How Can We Reduce Our Carbon Footprint?

Political leaders and legislative bodies, ranging from California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to the European Parliament, are calling for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. Coordinating with this target, nearly 700 college and university presidents and chancellors have signed the American College and University Presidents' Climate Commitment, thus pledging to lead their institutions toward carbon neutrality.Footnote ⁹ Declaring that “colleges and universities that exert leadership in addressing climate change will stabilize and reduce their long-term energy costs, attract excellent students and faculty, attract new sources of funding, and increase the support of alumni and local communities” (American College and University Presidents' Climate Commitment [ACUPCC] 2010), the presidents and chancellors have committed their institutions to a three-part plan. First, they pledge to initiate development of a comprehensive plan to achieve carbon neutrality that includes institutional structures, a comprehensive and regularly updated inventory of emissions, mechanisms to incorporate the issue into the curriculum, and assessment procedures. Second, they pledge to initiate two or more “tangible action options” to reduce emissions while the comprehensive plan is developed. Possibilities include a LEED-certified construction policy, a program to offset air-travel emissions, or an energy-efficient appliance policy.Footnote ¹⁰ Third, the presidents pledge to make all these decisions transparent through reports to AASHE, which serves as a central clearinghouse of resources and information. Signatories to the Presidents' Climate Commitment include institutions in all 50 states and Puerto Rico.Footnote ¹¹

This three-part plan is a pledge of considerable weight, and the results—collected and disseminated by AASHE in its weekly bulletins and annual digests—have tended to leave college media-relations staff starry-eyed. In a recent issue of the weekly bulletin, AASHE announced Ohio Northern University's construction of three wind turbines; the University of Massachusetts–Amherst's purchase of 25% of its food from local farmers in 2009; the University of Washington's establishment of a Campus Sustainability Fund; and Luther College's installment of low-flow showerheads in its residence halls.Footnote ¹² According to the most recent AASHE annual digest, construction of green campus buildings continued at a rapid pace in 2009. Thirteen of these buildings received platinum LEED certification, the highest level possible. Three institutions hired sustainability officers at the level of vice president or vice chancellor in 2008 (AASHE 2009). These days, “carbon footprint” is a term that falls readily and frequently from the lips of college and university administrators.

How Can We Incorporate Green Thinking into Our Educational Mission?

Higher education institutions have initiated sustainability-themed degrees, certificates, and academic programs at a fast clip over the past five years: three in 2005, 22 in 2006, 27 in 2007, 66 in 2008, and 113 in 2009.Footnote ¹³ In 2008, 13 schools opened sustainability-themed research centers, up from 10 in 2007, and plans for 33 more green research centers were announced. According to AASHE, 13 U.S. and Canadian colleges or universities now offer Bachelor of Arts degrees in sustainability, and 13 offer sustainability degrees in the form of a Bachelor's of Science.Footnote ¹⁴ At the federal level, the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 included structures to provide grants for the development, implementation, and assessment of academic programs on sustainability.

How Can We Connect with Local Producers to Support Green Community Projects?

For those who work or live on campus, the collegiate version of the local foods movement is one of the most noticeable trends in campus sustainability. Higher education food service giants such as Bon Appetit, Sodexo, and Aramark have begun purchasing and promoting locally produced meats, produce, and dairy products, and serve as ready markets for student-run campus gardens. Specially promoted “local foods meals” are a hot trend in campus dining halls and often are tied to farmers markets and local crafts sales. Several colleges and universities have opened farm-to-fork sustainable eateries on their campuses, and the University of California, Berkeley, obtained the first organic certification for a higher education kitchen (Greensfelder Reference Greensfelder2006).

How Can We Measure the Results to See if Our Actions Meet Our Goals?

How can colleges and universities—and their faculty, staff, current and prospective students, and alumni—know whether these sustainability efforts are yielding results? Sustainability ratings that purport to answer this question have proliferated in recent years, including the Princeton Review's second annual list of green colleges,Footnote ¹⁵ the Sustainable Endowments Institute's fourth annual College Sustainability Report Card (Sustainable Endowments Institute 2010), and the Sierra Club's third annual list of “eco-enlightened universities” (Sierra Club 2010). In January 2010, AASHE launched a new rating system for sustainability in higher education. The self-assessment tool, called STARS (Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System), is designed to measure institutions' progress and provide usable benchmarks for comparisons through a system of credits in education and research; operations; and planning, administration, and engagement, as laid out in a nearly 300-page technical manual.Footnote ¹⁶

How Can We Form Coalitions that Build on Each Others' Ideas and Raise Funds to Do So?

The past several years have been marked by the rise of new associations, conferences, special issues of trade journals, and publications on campus sustainability, often funded by philanthropic foundations and nonprofit organizations. For example, the Sustainable Endowments Institute, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, backs research on and coordination of campus sustainability efforts that focus on operations and endowments. The institute is funded by the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and several other foundations, and its annual College Sustainability Report Card focuses on endowment policies. The National Wildlife Federation has published “Higher Education in a Warming World: The Business Case for Climate Leadership on Campus” as a vehicle for campus coordination and resources (Eagan, Keniry, and Schott Reference Eagan, Keniry and Schott2008). Overall, the number of data, coordination, and administrative positions dealing with campus sustainability has grown exponentially from 2005 to the current date—and this trend has not escaped the attention of Congress, as was made evident by the passage of the Higher Education Sustainability Act (HESA) in 2008.

What Do We Mean by Green Democratic Education? Are We Substituting Marketing Rhetoric for Democratic Discourse?

The move toward transparency is well worth celebration, but we cannot assume that the campus sustainability movement is characterized by full access to information or open debate. At an institutional level, operations and marketing drive sustainability measures, and the debate rarely has moved beyond the realm of management expertise. As crucial as quantitative analyses might be, they do not address the economic, social, and political questions of power that must lie at the heart of green democratic education. In addition, the disciplinary strictures of formal higher education work against full discussion of an inherently interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and intercommunity debate. As Koester, Eflin, and Vann point out, “Disciplines, departments, or comparably named units are structured to meet the programmatic needs of university education that derive from a Kantian tradition in education, one that compartmentalizes knowledge and thereby narrows the missions of academic programs to fit into these compartments. Sustainability does not fit within this tradition, as it cuts across the lines of conventional knowledge categories; it is instead situated within a different educational metasystem” (Reference Koester, Eflin, Vann, Forrant and Silka2006, 53–54). Sustainability may be a good fit for the operations end of higher education management, the recession notwithstanding, but a green campus and, more importantly, interdisciplinary green democratic education, do not fit easily within the curricular structures of contemporary universities and colleges.

What Kind of Ecological Citizens Are We Producing? Are We Reinforcing Positivist Definitions of Expertise and Excluding Ethical and Critical Approaches to Knowledge?

Sustainability can be approached from a pragmatic and prudential perspective: how can we avoid short-term foolishness? However, a more demanding approach pushes us to address both intergenerational and intragenerational justice, and to focus on issues that have not yet been an explicit part of the ecological citizenship that should lie at the heart of the campus sustainability movement. The need to balance fundamental values from ethical and critical perspectives must be a central part of this discussion, yet “this debate is just what the discussion about sustainability has seemed to lack so far, or even to deliberately avoid” (Egan et al. Reference Egan, Gray, Kaufman, Montrie, Forrant and Silka2006, 75). The positivist definition of expertise that is based on neutral empiricism is matched by the liberal pluralist refusal to impose values on anyone else (MacIntyre Reference MacIntyre1984). The result has been a sustainability debate that lacks the analysis, negotiation, and dynamic development of a true ethical stand. A positivist response to human-caused global disturbance is relatively straightforward; determining the ethical implications of the unequal power relations on which it stands is the hard part. Are our universities and colleges producing graduates who will see green knowledge as an area of expertise that creates an elite source of decision-making power or as a means by which they can engage with local knowledge and grass-roots citizenship (Fischer Reference Fischer2000)? Will our students continue to accept the myth that ignorance is both reprehensible and resolvable and the fiction that increased knowledge, not ethical deliberation, is the means by which sustainability can be achieved?Footnote ¹⁹

Are We Allowing and Encouraging Structural Critiques of Capitalism and Educational Institutionalism?

Campus sustainability initiatives originate from and are housed within an institutional structure based on assumptions of market, hierarchy, and governmentality (Luke Reference Luke, Fischer and Hajer1999). Not surprisingly, then, the movement to “green the campus” seems to ignore the need for or even the possibility of a political movement for radical change. Ecosocialist, ecoanarchist, and ecofeminist voices have been noticeably absent from the publications, conferences, and proclamations of the campus sustainability movement, and the voluminous bulletins and digests have made no mention of keynote speakers who urge examination of the connections between environmental and economic crises in contemporary liberal democracies.

Instead, the push for sustainability continues to follow the individualized Lorax model: it is our duty to “plant a tree, buy a bike, save the world” in all of its various forms (Maniates Reference Maniates, Princen, Maniates and Conca2002). Students, staff, and faculty must come together to recycle, use fluorescent light bulbs, share cars, and eat local food. Despite its greater conglomerate size, the institutional level does not break out of that mold: with a wind turbine here and a green residence hall there, we are on the path toward global sustainability. My point is not that these individualist measures deserve ridicule—many observers of the campus sustainability movement have argued for decades that institutional support for wind energy and green architecture are vital—but rather that these kinds of measures do not come close to unearthing and then fighting the less visible structural relationships that have brought us to this current environmental position. The implementation of the Higher Education Sustainability Act (HESA) warrants some level of celebration, but our joy must be firmly tempered by the recognition that congressional allocations do nothing to scrutinize or challenge the deep inequities within the higher education system.

Are We Identifying and Acknowledging Issues of Environmental Racism and Justice on Campus and within Our Communities?

Whatever “sustainability” means, it clearly must extend beyond traditionally defined environmental issues of pollution and preservation to address questions of poverty, health care, workers' rights, and class- and race-based toxic hazards. Some campus sustainability initiatives have focused attention on these issues, and rightfully so, but such attention has been far too sporadic and dependent on individual leadership. With the exception of a strong focus on public health, these are areas in which environmental science and environmental studies programs have been particularly lax, and these programs must be prodded to reexamine their design. A significant number of such programs require field research or an internship as part of their major requirements, but the possibilities for these educational components are often narrowly defined. In addition to typical field research on public health and carbon emissions and internships with environmental law firms, students must be encouraged to consider less traditional research questions.Footnote ²⁰

Are We Reinforcing Bureaucratic Power within Educational Institutions and Undermining the Intellectual and Political Initiative of Local Students, Staff, Faculty, and Community Members?

As praiseworthy as the Presidents' Climate Commitment truly is, the growing emphasis on infrastructure, operations, and marketing raises troubling questions about the ways in which campus sustainability is reinforcing, rather than analyzing and unsettling, relationships of power. Anecdotal evidence shows that plenty of grassroots initiatives are sprouting at higher education institutions across the United States and Canada, so these questions are not founded in crisis. Nonetheless, a “test effect” is occurring that suggests further troubles are ahead. The transparency incorporated into the Presidents' Climate Commitment has institutionalized AASHE's role as the information center for all green campus actions, and the measurement of those actions and dissemination of those measurements—which are closely watched by presidents, chancellors, and sustainability officers at colleges and universities—perpetuate the further narrowing of the scope and methods of campus sustainability. The increasing role of AASHE and other campus-sustainability organizations also can hamper the development and autonomy of locally divergent understandings and responses to environmental relationships. Anthony D. Cortese, president of Second Nature, an organization that works with AASHE, has called for “the formation of a large national coalition of professional, business, academic, governmental, student and nonprofit organizations who will work individually and collectively to achieve this unprecedented goal,” which is to make sustainability the foundation for all education and practice in higher education institutions (Cortese Reference Cortese2005, 5). Unitary coalitions of this type have strength of numbers, of course, but they also define the boundaries of what questions will be asked and what questions will be evaded.

These additional questions of politics and power are not easy to raise and are even harder to answer. In thinking about campus sustainability, we need to pay broad attention to the underlying structures that limit the questions that we ask and the possibilities that we are able to imagine. What is the ideological landscape on which we are walking toward goals of sustainability? How can we encourage students, staff, faculty, and administrators to examine the connections between our goals and the community's needs, between ideals and the local knowledge that can help make them work? How can we control the influence of outside investors—in both financial and ideological senses—and celebrate the ingenuity and critical analysis of local thinkers? These are the questions that we need to ask as we move ahead, and we need to respond to them in explicitly political terms. As Orr points out, “The primary causes of biotic impoverishment are not ignorance or the lack of research funding. They are, on the contrary, invariably political, having to do with ‘who gets what, when, and how.’ The decisions necessary to conserve biological diversity likewise will be political” (Reference Orr2004, 70). Campus sustainability may be relatively new as an institutional movement, but the issues to which we should turn our deliberation, research, teaching and activism are not new at all—and they deserve the kind of critical analysis that has been far too scarce of late.