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.”

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)

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.  

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.”

Butte College’s 3rd annual sustainability conference opened with a welcome from the school’s president, Dr. Diana Van Der Ploeg. Her speech exhorted attendees to remember that sustainability is as much a national security issue as an environmental one, and that the shift is necessary for society.

Speaking to the 250 conference attendees here in Oroville, California, Dr. Ploeg described her work at Butte, managing a 928-acre campus (80 acres is reserved for farm use, and there is also a wildlife refuge) and serving approximately 20,000 students a year. The college, located on a wildlife refuge, is committed to sustainability - it uses LEED metrics in all building projects, is powered by 50 percent renewable energy, and incorporates sustainable practices into many other areas of the campus. Dr. Ploeg drives a Prius to the office every day.

Dr. Ken Meier, Butte’s Vice President of Student Learning & Economic Development, also presented, and touched on Butte’s culture of change that focuses on three primary aspects: social equity, environmental stewardship, and economic development. He says a fourth needs to be added – community. He says the role of the American community college is to work with and engage the community, and to serve as an example. “Sustainability it not possible without community involvement,” he said.

The first day of the conference featured speakers from Ohlone College, the Los Angeles Community College District, San Mateo Community College, Bakersfield College, and Co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Price Dr. Woodrow W. Clark II was the afternoon keynote speaker, presenting “On Climate Change and the Future.” 

One of the favorite presentations came from an Ohlone graduate, currently a student at UC Berkeley, on eco-behavior, hoping to answer the question – what does it take to change people’s behavior? Maria Javier surveyed several groups of students, finding that:

• The environment in which a person grows up seems to have a huge impact on how a person lives as an adult. For example, a student surveyed that grew up in Ohio, in a community that had a strong conservation ethic, was a better steward of the environment as an adult than other students surveyed that grew up in communities without a strong conservation ethic.
• Laziness or perceived threats to “luxury of life” are common reasons why people don’t behave in sustainable ways.
• If behavior is going to change, education is vital, we need government policies that enforce sustainable practices, and economic incentives or disincentives need to be instituted.

Maria also highlighted a site on eco-behavior, Fostering Sustainable Behavior – Community-based Social Marketing, which consists of five resources for those working to foster sustainable behaviors in conservation, energy efficiency, transportation, waste reduction, and water efficiency.

After a day packed full of presentations, attendees had the opportunity to tour the sustainable fields at Lundberg Family Farms.

Kristy Jones is reporting from the 3rd Annual Butte College Sustainability Conference, in Oroville, California.

This week marks the first edition of AASHE's Global Edition of the Bulletin. Alongside ClimateEdu, the Bulletin is one of the best sources of news on the campus sustainability scene, but until now has only covered stories in the US and Canada. The new international version will be released twice a year, sent by email for free to subscribers of the existing Bulletin.

The first issue, released yesterday, covers such topics as green building awards in Dubai and Ho Chi Minh City, as well as student projects in Sydney and biodiesel parks in India.

See More:

Shanghai Calling: International Collaboration for Sustainability

Youth Activists Vocal at Climate Talks in Poznan, Poland

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

A new article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (sub. req.) profiles a minority trend that could, if economic conditions persist, become a majority problem.

Scott Carlson reports that "about 25 percent of the colleges that should have turned in their greenhouse-gas reports in September are still delinquent. Of the colleges that had a deadline in January, nearly half have yet to file."

The American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, which has more than 600 signatories, commits schools to working towards climate neutrality, and the first step in that process is creating a public greenhouse gas inventory. As Carlson points out, it is a difficult requirement, but an easier one than those following, which include creating an emissions reduction plan, carrying it out, and integrating sustainability education into the university's curriculum.

However, between budget shortfalls and shifting priorities, many schools have failed to create or publish their emissions report, and some, like the College of Alameda in California, seem to have forgotten entirely. Many of the delinquent schools are small institutions with fewer resources or shrinking enrollments, for whom large investments in sustainability were always a stretch:

"Mr. King says Cabrillo [College] may have to postpone plans for some renewable-energy projects, like solar panels, that require upfront investment. The college has plans for a new building that would be certified platinum in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, but budget concerns may require the college to shoot for a lower certification instead."

Many of the schools that have yet to create an inventory report that their philosophy remains unchanged, and that sustainability remains an important part of the agenda, even in difficult times. The article also notes that supporting organizations, such as Clean Air -- Cool Planet and AASHE, are continuing to reach out to schools that are lagging and provide resources.

But what of the other 75%, who have reported their emissions and are now (presumably) writing their climate action plans? The Chronicle notes in a different story that Butte College, a small, two-year institution in Northern California, has just added three new solar arrays to its existing panels from 2005. The beefed-up system will generate 2.7 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, and is expected to save the school $32.6 million on utility bills in the next 20 years.

{Julian's rundown of the best and worst of 2008 was so good we had to repost it here. Add your own nominations in the comments section below.}

Campus Highlights and Lessons for the New Year

With presidents leading the way, campuses shifting to solar energy, record level participation in national education campaigns and students turning out en masse to vote, 2008 was a banner year for campus sustainability.

To sustain this momentum in the coming years and achieve real reductions in pollution on campus, however, we will need more support for faculty and stronger state and federal leadership. Here are our best and worst picks for 2008:

Best:

Presidents Stepped Up

By December 2008, six hundred and five college and university presidents in every state of the U.S. had signed the American College and University President's Climate Commitment (ACUPCC). These courageous leaders committed their institutions to doing what the world's scientists urge is necessary: achieving climate neutrality by or before 2050. Although most of these commitments were secured in 2007, the real push to implement the commitment began in 2008 with most of the signatories submitting greenhouse gas inventories and taking immediate steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Many have also begun to develop climate action plans, setting target dates and interim milestones for becoming climate neutral. In the future, the signatories have agreed to integrate sustainability into the curriculum and to make their action plans, inventories and progress reports publicly available. Credit for this outstanding leadership is due to Dr. Anthony Cortese and his group, Second Nature, as well as to AASHE and Eco-America, and of course, first and foremost, to the presidents themselves. 

Butte Threw Down the Gauntlet

As she accepted Butte College's grand prize in the 2008 National Chill Out Competition, President Diana Van Der Ploeg explained, "Our goal is to be climate neutral by 2010 and I know that is ambitious, but I think we can do it." The two-year community college in Oroville, CA announced in 2008 that it had devised a plan to reduce its direct emissions of carbon dioxide by 100% by 2015 without relying on carbon credits. Photovoltaic (solar electric) panels, which currently generate about 28% percent of the campus' electricity needs, will be expanded to meet all campus electricity needs within the next several years. Butte is also successfully moving more than a thousand commuters out of their cars into the largest community college transportation system in California while integrating sustainability into its curriculum.

Students Voted for Clean Energy

More Millennials (youth, ages 18-29) turned out to vote this year than anytime since 1972 and it appears that the prospect of clean energy and green jobs were part of the draw. By election day, the Energy Action Coalition's Power Vote campaign had generated almost 350,000 pledges from students and other youth who promised to vote and to hold decision makers at all levels of government accountable for shifting to clean energy and creating millions of new green jobs. The number of pledges collected equals about 1/10 of the total increase in the youth voter turnout in 2008, providing a signal that youth enthusiasm for clean energy not only translated to votes, but helped determine the outcome in most of the swing states in the presidential election. 

We Engaged at Record Levels

The higher education community engaged at record levels in national sustainability initiatives in 2008. According to event organizers' tallies, 1,365,250 students, faculty and staff at approximately 2,100 college and universities (that's more than half of all colleges and universities in the country) participated in a range of events focused on advancing sustainability and climate action. The largest event by far (and the largest ever of its kind that we know of in the US on sustainability and climate action) was the Focus the Nation teach-in (now known as the National Teach-In) held on January 30, 2008 with an estimated one million participants at 1,900 campuses. Other record-breakers included the National Campus Chill Out Competition Earth Day Awards Broadcast (13,550 participants at 330 campuses made it the largest campus sustainability and climate action awards program in the U.S.) and the AASHE conference (1,700 participants from 400 campuses made it the largest higher education sustainability conference held to date and one of the largest campus environmental conferences held in two decades). If you add the 350,000 pledges collected by the Energy Action Coalition during Power Vote, involvement levels in 2008 swell to more than 1.7 million.

Worst:

Faculty Not Keeping Pace

While many college presidents have committed their institutions to bold action to address climate change, few faculty have caught up with the vision and management of their campuses. A national study, Campus Environment 2008, conducted by Princeton Survey  Research Associates International for the National Wildlife Federation at 1,068 campuses concluded that little if any progress has been made in educating students for sustainability since the study was first conducted in 2001. At only a minority of schools, for example, have fifty percent or more of the students taken a course on the basic functions of the earth's natural systems and even fewer have taken courses on the connection between human activity and environmental health. Areas such as business, engineering and teacher education still lag far behind the natural and physical sciences in offering environmental or sustainability courses within their disciplines. Part of the reason for this may be that only a minority of campuses have program to support faculty professional development on environmental or sustainability topics and an even smaller minority formally evaluate or recognize how faculty have integrated sustainability topics into their curriculum. Dr. Jean MacGregor's Curriculum for the Bioregion Initiative -based at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington-is one of the leaders in bringing faculty from multiple institutions together to develop best practices for educating for sustainability within and among diverse disciplines.

States Slowed Innovation

While it is important to work towards effective federal legislation to curb GHG emissions in the U.S., there is much that can be done at the state level to boost innovation. Unfortunately, many states are missing these opportunities. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, as of 2008, only 24 states and the District of Columbia have renewable portfolio standards (RPS) in place that require power generators to generate a specific percentage of renewable energy by specific dates. Campus renewable energy programs in states with strong REPS thrived this year, but their counterparts in other states were at a comparative disadvantage, including campuses in states with non-binding standards (Illinois, Virginia, Vermont and Missouri) and in states with no renewable portfolio standards at all (Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wyoming).

Communities Remained Gridlocked

A handful of campuses all across the U.S., including Colorado University, the University of Montana, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Washington have begun to demonstrate ways to effectively move students, faculty and staff out of single-occupant vehicles into more sustainable transit options. The vast majority of campuses, however, remained gridlocked in 2008. The Campus Environment 2008 study revealed that a select few schools offered free or discounted bus or public transit passes, carpooling or vanpooling programs, or other incentives not to drive alone in 2008.As we seek solutions in 2009 and beyond, Will Toor and Spenser W. Havlick's book, Transportation and Sustainable Campus Communities (Island Press, 2004) provides an excellent blueprint for developing greener transportation plans, transit systems, fleets and more and Toor's article, "The Road Less Traveled," in Walter's Simpson's new book, The Green Campus: Meeting the Challenge of Sustainability (APPA, 2008) provides additional insights.

Fossil Fuels Reigned

Although the anecdotal evidence of campuses generating clean power on site or purchasing carbon credits or renewable energy certificates is mounting, fossil fuels remained by far the dominant source of energy in 2008. Eighty-six percent of schools generated no renewable energy on-site in 2008 at all for heating or cooling; less than 8% purchased renewable energy certificates or carbon credits to promote cleaner energy from off-site sources; and less than 12% used wind, solar electricity, biomass or other clean sources on site to generate electricity. At carma.org, where it is possible to look up college and university power plants, it is surprising how many campuses, even with robust and visible sustainability programs, are running plants that emit comparatively large amounts of greenhouse gases, using coal and other relatively polluting fuel mixes.  Many of these campus plants are listed as planning to produce similar or greater CO2 output in the future and none indicated a planned reduction.

To Conclude:

Ultimately, a dramatic collective reduction in campus global warming pollution was not the headline this year, but we made considerable progress. Between hundreds of thousands of student pledges to hold elected officials accountable for clean energy and green jobs, a massive teach-in on global warming solutions, and hundreds of presidents' climate commitments, 2008 signaled a wide-spread understanding that global warming is a real problem, requiring a willingness to set what seem like nearly impossible goals in order to quickly cap and begin to reduce concentrations of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere.

Confucius said, "When it is obvious the goals cannot be reached, don't adjust the goals, adjust the action steps." President Diana Van Der Ploeg of Butte College and hundreds of other college and university presidents all across the country have signaled a willingness to do just that, aiming towards climate neutrality with the hard work ethic and inventive spirit that represents the best of what we have been and can be as a nation.

As part 2 of last week's post on college sustainability rankings, here's a little more information on the Sustainable Endowment Institute's newly issued Green Report Card.

The Sustainable Endowments Institute relies heavily on a small core of schools for its College Sustainability Report Card: "colleges and universities with the 300 largest endowments in the United States and Canada, representing more than $380 billion in endowment assets, or more than 90 percent of all university endowments."

While 300 is only a small fraction of American colleges and universities (about 13%), the study is designed to examine how schools are using their endowments to work towards sustainability, NOT to rank general sustainability trends. (For a more general overview of trends in higher education, have a look at NWF's Campus Environment 2008 report, which covered more than 1,000 schools of all sizes and types.)

That said, there are a few obvious patterns among the schools who participated. In the good news category, two of every three schools that were evaluated in 2008 and 2009 have improved their scores, with more than four out of five improving since their 2007 rating.

Also good, a majority (66%) of these schools have full-time staff dedicated to sustainability efforts on campus, and most have signed the ACUPCC or made a commitment to massive carbon reductions. Green building, local food purchases, recycling and alternative transportation projects are on the rise. And most importantly for the SEI, endowment transparency and investments in renewable energy are increasing at many schools.The list of all-star schools shouldn't surprise anyone: Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Dartmouth, Middlebury, Oberlin, Stanford and and University of Colorado are a few of the top 15, and they well deserve the recognition.

Of course, there are still a few F's among the accolades, some going to schools such as Brigham Young University, Howard University and Hillsdale College, which did not respond to the survey. While the F doesn't mean that these schools don't have any green efforts -- for example, BYU does have a recycling program and student eco-clubs -- it does mean that those efforts are not obvious enough for SEI to track them without the school's involvement, and that the school hasn't yet made it a priority to lead by example. Because the report is intended to rank the schools with the largest endowments, a school's non-participation didn't exempt it from inclusion, as with other sustainability-tracking reports.

Perhaps one of the most refreshing things about this particular report is its web navigability. The site, which is hosted outside SEI's, is designed to be a destination for the competing schools, who can pull up side-by-side comparison charts between any set of schools to compare factor by factor, or year by year. Rather than presenting results in document form, the site makes it easy to move from school to school and filter summaries.

As we and others have discussed before, the plethora of ranking systems raises difficult questions. How do independent organizations weight initiatives that have varying levels of effect on climate and CO2 emissions? Should curriculum shifts or operations changes be prioritized? Is it unfair to favor administration-led changes and ignore small-scale, grassroots involvement? Or should the programs that cut the most carbon be our primary goal? How do we address globalization concerns and find the balance between social justice and the need for open markets? What about habitat, biodiversity, and water quality?

In my (mostly unqualified) opinion, it seems we have a long way to go towards a holistic and healthy relationship with our natural surroundings, as well as the fuels, industry and machinery which have provided such unprecedented educational opportunity. However, I also think that a certain amount of gratitude is in order for the hard work of university presidents and administrators, students, faculty, reporters, researchers, conservation organisations, and supporting nonprofits, which are finally getting some of the attention they deserve.