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

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

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

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

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

The final event of Power Shift, which took place on a snowy, below-freezing day in Washington, DC, drew thousands of students to the Capitol for pre-scheduled visits to members of Congress.

Christopher Applegate, a Missouri transplant now attending the University of Oklahoma, said that his state has been underrepresented, so he came with a group of ten people to speak with Senator Coburn and Senator Inhofe.

"The biggest issue we’re facing is that they’re trying to get some nuclear energy and some coal plants put up, but Oklahoma already has 708 MW of wind energy and another 126 going on the grid this year, so we're looking for ways to transition to more of that," said Applegate. "Oklahoma has already voted down one coal plant and through grassroots organizing we got rid of another one." He noted that the University of Oklahoma has announced that it will be completely powered by wind energy by 2013.

Lindsay Randall, a graduate of Purchase College in NY who now works as the school's Environmental and Sustainability Coordinator, said, "“It’s incredible, there are 12,000 people here at Power Shift, and that’s just the people who could afford tickets, who could take the time off school. It’s just a fraction of the people who wanted to be here."

The 11 students who came with Randall, most in environmental studies, art and business, went to a meeting with Senator Gillibrand's environmental staffer, Ben Rosenbaum. "When she was Congresswomen, she was a co-sponsor of the state climate act, so we look forward to working with her. I think she’ll be supportive, and that we’re going to be able to make some good progress with her," she said.

Purchase College, a signatory of the President's Climate Commitment, recently completed its greenhous gas inventory. "We're looking at reductions right now," said Randall. "The students are going to be more involved. They learned skills here to organize on campus, and we’re going to do a lot more activism and awareness of federal legislation. We have a really strong non-violent action group on campus, and they’re going to do more."

After the rally and visits were over, many left not for home, but for a protest that ended up at the Capitol coal plant. Carrying signs advocating everything from a no-coal economy to green jobs, students from Power Shift joined groups from Greenpeace, the Chesapeake Climate Action network and other organizations. As they walked, the group of more than 2,500 protestors passed a rival protest from coal supporters that had attracted fewer than 20 people.

Several days earlier, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had announced that the U.S. Capitol Power Plant would be switched to burn only natural gas, a transition that will require significant retrofitting to the equipment that produces 35% of the plant's output from coal. No timeline for this transition has been determined.

During lunch on Saturday, I went from table to table to ask groups of students why they had come to Power Shift and what they were hoping to gain.

Two high school students from Lehman Alternative Community School in Ithaca, NY, were sitting with a friend of theirs who now attends college in Oberlin, OH. Younger than many of the attendees, they were deep in a discussion of the high-speed rail funding in the recently-passed stimulus bill when I interrupted.

At the Lehman school, which brought 16 students to Power Shift, environmental issues are not new. Miroslav Azis, 17, said, "I was at Bioneers By the Bay in October, and I thought it was an amazing experience. My ecology class back at school picked up on this and thought we should go to Power Shift. It’s great to meet people here who are like-minded. We’re still high school students, so we’re drawing a lot from those who are in college, who have already taken economics and other classes, and can talk about it in the workshops."

Lukas Friga, also 17, interjected. "I’m not the most active person in terms of political stuff, but I’m getting a lot out of the workshops that are more about information. I want to go into international relations, so the panels on what’s going to happen at Copenhagen are really interesting to me." He went on to describe other workshops he wanted to attend, most of which were academic in nature, rather than personal. Avis agreed that "there aren't any workshops on how to 'be green.' They're on what issues come up in making green things happen."

When asked what they were planning to take away from the conference, all three said that they hoped they would be better at talking to people who might not be interested in mingling with the environmentalists and social-justice advocates at Power Shift. "This is more of a cultural gathering than anything else," said Friga. "But we need to be able to pull in everyone. Hopefully, we can learn the skills here to go back and talk to the people that don’t want to hug trees. If you say, I know this area is losing jobs, what if you were all to work in x, y, z that’s more sustainable? That’s going to hit a lot more. You don’t want to be a treehugger, you want to be able to say that your ideals have all these logical supports to them, and that’s what we’re here to learn."

Miriam Rothenberg, who attended Lehman last year but now goes to college in Ohio, felt strongly that the impact of Power Shift wouldn't be felt this weekend, but as students dispersed to their separate schools. "There are a lot of people on my campus that are apathetic," she said. "But here I feel like we’re really a force. We have the numbers, and we have the drive, and we have the science to back us up. We all have different backgrounds, but there’s a sense of drawing together to be one unified movement, and then going back out to make all of this happen."

Power Shift, a conference and lobby event that aimed to bring 10,000 young people to the Capitol to take action on climate change and environmental degradation, took a turn for the socially-aware at last night's opening keynote speeches.

Almost 12,000 t-shirted twenty-somethings filed into the hall, sometimes breaking out into spontaneous cheers or songs. About 2,000 more people had registered than Jessy Tolkan and other members of the Energy Action Coalition had hoped, and they filled the room to capacity. Buses were unloading more groups from colleges and youth groups all over the country until just before the session opened. The event is being cited as the largest gathering on climate change and clean energy in the history of the US; more people are in attendance here than were at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali in December 2007.

For a group that considers itself the most tolerant and most diverse environmental movement in the nation, it was no surprise that opening speakers didn't restrict their remarks to increasing atmospheric CO2 or ocean acidification. Instead, Lisa Jackson of the EPA, Ken Salazar of the Department of the Interior, Majora Carter, Mayor Rocky Anderson, Van Jones, Clayton Thomas-Muller and others elaborated on the idea that environmental work cannot be delegated to any one group, nationality or ethnicity.

Majora Carter, an environmental activist from the South Bronx who has spent years on a "Greening the Ghetto' campaign, told stories of the pollution in the neighborhoods where she grew up, and the diabetes, asthma, and other health problems caused by manufacturing and energy plants in the Bronx. "Our pollution-based economy is built on the subsidies on the health of poor people," she said. She urged the audience to put a stop to mountaintop coal removal and other community-harming sources of fuel, to meet opponents with love and companionship, and find safe, fair work for those currently employed in coal or other industries. "Environmental justice," she said, "is civil rights for the 21st century."

Overwhelmingly, the crowd signaled their commitment to working with government and other organizations to find solutions to climate problems. One of the loudest cheers of the night went to Ken Salazar, who promised that the Department of the Interior would "appoint thousands of young people to restore America. We'll have the best youth conservation corp the world has ever seen!"

Van Jones also noted the importance of "adding to the world" rather than taking things out of it. "If all we do is take away the dirty powers in the system and stick a solar panel on it, but don't deal with our water, or the way we treat each other, we'll have biofueled bombers, and be fighting over lithium for the batteries," he said. "We can be locusts or we can be honeybees," he finished. "Will our work be a scourge on this planet or a blessing on this generation?"

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.

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.

In case you haven't heard, Al Gore addressed students across the country tonight in a live webcast from the Energy Action Coalition and the PowerVote campaign, asking young people to continue the work they're doing to change the way we think about and use energy, and make climate issues the driver of their vote in this election.

It's a short broadcast (less than 30 minutes), but one worth watching, especially if you haven't heard Gore weave together the economic, energy, and climate crisis.

Watch the Gore-Cast

Since its launch, WorldChanging has been known for its innovative and game-changing solutions, and this week they're having a look at colleges and universities.

The feature on School Sustainability is worth a look, as it breaks down some good choices for study in Environmental Law, Sustainable Engineering Conservation Biology, and other sustainability-focused programs both in the US and abroad. There's even a (very short) discussion of "Generation-E," which we've addressed before, student activism, and a quick note on the race between colleges themselves in becoming sustainable as institutions. 

While I'm sure a few more posts are coming down the pipeline in the next few days, so far I think the undergrad and grad school listings are the most valuable, particularly for students looking for top-tier training in environmental work. Deeper analysis of institutional sustainability can be found all kinds of places, and youth activism, whatever its stripe, is nothing new around here.

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Speaking of campus activism, have you signed the PowerVote pledge yet? Nothing scary (you're not signing away your future children, I promise), it's just a way to show your commitment to clean energy in the looming election.

With the new semester starting, opportunities abound for students interested in putting their screenwriting and film skills to work:

Climate Matters: Inspire Your Next President

These 30 or 60 second short videos must relate to climate change and not to the support of or opposition to any candidate for public office or any political party. Brighter Planet and 1Sky have teamed up with Vimeo to host the contest, and judges include Maggie Gyllenhaal, David Jenkins and Tia Lessin. Winners receive a cash prize the screening of their video on various sites and events. Deadline: September 22, 2008

Vulnerability Exposed: Social Dimensions of Climate Change

The Social Development Department of the World Bank is looking for micro-documentaries (2-5 minutes) on how climate change affects people's lives and communities around the world, especially in developing countries, and on what can be done to reduce their vulnerability and build climate resilience. Categories include Conflict, Urban Space, Social Policy, Migration, Gender, Human Rights, and others. There is a category for Youth entrants (24 and under) and a general category.Winners will receive an all expenses paid trip to Washington, DC, for a screening of their film and a series of networking and learnign events with the World Bank id December 2008.  Deadline: October 24th, 2008 

Building Dashboard Student Contest

Lucid will award its Building Dashboard to a U.S. or Canadian college or university whose student-led team submits the best YouTube video (3-10 minutes) demonstrating a creative initiative that engages people to conserve energy and resources and how a Building Dashboard® would benefit those efforts. Winners receive a Building Dashboard which can track energy usage in up to three buildings for their campus. Deadline: October 24, 2008

Voices and Visions from the Next Generation of Conservationists

The National Council on Science, Policy and the Environment is seeking short videos (up to 5 minutes) focusing on how today’s youth are and will be addressing the challenges that threaten biodiversity. Entrants must be aged 12-25. Winners will receive one complimentary registration to the NCSE conference in Washington DC, a pass to Disney’s Animal Kingdom, and select winners will have their video displayed during the 2009 DC Environmental Film Festival. Deadline: Oct 31, 2008

Chill Out: Campus Solutions to Global Warming

Show the world how you are confronting global warming on campus: create a three minute video about an initiative, project or campaign going on on campus or in the surrounding community and share it with the world. NWF's Campus Ecology sponsors the competition, and winners will be awarded grant money and a spot in Chill Out, our national broadcast in April 2009. Deadline: November 30, 2008