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Sustainability is about more than recycling at top colleges By Monika Joshi

One Indiana school is not only drilling its students on academics, but it's also drilling holes in its campus to tap geothermal

energy. A Vermont college is into burning wood chips as a way to save money. What they share is a passion for environmental sustainability — operating in a way that uses renewable fuels and tries to

save money in the process. Interest in sustainability is particularly strong on college campuses. Princeton Review, in partnership with the U.S. Green Building Council, is out this week with its 2012 Guide to 322 Green

Colleges and finds in a separate survey that 68% of more than 7,000 college applicants told them that a college's commitment to the environment would play a role in their decision to apply to or attend that school. The guide can be downloaded at princeton - review.com.green-guide or centerforgreenschools.org/greenguide.

Further, the number of projects on campuses that have earned Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, a testament to their environmental attributes, has surpassed the total number of colleges.

"Universities are spending a good amount of time assessing each of their buildings and determining how they're being utilized and which should be prioritized for an energy-efficient upgrade," says Jaime Van Mourik, director of higher education at the Center for Green Schools at the non-profit Green Building Council, which runs the LEED program.

Here's a look at a handful of colleges that have gone the extra mile in sustainability: Ball State University, Muncie, Ind.

This university is going deep in its sustainability efforts — quite literally. The school is in the process of creating the world's largest closed geothermal energy system.

Such a system uses the natural temperature of the earth hundreds of feet below ground to help in heating and cooling objects at the surface.

Ball State has constructed a system that pumps water 400 feet below the ground, where it reaches equilibrium with the temperature at that depth and then gets circulated back to the surface.

Thus far, the university has drilled about 1,800 boreholes around campus, and the system is providing cooling to the entire campus and heating to about half. In March, construction for the project entered the final phase. When fully implemented, the project will allow the university to cut its carbon emissions almost in half and save about $2 million in annual operating costs.

Butte College, Oroville, Calif. The Northern California school touts that it is now "grid positive," generating more energy than it consumes. In a project

that began in 2005, a total of 25,000 solar arrays have been installed mostly at its main college campus. The arrays occupy space not only on rooftops but in parking lots and walkways as well.

"When we say that number, the campus community is surprised because (the arrays) are not obvious," says Butte College President Kimberly Perry. "They've been incorporated into the design and culture of the campus, and I think that's the beauty of it."

Chatham University, Pittsburgh When the Eden Hall Foundation gifted Chatham University 388 acres of farmland in 2008, the university decided to create

an entire campus dedicated to sustainability. The Eden Hall Campus, about 20 miles north of the main Chatham campus, houses an organic garden and greenhouse with research and teaching plots.

Though only a handful of classes are currently held on the Eden Campus, it is expected to become a residential campus within the next three to five years, according to David Hassenzahl, dean of the university's school of sustainability and the environment.

"We plan to do everything out in the open and demonstrate to people how to live more sustainably," Hassenzahl says. Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vt.

In an effort to reduce emissions, this liberal arts college turned to using biomass, energy from plant material, as a source of fuel. The institute's biomass gasification plant, located at the center of campus, provides heating to the buildings on campus.

On an average day, two to three truckloads of wood chips are delivered to the campus from within 75 miles. At the plant, chips are heated to high temperatures with low oxygen, eventually releasing wood gas. This gas is fed into a boiler, producing steam that is then circulated throughout the campus as a source of heat. In addition, the steam turns turbines, generating 20% of the campus' electricity.

"When students make the connection between turning up the heat in their room and trees getting cut down to provide the heat, it's a whole new perspective for them," says Jack Byrne, director of the university's sustainability integration office.

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How green is your campus?

By Amanda Leigh Mascarelli

Universities are working to bring sustainability to their campuses and classrooms, and could serve as a model for other institutions looking to go carbon-neutral.  But  there’s  no  single  way  to  grade  the  initiatives. On a typically muggy day in late August, some 1,300 incoming freshmen and their parents gathered for orientation weekend at Emory University, near downtown Atlanta, Georgia. Here, in the heart of the conservative Deep South, the students received their first lesson of the school year. They were served food that was locally or sustainably produced, which they ate with cutlery made from sugar cane. And they were handed reusable water bottles and compact fluorescent light bulbs, which they tot ed around in reusable grocery bags. Over the two days of orientation, the school composted nearly two tonnes of waste, making it Emory’s  first  near-zero-waste  freshman  orientation.  “From  the  first  time  the  students  interact  with  Emory,  we  try  to  make  it  clear   that  sustainability  is  part  of  our  DNA,  that  this  is  our  expectation  from  them,”  says  Ciannat  Howett,  director  of  the  university’s  office   of sustainability initiatives.

Emory is part of a wave of colleges and universities throughout the United States and across the globe that are going ‘green’.  “We’ve  gotten  into  this  situation  where  we  have  an  unsustainable  environmental  future  because  we’ve  produced  all  kinds of really  smart  people  that  don’t  get  it,”  says  Michael  Crow,  president  of  Arizona  State  University in Tempe. Crow is also chair of the American College & University  Presidents’  Climate  Commitment,  through  which  some  650  US  educational  institutions  have  pledged   to  become  “climate  neutral”.  Nearly  400  of  them are now facing a 15 September deadline to submit  their  detailed  ‘climate  action   plans’  for  achieving  their  goals.

Measuring up Such schools also hope to serve as models for others, including businesses, cities and counties, that hope to reduce their

environmental impacts. But their experiences underscore the fact that sustainability can be hard to measure and that attaining it, especially  with  competing  financial  pressures,  doesn’t  happen  overnight.

More than 300 of the first signatories to the climate commitment have submitted green- house-gas inventories, which tally electricity use, heating and cooling of buildings, transportation to and from campus, and official air travel. Climate action plans are step two. So far, about 80% of the signatories have reported on time and are in good standing with the initiative, says Anthony Cortese, president of the Boston-based non-profit organization Second Nature, which helps run the initiative. He expects 90% fulfillment by the beginning of the 2010–11 school year. Still, institutions set their own timetables for achieving climate neutrality, and there is no penalty if they fall short, aside from peer pressure by other members.

To quantify their greenhouse-gas reductions and efficiency gains, most schools rely on standardized emissions inventories, such as the Campus Carbon Calculator provided by Clean Air–Cool Planet, a non-profit group based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In some cases, institutions have their own environmental engineers or energy analysts who keep track of carbon accounting, with others engaging students through their coursework. In addtion, the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, based in Lexington, Kentucky, has developed a system to help schools track their progress over time. Since February 2008, some 70 schools have piloted that system; it will officially launch in January, and its online reporting tool will be available to all campuses.

But it is difficult to find a universal system of ranking or grading sustainability, because schools grapple with different challenges, says David Oxtoby, president of Pomona College in Claremont, California. Whereas schools in the American West focus heavily on water conservation, for instance, many in New England are homing in on finding more centralized, lower-carbon alternatives for heating their buildings year-round. Emissions gains

Some of the early starters have already made major advances in shrinking their carbon footprints and improving efficiency. Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont, is building a combined heat-and-power plant that will supply 85% of heating to the campus  and  run  on  renewable  biomass  such  as  locally  sourced  wood  chips.  Green  Mountain’s  student  enrolment  has  risen  by  14%   since 2007, but its carbon emissions per student have decreased by nearly 20%.

Meanwhile, the University of Minnesota, Morris, has constructed a large-scale wind- research turbine that supplies power to most of its buildings. And in 2008, Middlebury College in Vermont completed a biomass gasification plant, which is expected to replace 3.8 million litres of heating oil. Harvard University has more than 60 green building projects in progress. One of its building renovations, completed in 2008, resulted in a 35% improvement in energy efficiency and a 40% reduction in water use, says Heather Henriksen, the university’s  sustainability  director.

And if the 51 institutions in one study succeed in going carbon-neutral, that would be equivalent to taking 690,000 cars off the roads, says Jason Pearlman of the consulting firm Sightlines, based in Guilford, Connecticut.

Some early skeptics, who once worried about universities trying  to  ‘greenwash’  their  reputations with minor institutional adjustments, are now convinced. Dave Newport, director of the Environmental Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, says that several years ago he was dubious about whether universities would really take a leading role in sustainability.  “Campus  

4 leadership  has  really  stepped  up”  since  then,  he  says,  “and  the  effort  is  nothing  short  of  full  speed  ahead.”

Many US schools have committed to meeting Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards, set out by the US Green Building Council. In 2001, Emory built the first LEED-certified building in the south- east, a biomedical research building, and in 2005 it became the first US university to attain LEED certification for an existing building when it renovated its business school, a $95,000 project that paid for itself in less than a year through reduced energy bills, says Howett.

Institutions elsewhere are also jumping onboard. A junior college in Puerto Rico and a community college in the Republic of Palau have signed the climate commitment. Six educational institutions have also recently joined the Climate Neutral Network, led by the United Nations Environment Programme, with the mission of helping society reach a low- or zero- carbon future. They include Tongji University in Shanghai, China, which has been implementing building upgrades and energy-saving projects. In 2006, it saved about 10 million kilowatt-hours of electricity and reduced its carbon dioxide emissions by 9,200 tonnes, according to the university’s   vice-president Chen Xiaolong. And in 2008, he says, it installed a system to perform real-time monitoring of energy consumption in some 300 buildings across four campuses.

In southern Spain, Malaga University is installing solar panels that will produce a mega- watt of energy to power the campus, along with geothermal energy and a trigeneration power plant to convert waste heat into power. The university aims to eventually meet all of its energy needs through renewable energy, according to Rafael Morales, a university vice-rector and head of its sustainability programme.

In Britain, the University of the West of England in Bristol expects to have 100% of electricity on its academic sites coming from renewable sources by 1 October. From 2006 to 2007, the university cut its carbon emissions by 23%, says James Longhurst, an environmental  scientist  there.  “We’re  on  a  journey,”  he  says.  “I  don’t  think  any  of  us  are  certain  that  we’ll  ever  arrive,  but  we’re  on  a   journey  towards  being  more  sustainable.”

In the United States, some of the most aggressive schools in the campus sustainability movement, such as Emory and Harvard, have chosen  not  to  sign  the  presidents’  climate  commitment.  In  part,  that’s  because  many  are  skeptical of the commitment’s  focus  on  a  zero-carbon goal. Reaching carbon neutrality will require schools to buy offsets, which are often criticized because they allow a polluter to pay a fee to support a green activity  to  ‘offset’  the  polluter’s  carbon  transgressions.  “There’s  no  way   to  become  carbon  neutral  without  buying  offsets,  mathematically,”  says  Pearlman.

Buying offsets is still a fairly new and unregulated practice, so some are concerned that it could take the place of more meaning- ful  emissions  cuts.  “Until  it’s  better  regulated,  we  didn’t  feel  comfortable  that  we  could  say  we  knew  exactly  where  every   dollar  of  that  was  going,”  says  Emory’s  Howett.  But  Cortese contends that over time, as schools make larger investments in green technologies and find better ways to cut carbon, fewer offsets will be necessary.

Model institutions Many schools also see themselves as a test bed for green living from which communities and cities can learn. In Atlanta, a

city notorious for traffic congestion and poor air quality, Emory is setting aside more than half of its campus as protected green space, working to create a bike culture, and providing incentives for its employees to ride buses powered by used cooking oil from its campus cafeterias. Harvard has developed a $12-million revolving loan fund for sustainability projects, which doles out up to $500,000 per project. Within just a few years, the work has saved nearly $4 million annually and some 25,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, says Henriksen. She says she has fielded calls from foundations and corporations and spoken to city managers who are thinking of setting up similar loan funds. And in 2007, Middlebury completed a renovation of its Franklin Environmental Center, housed in an 1870s farmhouse near the centre of the campus, as a model of sustainable design for those who want to go green  while  retaining  the  character  of  the  region’s  architecture.

Institutions do not seem to be shying away from their commitments, despite the current financial downturn. Paul Fonteyn, president  of  Green  Mountain  College,  says  the  school’s  new  biomass-fuelled plant will save $250,000–300,000 per year in heating costs.  “I  don’t  see  how  you  can  afford  not  to  do  this  kind  of  activity,”  he  says. Amy Johns, an environmental analyst at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, agrees. Although the financial belt-tightening has made some projects more challenging, she  says,  “a  lot  of  them do have a pretty solid payback, so even in the hard financial times they can be pretty appealing”.

Jack Byrne, director of the sustainability integration office at Middlebury, says that the recession is driving his school to find more efficient ways to accomplish  its  green  goals.  “The  one  thing  that  has  been  clear  in  all  of  this  is  that  sustainability  is  a  core   value,”  he  says.  “We’re  just  going  to  be  looking  for  more  effective  and  efficient  ways  to  do  it  with  fewer  people.”

The Roots of Sustainability By Glenn M. Ricketts

Sustainability and Higher Education

Sustainability was born outside of the academy, but environmentalism paved a relatively smooth way in. The social activism

5 of the 1960s was institutionalized by the 1990s, and the sorts of people who would have raised skeptical questions about a movement founded on apocalyptic visions and ideological enthusiasms had either retired or been marginalized. The new academy could only raise one series of questions to any new supplicant: Will you respect diversity? Will you accommodate the sensitivities of identity groups? Will you join in a view of the world that treats the basic narrative of society as a struggle between oppressors and the oppressed? Sustainability came to the table with the right answers. But while the environmentalist movement had already joined the team by melding with ecofeminism, the environmental justice movement, and a tangle of alliances with other grievance groups, sustainability did not immediately become a major campus movement. That took some serious effort by determined advocates.

In 1990, Teresa Heinz, then married to Republican senator John Heinz, met Massachusetts Democratic senator John Kerry at an Earth Day rally. The Widow Heinz met Senator Kerry again at the Earth Summit in 1992, and during the ensuing courtship in 1993 they co-founded Second Nature: Education for Sustainability, a non-profit organization dedicated to making sustainability a key feature of American higher education. Second Nature had (and still has) a strikingly narrow focus. It would advance sustainability not by  winning  over  students,  not  by  funding  faculty  research,  but  by  converting  the  campus  leadership.  With  a  focus  on  “senior  college and  university  leaders,”  Second  Nature  placed  itself, ironically, in the tradition of Christian missionaries who evangelized the chiefs, confident that they would in turn force everyone else to heel.

Moving outward from university leaders, Second Nature evoked the familiar environmentalist image that everything is connected with everything else. In the end, the community would convert: We believe that in order for society to move in a sustainable direction, higher education must develop a framework in which the sector and individual institutions operate as fully integrated communities that teach, research, and model social and ecological sustainability.

In common with Marxist, feminist, Afrocentrist, and multiculturalist antecedents, Second Nature views sustainability as central to the entire academic enterprise, rather than as compartmentalized within a single discipline or department:

Our work toward this vision embraces interdisciplinary learning and includes the community as a whole. By reinforcing the concept that the educational experience of all students must be aligned with the principles of sustainability, we help ensure that the content of learning embraces interdisciplinary systems thinking to address environmentally sustainable action on local, regional and global scales over short, medium and inter-generational time periods.

With relatively little public visibility, Second Nature has gradually secured the support of senior administrators and other academics through a series of conferences, seminars, and international gatherings that promote its vision of sustainability. Its most signal  success  is  undoubtedly  the  American  College  and  University  Presidents’  Climate  Commitment.  Signatories—now more than 650 college and university presidents, representing about a third of American college students—have committed their respective institutions  to  political,  social,  and  educational  activism,  often  at  significant  expense,  in  immediately  addressing  the  “challenge”  of   climate change:

We, the undersigned presidents and chancellors of colleges and universities, are deeply concerned about the unprecedented scale and speed of global warming and its potential for large-scale, adverse health, social, economic and ecological effects. We recognize the scientific consensus that global warming is real and is largely being caused by humans. We further recognize the need to reduce the global emission of greenhouse gases by 80% by mid-century at the latest, in order to avert the worst impacts of global warming and to reestablish the more stable climatic conditions that have made human progress over the last 10,000 years possible.

A  college  president’s  commitment  to  sustainability  virtually  assures  that  academic  deans,  support  staff,  and  department   chairmen will do likewise. Newly-hired junior faculty members will also eagerly queue up, understandably believing that support for “sustainability”  will  enhance  “professional  development”  and  bolster  their  prospects  of  gaining  tenure  or  promotion.  They  will also pass the good word to their students.

Beyond the tentatively informed enthusiasm of college and university presidents, the sustainability movement has been buoyed and promoted by the torrent of publications that has appeared since the Brundtland report. Typically, these works view higher education as the critical agent in service of the massive social, economic, and ideological reorientation necessary to ensure the  “survival”  of  humanity  and  life  on  Earth.  One  of  the  earliest  and  most  influential  campus  proponents  of  sustainability,  Oberlin College environmental studies professor  David  Orr,  sees  the  reform  of  higher  education  as  paramount  to  sustainability’s  success.   Reflecting the once marginal tenets of deep ecology, Orr fixes the wellsprings of ecological distress at the conceptual level:

The crisis we face is first and foremost one of mind, perception, and values. It is an educational challenge. More of the same kind of education can only make things worse. This is not an argument against education but rather an argument for the kind o f education that prepares people for livelihoods suited to a planet with a biosphere that operates by the laws of ecology and thermodynamics.

Echoing the ideas of Arne Naess and other deep ecologists (as well as Afrocentrists, feminists, and post-colonialists), Orr accuses the Western philosophical tradition, especially the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, of providing the basis for devaluing nature and making mankind its master rather than one constituent part among The Whole. The catastrophic consequences of this mindset require comprehensive social, economic, and political reorganization, a task Orr

6 assigns  to  higher  education.  Those  who  are  “educated,”  in  Orr’s  view,  must  stabilize  world  population,  cut  greenhouse  gases,  grow forests, conserve soils, use energy-efficient materials and  solar  energy,  eliminate  waste,  and  pretty  much  undo  “200 years of industrialization.”

It  doesn’t  stop  there.  With  Orr,  we  encounter  the  feature  of  sustainability  that  distinguishes  it  from  the  earlier  forms  of   environmentalism: the triumvirate established via the merger with economic redistribution and social justice. So, along with undoing the  Industrial  Revolution,  Orr  also  charges  this  educated  elite  with  overcoming  “social  and  racial  inequities.”

Orr has successors, among them Andres R. Edwards, who explicates  sustainability  as  the  “holistic”  approach  entailing  the   Three  E’s:  “ecology/environment,  economy/employment  and  equity/equality.” The  Three  E’s,  however,  must  be  addressed  as  a   single  entity,  a  “revolution  of  interconnections,”  once  again  invoking the master trope of the environmentalist movement, Commoner’s  mystic  “everything  is  connected  to  everything  else.”  Edwards  declares: The Sustainability Revolution provides a vital new approach to tackling the issues confronting the world today. By taking a comprehensive look at the interconnections among ecological, economic and equity issues ranging from global warming to pollution, health and poverty, we are more likely to seek and implement lasting solutions.The Sustainability Revolution marks the emergence of a new social ethos emphasizing the web of relationships that link the challenges we currently face.

The  “web  of  relationships”  encompasses  an  apparently  limitless  range  of  political  and  social  issues,  all  of  which,  in   Edwards’s  view,  fit  neatly  under  the  “sustainability”  umbrella:

Sustainability encompasses a wide array of issues including: conservation, globalization, socially responsible investing, corporate reform, ecoliteracy, climate change, human rights, population growth, health, biodiversity, labor rights, social and environmental  justice,  local  currency,  conflict  resolution,  women’s  rights,  public  policy,  trade  and  organic  farming.  These  issues cross national boundaries, socioeconomic sectors and political systems, touching every facet of society and driven by life-affirming values that influence policies and initiatives at the local, regional, national and international levels.

This synthesis, of course, has now become axiomatic to the intellectual supporters of sustainability. It purports to state a self-evident social and biological truth. But is it true?

Discovering connections between apparently unrelated phenomena is surely one of the keys to scientific discovery, but also to literature, art, and religion. We are, as humans, deeply oriented to seeking out patterns, and uncovering ways in which the universe fits together is among our most satisfying accomplishments. Such discovery often requires, however, that we first break things down to their underlying components. Simply asserting that  everything  exists  in  a  “web  of  relationships”  doesn’t  get  us  very   far  and  may  well  impede  the  search  for  real  connections.  “Everything  is  connected  to  everything  else”  isn’t  science  or  philosophy. It is a declaration of faith. Sometimes the important thing is the discovery of non-relations.  Magical  spells  don’t  make  it  rain.  The  evil   eye  doesn’t  cause  sterility.  Childhood  vaccines  don’t  cause  autism.  Some  connections,  no  matter  the  grip  they  have  on  our   imaginations,  aren’t  real.  Is  it  possible  that  carbon  emissions  don’t  cause  global  warming?  When  we  hear  such  declarations  from   people  grounded  in  the  “everything  is  connected  to  everything  else”  approach  to  inquiry,  we  ought  to  approach  the  hypothesis   warily.

Orr and Edwards, as leading and typical spokesmen for sustainability, also recall Charles A. Reich’s Greening of America, that  archetypal  1960s  text  invoking  a  new  kind  of  knowledge  one  would  gain  through  a  vague,  holistic  “consciousness.”  Like  his contemporary Herbert Marcuse, Reich established the “interconnections”  between  American  consumer  capitalism  and  all  existing   social  evils  by  simple  assertion.  He  believed  this  not  because  of  compelling  evidence,  but  as  matter  of  “insight,”  and  convinced those disposed to believe, almost as a matter of faith.

The sustainability movement proceeds in the same mysterious way, asserting a comprehensive theoretical understanding of the world, but rarely checking its propositions against the facts, and often furious when anyone dares to look beyond the conclusions to the supposed data. The movement espouses a peculiarly potent distillate of political and religious enthusiasm, even in  precincts  one  might  think  would  resist  any  rush  to  judgment.  Within  sustainability,  “modeling”  typically  trumps  evidence—models being infinitely adjustable and never actually falsifiable. The late Michael Crichton observed tellingly that:

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists....Increasingly,  it  seems  facts  aren’t  necessary,  because  the  tenets  of  environmentalism  are  all   about  belief.  It’s  about  whether  you  are  going  to  be  a  sinner,  or  saved.  Whether  you  are  going  to  be  to  be  one  of  the  people  on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us or one of them.

Physicist Freeman Dyson, a professed environmentalist but also a skeptic with regard to global warming, recently lamented the shrill intolerance and crude contempt directed toward dissenters like himself and MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen by mainstream academic and scientific societies, for whom they have become apostates:

The United Kingdom has made up its mind and takes the view that any individuals who disagree with government policy should be ignored. This dogmatic tone is also adopted by the Royal Society, the British equivalent of the US National Academy of Sciences....In other words, if you disagree with the majority opinion about global warming, you are an enemy of science.

Like Crichton, Dyson attributes this puzzling hostility to the fact that environmentalism has evolved into a new and fervent religion:

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There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world. Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion.

Thus, Dyson concludes, even though the impact of environmentalism had been highly salutary and the movement unquestionably  “[held]  the  moral  high  ground,”  the  detached,  scientific evaluation of global warming had been seriously impeded by the fact that some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become so bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warmin g is an enemy of the environment.

Crichton and Dyson speak of the  “environmental  movement,”  but  their  words  apply  even  more  aptly  to  sustainability. What exactly is the difference? Environmentalism focused on the environment and went in search of how environmental issues connected to other matters of concern to social activists. Sustainability simply assumes all those connections and reduces environmental issues to one leg of a three-legged stool. The credo of sustainability is that the earth, humanity, and life itself will be extinguished by human greed and folly unless we truly repent. Reducing your carbon footprint is not enough. We must also submit to  new  structures  of  authority  in  which  those  who  possess  the  wisdom  of  “interconnectedness”  will  make  the  right  decisions  for us. We must relinquish capitalism, with its endless need for consumption and growth. We must reorder human society to rid ourselves of the age-old scourges of hierarchy, racism, and sexism.

Sustainability can put on different hats at different times, sounding as if it is sternly scientific at one moment, enchanted with mystical unities the next, and down in the street fighting for social justice and cut-rate mortgages the moment after that. Like most ideologies, it can be amorphous when it is tactically useful to its proponents to blur the issues. But it does have core ideas, and “interconnectedness”  writ  large  is  the  most  important  of  these.

From its origins in the intellectual contortions of the 1960s, sustainability has emerged as the newest missionary ideology within higher educational institutions in the United States. With an ever-expanding conceptual reach and touting the authority of “science,”  its  influence  is  manifest  in  every  aspect  of  campus  life.  It  embodies  the  omnipresent  sense  of  emergency  long   characteristic of environmentalism and the aggressive intellectual imperialism of the 1960s, and confers an automatic aura of moral obligation  and  concomitant  moral  superiority.  Sustainability  provides,  to  borrow  Robert  Conquest’s  term,  “The  Idea”—the thing, the system, the beliefs that encompass and explain everything—pursued by secularized intellectuals of the West since the late eighteenth century. And it is now ascendant in academic institutions that have long since been transformed into citadels of ideological indoctrination, postmodernism, and political correctness.

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Are Colleges Greenwashing? By Chelsea Jones

When I began my undergraduate education years ago, the concept of sustainability was not wide-spread or such a buzz

word as it is today. Now  an  increasing  number  of  colleges  and  universities  are  publicizing  themselves  as  “sustainable”   campuses. But given that there are numerous opinions of what defines sustainability, what do institutions really mean by these claims? Are campuses becoming guilty of greenwashing or are they truly embracing sustainable initiatives that are reflective of the school’s  values? If the former, should there be any governmental oversight of this behavior? Greenwashing  is  defined  as  “disinformation  disseminated  by  an  organization  so  as  to  present  an  environmentally   responsible  public  image.”  It  is  typically  associated  with  businesses  who  want  to  portray  their  products and/or practices as environmentally  friendly,  but  either  the  “green”  claims  of  the  product  are  misleading  or  the  business  as  a  whole  is  incompatible with sustainable ideals. For example, Wal-Mart announced in 2005 that it would incorporate sustainability into its corporate strategy. The company has since stated that it is working on a goal to be supplied by 100% renewable energy and promised in 2010 to  double  its  selection  of  “local”  produce  in  stores  from  4.5%  to  9%  within  six  years. As of 2011 less than 2% of Wal-Mart’s   electricity consumption in the U.S. comes from renewable energy. It would take the company 300 years with this current pace to reach its 100% renewable energy goal. Additionally, Wal-Mart  defines  “local”  as  within  the  same  state, meaning fruit grown around San  Francisco,  California  could  be  labeled  “local”  in  San  Diego,  California. These two initiatives heavily marketed by Wal-Mart are not in reality that sustainable and are very misleading. Before Wal-Mart announced its sustainability campaign, 38% of Americans reported having an unfavorable view of the company – a peak for Wal-Mart. As of 2010 that number dropped by almost half to 20%. Its revenue has increased nearly 35% from 2005 to 2010 without changing much else of its business model or practices – from $312 billion to $419 billion. That is the power of greenwashing.

Are colleges trying to benefit from greenwashing as well? A company starts to engage in greenwashing when its practices “don’t  match  up  to  the  image  they  would  like  to  have.” Theoretically, colleges could behave in this way as well – in order to attract more  students  or  to  obtain  higher  rankings,  they  may  try  to  “green”  their  image  without  making  any  firm  commitment  to  doing   so. In April 2012, the Michigan  State  University  (MSU)  Board  of  Trustees  adopted  the  “Energy Transition Plan (ETP),”  declaring  that   MSU plans to have its energy needs met by 100% renewable energy and that it aims to be a leader in sustainability. Interestingly, MSU has the nation’s  largest on-campus coal-burning power plant (the T.B. Simon Power Plant) and it burns 250,000 tons of coal each year. MSU’s  power  plant  was  named  by  the  U.S.  Environmental  Protection  Agency  (EPA)  in  January  2012  as  the  25th biggest polluter in Michigan. In 2008, MSU was fined $27,000 by the EPA for high priority violations of excess sulfur dioxide emissions and nitrogen oxide emissions by the power plant. Could MSU be trying to combat this negative environmental image by touting lofty and unlikely to be realized sustainability goals? A group of its students think so. They claim that MSU is engaging in greenwashing by highly publicizing the ETP with its 100% renewable energy goal when it does not set a timeline to close the power plant. According to the ETP, the campus currently gets less than 2% of its power from renewable energy. The ETP presents a goal to have  40%  of  the  campus’  energy  be  produced  by  renewable  energy  sources  by  2030.

So is MSU actively engaging in greenwashing? While  MSU’s  ETP  presents a schedule for increasing renewable energy use, unlike Wal-Mart, the timeline is still only tentative. MSU is not bound by this plan and it is subject to review and revision every five years according to the ETP. It also appears that it will take at least several decades before MSU will near its proclaimed goal of 100% of its energy be from renewable energy sources. To be fair, MSU has to start somewhere and it is unrealistic to expect them to reach their 100% renewable energy goal within the next few years. According  to  MSU’s  President,  Mary  Sue  Coleman,  the  University   has embraced sustainability:

“With  the  pressing  challenge  of  climate  change,  we  are  elevating  our  emphasis  on  sustainability  at  Michigan.  From  teaching   and research, to hands-on engagement, we are going to leverage our many strengths so we can make significant contributions to solving  a  genuinely  complicated  problem.”

However, the problem with greenwashing is that the perpetrator is portraying itself as something it is not. Simply publicizing that the university is committed to sustainability and has a plan to be run by 100% renewable energy could make it appear to the average person that this goal will be attainable in the near future, when in reality it will not. Operating under the ETP is  arguably  contradictory  when  the  view  out  of  most  campus  classrooms  is  the  nation’s  largest  campus  coal  power  plant.

Surprisingly, MSU received a B+ on the College Sustainability Report Card (CSRC) in 2011. The CSRC is an independent evaluator of campus and endowment sustainability activities in colleges and universities and seeks to encourage sustainable initiatives on campuses in nine categories. Shockingly,  MSU’s  score  in  the  Climate  Change  &  Energy  category  was  an  A. One possible explanation is that the information gathered to evaluate each school is done on a voluntary reporting basis where CSRC sends each school several surveys to complete. The  CSRC  gives  a  brief  explanation  for  MSU’s  A  rating,  stating  that  MSU  decreased  its  green   house gas emissions by 7% and is committed to a 15% reduction by 2015. But this seems to pale in comparison to what other schools have been doing (e.g. Carleton College has installed its second campus wind-turbine and the turbines can meet approximately 40% of the campus’  annual  electricity  demand). The arbitrariness of various sustainability rankings has left many schools frustrated. If you look for a more detailed explanation for this grade in the survey that MSU completed, the CSRC notes that

27 MSU requested that this data be kept private – unlike most schools. Perhaps  MSU’s  self-reporting is not incredibly reliable or maybe it successfully overemphasizes certain areas while downplaying negatives such as its coal power plant and thus escapes a lower score.

Is there a solution for this potential greenwashing abuse by higher-education institutions? Supposedly independent ranking systems  are  providing  the  necessary  evaluations  of  a  school’s  sustainability  commitment,  but  they  seem  to  be  falling  short. The Federal Trade  Commission  has  released  a  revised  set  of  “Green Guides.” Its goal is to provide marketing principles to help companies  avoid  making  misleading  environmental  claims.  According  to  §260.1,  the  Green  Guides  apply  to  “claims  about  the   environmental attributes of a product, package, or service in connection with the marketing, offering for sale, or sale of such item or service  to  individuals.” Schools are selling an education to students, which is a service so perhaps the Green Guides should apply to them as well. Maybe they technically already do but no one has yet to challenge them in this area. Apparently  a  school’s   commitment  to  sustainability  is  important  to  some  students  as  many  are  “flocking”  to  schools  that  incorporate  sustainability  into   their programs  in  hopes  of  gaining  an  edge  in  the  “green  collar”  job  sector. Given  that  a  group  of  MSU’s  students  are  angry  over  its   alleged greenwashing, there may be other groups harboring the same feelings against their alma maters. I personally would not be surprised to see a greenwashing complaint filed with the FTC against a university in the near future.

Introduction to StopGreenwash.org

These days, green is the new black. Corporations are falling all over themselves to demonstrate to current and potential customers that they are not only ecologically conscious, but also environmentally correct. Some businesses are genuinely committed to making the world a better, greener place. But for far too many others, environmentalism is little more than a convenient slogan. Buy our products, they say, and you will end global warming, improve air quality, and save the oceans. At best, such statements stretch the truth; at worst, they help conceal corporate behavior that is environmentally harmful by any standard.

The average citizen is finding it more and more difficult to tell the difference between those companies genuinely dedicated to making a difference and those that are using a green curtain to conceal dark motives. Consumers are constantly bombarded b y corporate campaigns touting green goals, programs, and accomplishments. Even when corporations voluntarily strengthen their record on the environment, they often use multi-million dollar advertising campaigns to exaggerate these minor improvements as major achievements.

Sometimes, not even the intentions are genuine. Some companies, when forced by legislation or a court decision to improve their environmental track record, promote the resulting changes as if they had taken the step voluntarily. And at the same time that many corporations are touting their new green image (and their CEOs are giving lectures on corporate ecological ethic s), their lobbyists are working night and day in Washington to gut environmental protections. All this - and more - is what Greenpeace calls greenwashing - the cynical use of environmental themes to whitewash corporate misbehavior. The term was coined around 1990 when some of America's worst polluters (including DuPont, Chevron, Bechtel, the American Nuclear Society, and the Society of Plastics Industry) tried to pass themselves off as eco-friendly at a trade fair taking place in Washington, DC.

But make no mistake: corporations were using greenwashing long before that trade fair took place, and have not hesitated to use it ever since. As the public's (and the media's) environmental awareness has grown, so too has the sophistication of corporate public relations strategies. If companies had spent as much time and money improving their core business practices as they have spent making themselves look green, they might have made a real difference. Greenpeace wants corporations to talk the talk, but not if they are merely cynically using such rhetoric to conceal their utter failure to walk the walk. We believe that corporations must play a central, essential role in helping to solve the world's environmental challenges. We believe they can do so by ending their destructive policies and by waking up to the economic benefits of environmentally sustainable practices and products.

In that spirit, we call on companies to stop portraying baby steps on the environment as giant strides. When an oil company invests in wind or solar power, every little bit helps. But we need more than "little bits" to solve global warming, halt deforestation, prevent the destruction of the oceans, and end the proliferation of toxic chemicals. As long as half-measures are sold as full solutions, corporate actions, no matter how sincere, will be nothing more than a more sophisticated form of greenwashing.

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References

Alshuwaikhat, H. M., & Abubakar, I. (2008). An integrated approach to achieving campus sustainability:

Assessment of the current campus environmental management practices. Journal of Cleaner

Production, 16(16), 1777-1785.

Breen, S. D. (2010). The mixed political blessing of campus sustainability. PS: Political Science and

Politics, 43(4), 685-690.

Brinkhurst, M. R., P., Maurice, G., & Ackerman, J.D. (2011). Achieving campus sustainability: Top-down,

bottom-up, or neither? International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 12(4), 338-

354.

Finlay, J. & Massey, J. (2012). Eco-campus: Applying the ecocity model to develop green university and

college campuses. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 13(2), 150-165.

Introduction to stopgreenwash.org (n.d.), Retrieved from http://stopgreenwash.org/introduction

Jones, C. (Dec. 6, 2013). Are colleges greenwashing? Sustainability Law at Lewis and Clark Law School,

Retrieved from http://sustainabilityandlaw.com/2013/12/06/are-colleges-greenwashing-by-

chelsea-jones/

Joshi, M. (April 19, 2012). Sustainability is about more than recycling at top colleges. USA Today.

Mascarelli, A. (2009). How green is your campus? Nature, 461(7261), 154-155. doi:10.1038/461154a

Ricketts, G. M. (2010). The roots of sustainability. Academic Questions, 23(1), 20-53. doi:

10.1007/s12129-009-9151-5

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Works Cited

Alshuwaikhat, Habib M., and Ismaila Abubakar. "An Integrated Approach to Achieving Campus

Sustainability: Assessment of the Current Campus Environmental Management

Practices." Journal of Cleaner Production 16.16 (2008): 1777-85. Web. 21 Feb. 2014.

Breen, Sheryl D. "The Mixed Political Blessing of Campus Sustainability." Political Science and

Politics 43.4 (2010): 685-90. Web. 21 Feb. 2014.

Brinkhurst, Marena et al. "Achieving Campus Sustainability: Top-Down, Bottom-Up, Or

neither?" International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education 12.4 (2011): 338-54.

Web. 21 Feb. 2014.

Finlay, Jessica and Jennifer Massey. "Eco-Campus: Applying the Eco-city Model to Develop

Green University and College Campuses." International Journal of Sustainability in

Higher Education, 13.2 (2012): 150-65. Web. 5 Mar. 2014.

“Introduction  to  StopGreenwash.org.”  stopgreenwash.org.  Greenpeace,  n.d.  Web.  17  Apr  2014.

Jones,  Chelsea.  “Are  Colleges  Greenwashing?”  Sustainability Law at Lewis & Clark Law School.

Sustainability Law, 6 Dec 2013. Web. 17 Apr 2014.

Joshi, Monika. "Sustainability is about more than recycling at top colleges." USA Today April 19,

2014. Academic Search Complete. Web. 7 Apr. 2014.

Mascarelli, Amanda Leigh. "How Green Is Your Campus?" Nature 461.7261 (2009): 154-155.

Academic Search Complete. Web. 21 Feb. 2014.

Ricketts, Glenn M. "The Roots of Sustainability." Academic Questions 23.1 (2010): 20-53. Web. 5

Mar. 2014.