideas:

Gloria Mwase from Jobs for the Future discussed the opportunities for under-served communities in the new clean energy economy, positioning green jobs as an important pathway out of poverty.
Jay Antle from Johnson County Community College in Kansas helped the audience understand all the different definitions of a green job (and how difficult it is to define a “green job”) and talked about JCCC’s green workforce training programs on sustainable agriculture, energy auditing, and for corporate sustainability officers.
Jennifer Hayward from Lane Community College in Oregon presented on how Lane uses their campus projects for hands-on training opportunities for their students in the workforce training programs.
Ragini Kapadia from the AFL-CIO highlighted best practices in working with unions and presented a couple of campus/union partnerships.
Patrick Fitzgerald from National Wildlife Federation reviewed funding opportunities for campuses committed to providing green workforce training for their students. Patrick also stressed that education and training needs to be supported through the climate bill if a clean energy future is to become a reality.
Finally, Julian Keniry, also from National Wildlife Federation, discussed how campuses can be used as a laboratory for job creation. As campuses construct new green buildings or retrofit existing buildings with more efficient systems, students can be brought into the process to earn hands-on experiences that will help them in their careers.

To learn more about green workforce training: Webinar: Preparing for a Green Workforce - How are community colleges and other campuses preparing their students? November 19 at 2:00pm Eastern. Blog: Green Jobs Central - An overview of U.S. employment in the coming green economy.

Members of the Campus Ecology team are blogging at Greening of the Campus VIII at Ball State University. Kristy Jones is Manager of Campus Climate Education and Action.

An Honor to be Nominated

Jennifer Fournelle — 2009-08-22T12:58:31-04:00

Last night, I attended The Imagen Foundation Awards with Chill Out producer Melinda Esquibel of Mundo Maravilla, director Melissa Balin of the Brookturn Company, and NWF board member Lyvier Conss. (That's them with me and Jose Yenque in the photo at right.) The evening was filled with awards for amazing and talented actors, writers, agents, and a legendary civil rights and social justice leader.

Chill Out was nominated for “Best National Informational Programming” for the positive portrayal of Latinos and Latino culture in the entertainment industry. It's the first webcast to be nominated for this prestigious award, and we were up against four other incredible programs about varying topics. We didn't win, but we were so thrilled to be nominated and attending the ceremony.

A few highlights of the night included meeting Jose Yenque, one of the talented actors featured in the Chill Out webcast. Jose has been a great supporter and was so excited to be a part of our program, as it is such an important issue. We met the beautiful and young actress Caitlin Sanchez, the voice of Dora the Explorer. Tom Cruise surprised everyone by showing up to give one of the awards. Benjamin Bratt, Robert Orci, Jimmy Smits, Judy Reyes, Silvio Horta, Wilmer Valderrama, Department of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and so many more incredible actors, writers, producers and executives were there.

Of all the amazing women attending the awards, one stood out among the rest—national civil rights leader and humanitarian Dolores Huerta. She was being honored with the 2009 President’s Award for her work in social justice. Dolores has been a leader in the community for 50 years, co-founding the United Farm Workers of America and advocating that people transform their lives by becoming leaders in their own communities. The Dolores Huerta Foundation’s mission is to inspire and organize sustainable communities.

The Imagen Foundation Awards was a great time to celebrate the amazing and creative Latinos in entertainment and in the community, and we were honored to be recognized by an organization that supports the same goals as we do: a fair, diverse society that takes care of its people and environment.