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As a warm-up to this year's AASHE conference, I toured Duke University with a group of other sustainability professionals, starting with the swamp.
I imagine most campus visitors don't immediately get dragged out into
the marsh, but the interest on everyone's faces was a visible
reminder that schools aren't just invested in clean energy, but also
in traditional environmental work, such as restoring wetlands. This is particularly true when projects involve students in the process.
The SWAMP (Stream and Wetland Assessment Management Park) project is designed to restore an urban watershed, research several different kinds of wetlands, and purify local water supplies. The work was largely funded by the state of North Carolina because of its positive impact on downstream water quality, with a smaller contribution from the university itself. Students are trained on "real-world restoration techniques, modern hydrologic modeling, and the basic principles of stream, lake, and wetland ecology" as part of their coursework, and they came on the tour with us to answer questions and tell us about the work they've done.
As part of the tour, we also looked at several LEED-Silver campus
buildings, counted bike racks, toured a prototype "smart house," and ate a meal of local food from one of the campus cafes. However, for many people the most memorable part of the day was the morning walk through the woods. One attendee remarked, "I love that students are out here doing the work. That happens at a lot of universities, but not enough. Maybe it needs to be more than just the natural science students."
The idea that students and others on campus need to connect better to their surroundings was a common theme of the conference. Between sessions on eco-literacy, local environmental history projects, campus habitats, and Vandana Shiva's appeal to get people back on the land, almost everybody had something to say.
After Janice Crede started taking small groups of students out to a cabin for a week (no laptops or TVs allowed) for a "Nature Immersion" curriculum she piloted at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, she started seeing results. "We wanted to help students understand a little bit more about their impact on the planet. They have a half-hour biology class each day, then we let them loose to explore the lake, the woods, the bog, before we have some conversations about sustainability and leadership. Everything is outside. We eat dinner by the campfire and stay up too late, and by the end of the week they no longer miss their laptops, and they don’t want to leave."
Surveys and open-ended writing assignments that the students complete before and after the course corroborate Crede's thesis: "What they told me is that they come back and they feel changed in their attitudes, perceptions and behaviors. They feel as if they have a whole new group of people they can relate to."
We are recapping AASHE:
Sustainability on Campus and Beyond as it happens. If you were at the
sessions we're covering, weigh in with your comments below. Or see others'
blogs, photos and Twitter updates on the AASHE live page.
To the surprise of the presenter, Dave Newport of CU-Boulder, this afternoon’s discussion of GHG offsets and Renewable Energy Credits didn’t degenerate into fisticuffs or even a red-faced screaming match. In fact, the discussion was downright welcoming, which is what I’ve come to expect of the attendees of this conference.
Several weeks ago, our feature ClimateEdu article dealt with the different ways that universities and colleges are incorporating renewable energy into their portfolios, whether that’s through installing renewable energy equipment or through purchasing. It’s a touchy issue for most sustainability coordinators, who are intent on conservation, energy efficiency, and on-site generation where possible, but are also coming to terms with the fact that they may not be able to meet their full energy load with such measures. Many schools, in fact, find that they have a large gap to fill, and turn to offset measures to make up the difference.
However, the vagaries of the offset and REC market are still not well understood, even by experts, leading to general suspicion and sometimes outright hostility (which is apparently what Dave Newport expected).
Newport used his own campus as an example as he described the pros and cons of purchasing offsets versus RECs. CU-Boulder, which had been purchasing RECs since 2000 (using funds that students voted to add to their semester fees), switched this year to purchasing offsets through the Colorado Carbon Fund.
Renewable Energy Credits are simply certificates that assure the purchaser that somewhere, a MWh from renewable sources has been produced and fed into the grid. Newport says, “They have some pros, and that’s why we bought them. But we made a mistake, and we oversold them. We told our president that we’re buying wind power, and then when we tried to explain that there’s no big orange extension cord from a wind turbine to our campus, and that actually we don’t know where that energy went to when it got fed into the grid, we caused a lot of problems. We don’t say that anymore.”
While Newport feels that RECs have had their victories, among them increased market demand for renewable energy and the dismantling of some of the geographical barriers to sustainability, the disadvantages of RECs outweigh the benefits. He lists the public perception of REC’s as a ‘sin tax’, the lack of transparency, a poor sense of closure for buyers, and the lack of added value to the initial investment as cons.
Offsets, by contrast, particularly in the community-based model that CU-Boulder is developing, have the potential to not only reduce emissions, but fuel an ongoing movement.
Newport says, “We are focusing on local projects, and doing some of the labor ourselves. You will be able to ride your bike by and see our solar hot water heaters. We have bilingual students going into low-income neighborhoods to help residents weatherize their homes and save some of the energy costs that are disproportionately heavy on them. We’ll have a biomass plant, and new ways to manage transit. All of these things are creating green jobs, keeping local capital local, and are really good for students. And they’re so visible, we get the confidence from investors to keep doing more. It is about reducing carbon, but it’s just as much about improving people’s lives.”
We are recapping AASHE:
Sustainability on Campus and Beyond as it happens. If you were at the
sessions we're covering, weigh in with your comments below. Or see others'
blogs, photos and Twitter updates on the AASHE live page.
In the space of an hour, Vandana Shiva, physicist and agricultural activist, managed to connect the oil and human labor inputs required by modern agriculture, the nutritional deficit of monocrops, the dangers of species loss, the moisture depletion of agro-chemically treated fields, the imbalance of grain that goes to factory farms rather than human mouths, obesity and diabetes, US grain subsidies, biofuels, the 160,000 annual suicides of Indian farmers who are finding the monocrop seeds they purchased won't grow, and the mass exodus of families from heritage land. The coherent case that emerged at the end was simple: "We must get people back on the land."
One of several sustainable food experts that have earned attention in recent years, Shiva is in good company. Michael Pollan, Frances Moore Lappe, and even Jane Goodall have spent years studying the American industrial food systems and come to similar conclusions.
While agricultural yields increased dramatically in the mid-1900's, the soil depletion that has resulted makes farmers even more dependent on intensive chemical fertilizer and water inputs. Not only is this problematic for the farmers who are increasingly sensitive to drought and price fluctuation, but fertilizers based on fossil fuels could very soon become impossible to obtain, if declining oil predictions are correct. The answer, says Shiva, is biodiversity. "The delicacy that small-scale farming requires,
is the delicacy that encourages biodiversity. And biodiversity makes for
healthier food.”
As she spoke, Shiva compared universities—and their status
within their communities—to the recent election, making the case that just as
President-elect Obama will use his advisors to find solutions to the problems facing the nation, "every campus should make its own transition team for food
beyond oil. We can create a food system beyond toxics. Beyond genocide."
In fact, she claimed, food is not only an agricultural issue, but integral to national security and peace. "For me, food is about peace. Peace with nature, peace
between communities, and peace with our own bodies. Because we are at war with
our bodies now, and food has become ammunition."
She went on to say that universities and colleges, who made major strides in the research that based our current agricultural system on fossil-fuel based fertilizers, have a large share of the responsibility for finding a solution."Campuses have a lot of eaters, and a lot of influence in their community. Wouldn't it be exciting if biology classes planted their own biodiversity plots? Why shouldn't edible schoolyards be on every campus?"
Given the intricacies of the global food system, it's no small demand. Shiva’s final comparison drew a laugh from the audience: “Those
guys fiddling with the derivatives that put your economy into this state are
like me, they juggle numbers. But wouldn’t it be amazing if they were juggling
numbers that would make a better system for us?”
Podcast Interview with Vandana
Vandana Shiva: Why Shouldn't Edible Schoolyards Be On Every Campus?
We are recapping AASHE: Sustainability on Campus and Beyond
as it happens. If you were at the sessions we're covering, weigh in
with your comments below. Or see others' blogs, photos and Twitter
updates on the AASHE live page.
Sustainability is rarely defined as a single-entity problem, especially when considering recent economic and political traumas. Gordon Rands of Western Illinois University and Mark Starik of George Washington University argued in one of this morning's sessions that a university's plan for sustainability should be taken far beyond the campus border.
Rands says, "An entity can become sustainable on its own, but it can’t
remain that way." He went on to stress that without a larger context and a fully sustainable climate (environmental or cultural), even the most exciting higher education projects will be unsuccessful.
For example, a green business is unlikely to survive without competitors' willingness to make similar efforts, as their lower costs will cause the eco-minded company to fail. A college, even one running on renewable energy and stable supply systems, could find itself an island without the involvement of the surrounding town. Unless the local channels for food, telecommunications, energy, transportation, medical care, housing, and other provisions are as able to weather a crisis as the university itself, a few wind turbines and even carbon-neutrality will be ultimately meaningless.
Rands and Starik propose, instead, that a holistic view of higher education would work on five levels:
--Ecological: Ensure the viability and environmental-friendliness of the waste systems, products, and energy that support the university.
--Individual: Members of the institution must be invested and participating, whether that's through following a recycling policy, making sustainability knowledge an integral part of the curriculum. or inventing new storage technology for a solar array.
--Organizational: Make sure that your partners support your work, eg. forming strong industrial ecology arrangements or working with your local town for commuting programs.
--Political: Engage in political mechanisms, such as lobbying, trade associations, and media organizations to affect policy and public information.
--Socio-cultural: Use the university's stature in its community to increase the involvement of off-campus citizens and create a broad culture of sustainability.
The idea that a university has an obligation to the wider community is not new, but is usually considered in terms of thought leadership -- research and innovation will eventually trickle down to the populace, even if no direct conversation takes place. However, Rands and Starik suggest that the university itself do more to collaborate with its neighbors, making everyone greener in the process.
Rands says, "This is still on a conceptual basis. At WIU, we've made some operations changes, but that's pretty much it so far. The model, however, started with business and could easily be aimed at government as well. It's just a way to think about all of this."
We are recapping AASHE:
Sustainability on Campus and Beyond as it happens. If you were at the
sessions we're covering, weigh in with your comments below. Or see others'
blogs, photos and Twitter updates on the AASHE live page.
Today's environmentalism has been called a 'Third Wave.' Unlike the conservation ethic of the early 1900s, or the calls for anti-pollution regulation and the mass nostalgia for a more agrarian past in the 1970s, we are now looking at a fully globalized world, in which the decline of one nation would send shockwaves through the rest of the world, due to our linked economies, limited natural resources and shared climate.
Therefore, says Lester Brown, author of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, "Sustainable development is not a sexy term, but a sound concept. You hear a lot about a 'more sustainable this,' or a 'less sustainable that.' But the reality is, we're sustainable or we're not. The only way to avoid decline and collapse is a sustainable economy--a sustainable civilization."
The idea was met with cheers from the audience, a group 1,700 strong from universities and colleges all over the country, most of whom have spent years if not decades trying to make their colleges greener, and their students prepared for a world of rapidly shifting priorities and problems.
In fact, Brown went farther than most, calling for emissions reductions of 80% by 2020, a far more ambitious goal than any politician or even most academics have dared. He claims that actions this drastic might be the only way to save Asian glaciers (which provide the irrigation for vast sectors of the world's grain market) and the Greenland ice sheet. In this new environmentalism, action is no longer just about saving polar bears, but about preserving our own global society.
The question of necessity is no longer on the table. And judging by the enthusiasm of the audience, the question of "how," at least when it comes to higher education, will be the meat of the next two days.
We are recapping AASHE: Sustainability on Campus and Beyond as it happens. If you were at the sessions we're covering, weigh in with your comments below. Or see others' blogs, photos and Twitter updates on the AASHE live page.
The final tally is in from Tufts University's Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). The youth voter turnout was even higher than we posted in yesterday's blog: It increased by 3.3 million over 2004, making it the largest turnout among the Millennial generation (youth, ages 18-29) since 1972. Looking at vote percentages by age group in swing states, it is also apparent that youth helped determine the outcome in most of the states that hung in the balance.
At the same time, the Power Vote pledges are now up to almost 350,000-- equalling about 1/10 ofthe increase in the youth voter turnout. The pledges are not the same as a vote, but they do indicate that the commitment to vote and to hold elected officials accountable for climate leadership, clean energy and green jobs contributed to the overall youth enthusiasm and engagement. The strong turnout at Powershift in fall 2007 and the Power Vote campaign in fall of 2008 signal that youth enthusiasm for clean energy translated to votes. Many wondered-- some doubted-- whether this would be the case and now we know, youth will vote when they have something and someone they can believe in to vote for.
On Tuesday, November 4, millennials became the most powerful voting block in the U.S and among their concerns, according to Power Vote organizers, a non-partisan Get Out the Vote campaign, were clean energy, climate protection and green jobs.
An estimated 22 million millennials (youth, ages 18-29) turned out to the polls-- 2.2 million more than in 2004, according to preliminary findings of the Tufts University Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). Youth voter turnout in 2008 represents an estimated 6% increase over 2004 levels and an estimated 13% increase over 2000 levels. It may be the second highest youth voter turnout since1972 when the eligible voting age was decreased from 21 to 18.
Among the dynamics of the election were the non-partisan efforts to turn out the youth vote such as MTV’s Rock the Vote, the PIRG’s New Voter Project and the Energy Action Coalition’s Power Vote initiative, organized by more than 30 national and regional campus and youth organizations, including the National Wildlife Federation, whose Power Vote team was led by the Federation’s campus field director, Lisa Madry.
The Power Vote campaign, organized on more than 300 campuses, generated 341,127 pledges from youth organizers who promised to vote and to hold whoever was ultimately elected at all levels of government in 2008 accountable for shifting to clean energy and creating millions of new green jobs. The number of pledges collected equals about 1/6 of the total increase in the youth voter turnout in 2008.
The millennial vote may have swung the US election overall. For example, Obama won the youth vote by 50 points in North Carolina, turning the state from red to blue, but lost every other age group in the state. Similarly, in Indiana, Obama won the youth vote 63 to 35, but lost every other age group. Overall, voters chose Obama over McCain by a much narrower margin (52%-46%) than millennials who voted two-to-one (66 to 32%) for Obama.
Mr. Obama has only a few short months to prepare for inauguration and all the challenges that come with it, of which environmental problems are only one piece. In the past, he has called for emissions reductions 80% by 2050, a cap-and-trade market for carbon emissions, higher efficiency standards, investments in renewable energy, and a smarter electricity grid.
As he puts together his staff and his policies, what would you like to
see? What are your priorities for the first 100 days? The first year? A
possible second term? Do you agree with Mr. Obama when he says that this is a time for sacrifice and service? This post is an open thread for you to express your
thoughts, concerns, demands, and yes, hopes.
Here are a few links on Obama's declared goals for our "planet in peril" for you to browse:
The Obama Energy Speech, Annotated: DotEarth
Barack Obama's environmental platform and record: Grist
Obama Hits Hard on Efficiency Themes in Debate: Green Inc.
And some food for thought: To the Next US President, 100 Words for 100 Days
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We had a great time at AASHE: Sustainability on Campus and Beyond, and hope you did as well. The general feeling was one of determination, as members of universities and colleges from all over North America shared ways to make the campus a better model for resilient, sustainable living and extend those strategies beyond the campus borders.
