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.

Day two of the Butte annual sustainability conference opened with a special keynote featuring Ken Grossman, Owner and President of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company – a very popular company with the Butte crowd! Grossman, an alumni of Butte, gave an impressive overview of all the sustainability practices in place at the Brewery, such as the recycling or reusing of almost all waste (99% of waste is diverted from the landfill), using motion sensor lights throughout the buildings, a 10,000 plus panel (solar) structure, and a cattle partnership with Chico State University where the cows are fed spent grain, spent yeast, and even spent beer from the brewing process. The Brewery also captures CO₂ emissions, compressing and cleaning them and using the carbon dioxide as fuel in the dispensing process. Sierra Nevada also has two sustainability coordinators to monitor practices and look for new opportunities.

A second presentation by Dr. Randal Beeman from Bakersfield College, a professor of history, talked about the role of the government in sustainability in history. Dr. Beeman highlighted a couple of ecological crises from the past – the dust bowl and the flooding of the Mississippi and Tennessee river valley in the 30’s. He says the U.S. has always reacted to crisis, instead of preparing for a crisis. The message? Let’s prepare for the warming climate by building a sustainable society –- sustainable homes, campuses and communities with sustainable practices. He emphasized that sustainability, specifically sustainable agriculture, needs to sustain both people and the land and support their regeneration.

Many of the second day sessions focused on green jobs training and opportunities and the role of community colleges. SunPower, a company that designs, manufactures, and delivers solar systems worldwide, hosted a session titled Enhancing Solar Job Training and Solarizing Colleges. Their goal is to partner with community colleges and collaborate by providing support for curriculum and "train the trainer" development, linking colleges with local PV installers, and jointly pursuing federal funding for green jobs training. SunPower has an outdoor learning laboratory to train people on how to install solar PV panels (both on the ground and on the roof) and how to service them. They are hoping more learning labs can be built throughout the state and that community colleges will integrate their use into the curriculum.

Yvonne Christopher, faculty member for construction inspection at Butte College, shared her plans for a 12-building scenario village that will break ground this fall. This village will be built with green features and used for training purposes for local fireman and police, as well as Butte students interested in green building careers and construction.

Butte currently offers courses in energy efficiency and renewable energy, green building technologies and practices, and a green building and LEED certification course.

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

Former President Bill Clinton, at the third annual meeting of the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) in Chicago today, shared valuable perspectives on investing in large-scale building retrofits for efficiency and clean energy on campuses, including the possibility of significantly contributing to the creation of the new, green jobs needed to revive the U.S. economy.

Efficiency retrofits and clean energy on campus, he noted, will create significantly more new jobs than comparable spending on fossil fuels in coming years. A single campus, such as Cornell University, may invest up to a gross $150 million over the next 30 years to achieve its greenhouse gas reduction goals, according to Joseph Grasso, Cornell’s assistant dean for finance and administration. Using the U.S. government’s job creation estimate of $92,000 per job created, Cornell’s investment will not only achieve a net energy savings over time, especially when new regulations require internalizing the cost of carbon emissions, but could create more than 1,500 new jobs in the region.

If all 650 signatories to the ACUPCC agreement invested only 1/3 as much as Cornell, the ACUPCC signatories would collectively represent a $30 billion jobs creation powerhouse, while reducing net energy costs and pollution on campuses and in surrounding community.

How to finance such investments? A new guide to be released soon by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) will detail a range of financing strategies for energy efficiency retrofits and clean energy projects on campuses.

Julian Keniry is reporting from the Climate Leadership summit, a three-day conference focused on implementing ACUPCC commitments, organized by Second Nature along with the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) and eco-America.

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?

A recent Chronicle post about Sierra magazine drew a lot of commenter ire, including a nasty call for Scott Carlson, the writer of the piece, to be reassigned to the obituary column. Several of these commenters seemed to take offense at what they perceive as an anti-sustainability bias, as if Scott has his laptop plugged into the A/C adaptor in an idling Hummer, cackling as he pricks holes in the reputations of well-intentioned universities.

I can tell you from personal experience that Commenter Dan couldn't be farther from the truth, and that Scott's high standards come from a real desire for better practices in the way we build, manage, and teach at our universities. In the Sierra piece, it means he poked a little at their incomplete research. Other times, when talking about sustainability, that means he refrains from cheerleading to point out the incredible distance left to go, or perhaps even cries foul from time to time. If only more environmental reporters looked so thoroughly: corn ethanol, anyone? Unfortunately, good journalism is all too easy to denigrate, and far more difficult to do.

All this is to say that I love Scott's latest piece in the Chronicle: an appeal for a better, more holistic look at green building in general and on campuses in particular. He says:

The new star architecture would strive for "living building" status, a grail for the architecture profession. It would be made of recycled, nontoxic, and renewable materials. It would produce more energy than it uses. It would recycle rainwater and waste in a closed loop. It might even provide microhabitats for animal and plant life. In short, it would contribute to, rather than take from, the resources around us.

Moreover, it would be a building that teaches about natural systems, building systems, and a groundbreaking style of design—lessons that should be part of every college curriculum these days.

Indeed, Scott. Indeed.

Students at Stony Brook University’s new Southampton campus will help determine building design, campus energy decisions, cafeteria fodder and waste systems, as well as their own coursework, as part of an interesting real-time experiment on the intersection between university curriculum and operations.

Three new majors, available for the first time this fall, aim to give students a thorough grounding in the kinds of fields they will encounter in the sustainability world: ecosystems and human impact; environmental design, policy and planning; and sustainability studies. A recent article in the New York Times cites the interdisciplinary nature of every Southampton offering; for example, “a course that deals with endangered species could draw on climate change and land use as well as literature, with a reading of Moby Dick. The goal is to create a synergy of science and humanities, engineering and literature, statistics and poetry, all in the same syllabus."

Perhaps most importantly, the program invites students to participate in the management of their own campus. Students get to join committees to decide which speakers come, how to design new buildings, and what vegetables are grown in the greenhouse and provided to the cafeteria, and how to go paperless where possible.

It's an interesting experiment, and we're curious to see how much the subjects that students choose to study in the classroom will influence the decisions they make for the university. 

Here's another trend-skimming piece for you: this Los Angeles Times article highlights more than a dozen schools building green. If you already know a lot about LEED, geothermal and recycled countertops, you won't find anything revolutionary here. However, it's worth a quick read for the mentions of triple bottom line (for people, planet and profit, as put by LPA, Inc. designer Glenn Carels) and the photos of East Los Angeles College's new solar installation, which provides 1.9 million kilowatts to the campus annually.

Also note the observed effects of building green on student enrollment: "At Mills College in Oakland, the new Natural Sciences building is 90% more energy-efficient than most Bay Area laboratories. After prospective students received letters and tours highlighting the building, applications noting interest in environment and science studies spiked, said Giulietta Aquino, dean of undergraduate admissions."

Several posts over at the Buildings & Grounds blog have caught our eye recently for their focus on environmental initiatives on campus. Part of The Chronicle of Higher Education's site, this frequently-updated blog covers architecture, design, new technologies and construction, landscaping, and of course, sustainability.  (Full disclosure: I was May's guest blogger, so a couple of these posts are from me.) Check them out below:

Organic Gardening at Furman University : James Wilkins, sustainability coordinator at Furman, guides the Chronicle through a small garden designed to teach students about sustainable agriculture.

Conserving Water at Emory University: Emory's new rainwater collecting system is controversial enough that city planners have required that the water be dyed blue.

Tweaking Won't Assure Sustainability, But Reimagining Might: One of my guest posts takes a closer look at ASU's Biodesign Institute.

Education Is the Ultimate Carbon-Neutral Solution: This post from Clean Air--Cool Planet's Anne Stephenson examines the role of universities in creating aware, environmentally-educated citizens.

Save Energy or the Bear Gets It: A student project at Dartmouth encourages energy conservation with a real-time monitor of electricity usage in the dorms. Residents team up to keep the bear off "thin ice!"

Should a Liberal Education Include an Agricultural Education?: Teaching students about agriculture is another way to teach them about the world and their unique place in it.

Time to Roll Up Our Sleeves: My final post addresses the nature of symbols within the environmental movement, and a new way of thinking about sustainability.

    As the possibility of carbon-capping legislation becomes more likely and investments in renewable energy increase, the demand for "green-collar" workers will rise. All three presidential candidates endorse the creation of green jobs, and the RAND corporation recently estimated that as many as five million new jobs could be created by producing 25% of energy in America from renewable sources. North America -- and the rest of the world-- will need architects trained in green building, engineers who can create better transportation and rail infrastructure, energy experts who can work with geologists and atmospheric scientists to generate renewables, and agriculturists who can use land more effectively to support our communities with the least possible impact on ecosystems.

    To cope with these demands, schools like Nova Scotia Community College (a Canadian college encompassing 13 campuses) are instituting programs designed to "master the art of creating customized energy systems that include solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, tidal and alternative renewable sources." NSCC's Energy Sustainability Engineering Technology program (ESET) is quite a mouthful, but will go a long way towards training graduates in green practices. Designed for working tradesmen that now need additional skills, the two-year program will qualify graduates to audit energy systems and recommend the best alternative energy sources for new or existing properties. Green buildings on the NSCC campus (currently pending LEED-certification) will give students the chance to see sustainable building practices in action.

So often, discussions of sustainability restrict themselves to liberal arts classrooms and recycling clubs, so we're excited to see real-world training being offered at trade schools and community colleges.

Hillsborough Community College is going for gold: Gold LEED, that is, at a new campus in Tampa Bay's SouthShore community. Constructed with recycled steel, outfitted with efficient daylight-monitoring lights, and bordered by a lagoon to collect rainwater for irrigation and plumbing, the small campus is expected to save 80% of its water costs and about $156,000 on lighting and utility bills. While certification is still under review, the college is confident that the buildings will qualify, as they were designed and built around the Gold guidelines. The three buildings will house classrooms, administrative offices, a nursing lab and a student union center when they open this summer.

Even better, HCC's President Gwendolyn Stephenson has committed to aligning every new construction or renovation project with U.S. Green Building Council guidelines, including an additional three buildings for the SouthShore campus. She says, "Colleges have to be thoughtful stewards of our planet's natural resources. We have a role in educating the public. I think we have to be role models."