On the southern edge of the University of Florida’s campus here, past the ag-school fields and within noseshot of the swine pens, Doug Renk is helping to build a new energy economy, one gallon at a time.
It looks like a scene out of The Road Warrior. Steel caldrons, propane tanks, and barrels of old fryer oil are lined up on a concrete platform, some of them connected in a complicated tangle of pipes, gauges, and valves. Mr. Renk, a research assistant at the university, is taking discarded vegetable oil from restaurants on and around the campus and brewing it into biodiesel — some 400 gallons so far, which have been used in the campus fleet.
Mr. Renk’s goal is one day to have a self-sufficient unit that will turn a campus waste stream into a source of energy. He has been supported all the way by campus leaders — including the president, J. Bernard Machen, who has made sustainability a top priority and has set clear goals for the university.
“We wouldn’t be pursuing this if it hadn’t been for their incentive,” Mr. Renk says. Without Dr. Machen’s goals for sustainability, the biodiesel project “would have been a harder sell” to the restaurant managers, facilities administrators, and faculty members who supply resources to his experiment.
Across the country, conscientious professors, business leaders, student activists, and grass-roots organizers are driving the sustainability movement with the urgent sense that humanity is facing a series of crises — among them, climate change, a growing divide between rich and poor, energy shortages, the collapse of various ecosystems, and the pressures of a world population that may reach nine billion by mid-century.
The University of Florida is one of a growing number of institutions that are beginning to transform their campuses, their operations, their policies, and their teaching to reflect a commitment to sustainability, a wide-ranging concept with three components: environmental awareness, social responsibility, and sound economic stewardship.
Some environmentally oriented colleges — such as Berea College, College of the Atlantic, and Warren Wilson College — made sustainability a central part of their mission years ago. Other institutions — including Arizona State University, Furman University, the Johns Hopkins University, Muhlenberg College, and many others — discovered sustainability more recently, and are increasing their efforts quickly.
They are putting up green buildings, planting native landscapes, switching to renewable power, supporting local communities, developing clean technologies, establishing policies on living wages, and finding ways to turn those efforts into teachable moments and research projects. Many of the colleges have sustainability committees of faculty members or even sustainability coordinators, who organize efforts on the campuses and try to link people like Mr. Renk with those who would supply his vegetable oil and those who would use his fuel.
But sustainability is a complicated concept, and its implementation in higher education faces immense hurdles. Supporters of the movement say that most people simply do not understand sustainability or the ways that their day-to-day activities affect environmental, social, or economic issues. Even more challenging, much of society’s infrastructure has already been built unsustainably. For example, Arizona State University has enacted policies to build only green structures and to pursue renewable energy, but it still has to contend with the circumstances of its existence in a bone-dry, sprawled-out community addicted to the internal-combustion engine.
For the time being, most institutions are reaching for low-hanging fruit. The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, a group that has grown from 35 to 175 members in the past nine months, met at Arizona State earlier this month with the goal of encouraging colleges to do more and to learn how to measure success.
“If they view sustainability as a few green buildings here and a little work to help the community there, then we’re not awakening them to the larger issue,” says Anthony D. Cortese, a sustainability advocate in higher education and co-founder of the sustainability association.
Some supporters worry that universities are “greenwashing” themselves, taking minor steps to adopt the appearance of sustainability but avoiding the really difficult changes. Others say that educational institutions are simply moving too slowly, falling behind corporations that have led the way on this issue. David Newport, director of the environmental center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who was instrumental in getting sustainability efforts started at the University of Florida several years ago, believes that “higher ed is the last place sustainability is going to be hot.”
“I’ve always savored that irony — we’re supposed to be on the leading edge, and we’re behind the curve,” he says. “There are, what, 4,500 colleges in the United States, and how many are really doing something? Less than 100 or 200? It hasn’t really been integrated into the lexicon of higher education.”
Slow Going
At the University of Florida, momentum in sustainability began more than 10 years ago, long before Dr. Machen arrived, but it progressed in fits and starts. A campus sustainability committee had come up with a list of recommendations for the university, but it got little traction under Charles E. Young, who was president until 2003.
When Dr. Machen, a pediatric-dentist-turned-administrator, arrived from the University of Utah, the issue had become politicized. He called for new recommendations and a new sustainability committee to guide strategy. His wife, Christine, the environmentalist in the Machen household, joined the committee to show presidential support.
Before long, talk about sustainability was buzzing in administration offices, among professors, and in the facilities department. Dr. Machen recently listed sustainability as one of four priorities for the university, along with improving health care for students, raising faculty and staff pay, and offering more students financial aid.
“I just stood back and let it go,” Dr. Machen says. “If I tried to stop this now, I’d get run over.”
There are sustainable initiatives sprouting all over Florida’s 2,000-acre campus. The school has built or started constructing 18 green buildings since 2003, and it is setting minimum standards for energy efficiency. Many parts of the campus have been reverted to natural landscapes, and last year the campus earned a designation as an Audubon sanctuary. Mass-transit services have received more resources, including the addition of Sunday bus service for the first time, and part of the motor pool is running on biodiesel and ethanol. The university is making greater efforts to recycle trash, especially at Gator football games, where it collected more than 2,600 pounds of bottles and cans at a game against the University of Central Florida last month. The university has set an ambitious, perhaps unrealistic, goal of becoming waste-free by 2015.
Not all of the projects have been painless or well received. To reduce the number of state-owned cars within departments, administrators jacked up annual parking rates astronomically, to $3,000 per parking pass this September. Some departments have gotten rid of their cars to avoid the parking fee, but university officials won’t say how many.
The exorbitant parking tax wasn’t a popular move — even among researchers who support sustainability in general — and it hints at the difficulty that future, deeper sustainability efforts might face. “This comes at a bad time,” when money is already tight, says Alan T. Dorsey, the chair of the physics department. The cost of his department’s three cars, which are used to shuttle graduate students and research equipment, will come out of researchers’ budgets for now. Mr. Dorsey says his department is still deciding whether to get rid of the cars.
Dr. Machen says that discussions about sustainability will get even more contentious when the university starts considering issues more integral to the operation of the university, like investments. He remembers the pressure to get higher education’s investments out of apartheid South Africa or Big Tobacco, and he thinks a movement in sustainability is headed in the same direction. Groups like the Sustainable Endowments Institute, run by a recent graduate of Williams College, are already scrutinizing the investment policies of various institutions.
Accounting for the Future
Proponents of sustainability are advocates of transparent accounting — of making invisible costs visible. They say that running society sustainably is ultimately cheaper than not doing so, if leaders consider all of the hidden costs of our current system, such as the loss of farmland to sprawl, crime from poverty in inner cities, or pollution that comes from cheap, industrialized food.
Dedee DeLongpré, director of the University of Florida’s Office of Sustainability, believes applying that kind of accounting to the university is one of her core missions. She arrived at the university little more than six months ago and is one of about 65 college sustainability coordinators across the country who work as managers, educators, and evangelists for sustainability among professors, staff members, and students.
Her office is within the heart of the administration — next to the vice president for finance and down the hall from the president — which is unusual for someone in her position.
Ms. DeLongpré has a master’s degree in sustainable business administration and has a history in community activism. Her arguments to trustees and others who hold the university’s purse strings will ride on analyses of costs and benefits.
Most of the costs and savings have not been tallied yet, but she can point to some efforts that will likely pay off in the future. For example, she says, poor recycling efforts at Gator football games would present “a negative PR cost” to alumni, Gator fans, and people in the Gainesville community who might see the games as massive trash generators. (There is also real money to be made by recycling, if only a little: Anheuser-Busch has pledged to give student groups a dollar for every pound of cans and bottles they collect on game days.) Savings from energy-efficiency efforts in buildings will probably start adding up soon, she says. And she will tie the university’s use of biodiesel or ethanol to research in new energy sources or an investment in national security — rather than emphasizing their environmental benefits.
Like other sustainability supporters, Ms. DeLongpré sells her message as something different from the environmentalism of the past, which at times idolized nature and vilified humans. In a conservative state like Florida, “it’s important to me to frame the issue in a way that bridges political divides,” she says.
One of her latest efforts is getting local produce into a campus cafeteria run by the food-service corporation Aramark. (Aramark has made pledges to use local food at other colleges, such as Furman University and the Johns Hopkins University.) At the cafeteria, where many dishes are cooked fresh in front of the students, Ms. DeLongpré envisions signs about the farmers who have provided the ingredients, to make a connection to the local economy and the benefits of small-scale agriculture. With food politics discussed in popular films like Super Size Me, and in books such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, Ms. DeLongpré thinks she can stimulate students’ appetites for healthier local meals, even if they must pay a little more for them.
But the market here also works against sustainability. Burger King, one of several fast-food restaurants on the campus, has a restaurant right next door to the cafeteria. As long as students want Burger King, Ms. DeLongpré acknowledges, the restaurant stays.
She also faces challenges in the sheer size of her institution. Relying on local resources often works best in small settings — it doesn’t scale up easily. Even with Florida’s long growing season, Ms. DeLongpré doubts that she could use local sources to satisfy all or even a significant portion of the university’s food needs.
“For a small college with one dining hall in New Hampshire to get all of its food locally is a great accomplishment,” she says, “but it’s so much easier to do than at a huge research university with 48,000 students.”
The university’s size poses challenges in other efforts as well. Mr. Renk’s biodiesel facility gets 500 gallons of vegetable oil from campus restaurants every month, and he scrounges what he can get from local ones. The university’s fleet burns 8,000 gallons of diesel a month. There simply isn’t enough vegetable oil in Gainesville to wean the fleet off petroleum, Mr. Renk says.
Strides at Small Schools
If small colleges don’t face quite the same problems of scale, they often face limits on resources. Richard A. Niesenbaum, a professor of biology at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., has been pushing sustainability on his 2,100-student campus for a decade, and the administration has committed to the idea only within the past few years. However, the president didn’t want to spend money to hire a sustainability coordinator, Mr. Niesenbaum says, so organizing efforts on campus depend on him and a dedicated group of students, professors, and staff members.
“Maybe we’re a small enough institution that individuals on the sustainability committee can handle that sort of thing,” he says. The group tackles one big issue a year; the first year it was recycling, followed by reducing paper use, and composting food waste. Next the committee will look at energy use — a focus the administration supports, as Pennsylvania faces energy deregulation and steep rises in energy costs within a few years.
In Southern California, Pitzer College should be fertile ground for a sustainability movement, yet it also faces familiar challenges. Founded in the 1960s, Pitzer is the alma mater of the sustainability guru L. Hunter Lovins. “We’re trying to do the right thing, but excruciatingly slowly,” says Paul Faulstich, an associate professor of environmental studies. “I think every decision at the academy should be made with an eye toward impact. Our economics at Pitzer College don’t allow us to do that.” He says Pitzer could put up some of the greenest buildings on the West Coast or provide organic and locally grown food, if only the college had more money.
Laura Skandera Trombley, Pitzer’s president, says sustainability is integral to the curriculum and history of her college. The convictions of the students at Pitzer, she says, have influenced changes in college operations, both large and small. Students have set up vegetable gardens, composting areas, and a “green bikes” program, which repairs castoff bikes and offers them to students who need to get around the Claremont Colleges, of which Pitzer is a part. Taking a cue from the students, the college is building a new residence hall that will get gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council, which has a rating system to evaluate the environmental impact of buildings.
Pitzer’s most striking sustainability effort shows up, oddly, in the lack of green on campus. Here in thirsty Southern California, significant portions of the campus lawn — which required frequent watering — have been removed and replaced with native and desert plants. The effort was started years ago by one of Pitzer’s professors, but Ms. Trombley has supported it. The college hired one of the world’s leading experts in desert plants to tend its prickly arboretum.
Crossing a street from Pitzer to Harvey Mudd College, another Claremont College, is like walking into a different world. The desert landscapes, which can look wild and unruly, abruptly give way to lush grass in rigid squares, on which students are playing soccer.
Asked about sustainability at Harvey Mudd, Maria Klawe, the new president there, said the topic is “on the radar” and that committees are being formed to examine “how we should change our curriculum based on the fact that the world is changing.” She points out that Harvey Mudd has two buildings certified by the U.S. Green Building Council.
But she thinks tearing up the grass and replacing it with cacti would probably be a thorny issue for people on campus.
“I have a feeling it would be hard to convince the trustees to change that expanse of grass,” she says, just as sprinklers turn on outside her office. “There is enormous sentimental attachment to that being there.”
Emotions are not the only force countering sustainability efforts at some institutions. Last month Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Jim Doyle, caught some political flak when he declared that four University of Wisconsin campuses — Green Bay, Oshkosh, River Falls, and Stevens Point — would be “off the grid” and using all renewable energy by 2012.
Mark Green, a Republican U.S. congressman who is Mr. Doyle’s opponent in the state’s race for governor, said the project used money that would otherwise keep down tuition and support conservation efforts across the state. “Perhaps the governor should spend more time worrying about how to make our UW schools more affordable for Wisconsin families who have watched tuition skyrocket by 50 percent in the last four years,” Mr. Green said in a statement.
Selling Sacrifice
Sustainability’s proponents face a deeper challenge than either sentimentality or economics: They want to redefine people’s tastes and their perceptions of “the good life.” Supporters of the movement will sometimes argue that sustainability doesn’t necessarily entail sacrifice — that is, if you believe it isn’t a sacrifice to give up the headaches of traffic and unstable gas prices (along with the convenience of your car).
It’s a tough sell, even among allies. Ed Poppell, vice president for finance and administration at the University of Florida, helped raise parking rates on campus and promoted other efforts to get people out of their cars and onto bikes or two legs. In a movement that has been associated with leftist politics, he is a registered Republican who speaks eloquently about the crises of the world and the need to pursue sustainability. Some of his peers call him “born again” on the issue.
But he still drives to work every day. “I give myself the excuse that in my position I have to be very flexible,” he says, even as he acknowledges “it’s difficult to tell people to change behaviors if I’m unwilling to change mine.”
Sustainability advocates also disagree on the kinds of changes that universities should be making. Some institutions, such as the University of Florida, have emphasized the social-responsibility component of sustainability by setting living-wage standards for staff members. The university also requires businesses that operate on campus to meet those standards.
But the social-responsibility angle is often underemphasized or ignored in sustainability programs at other institutions, which tend to focus on the environmental component. Davis Bookhart, who is managing sustainability projects at Johns Hopkins, says his efforts to improve mass transportation and energy efficiency on the campus might have some residual social benefits, but he doesn’t believe that should be a focus of the university’s sustainability drive.
“I think [sustainability] means focusing exclusively on how we get the most out of our resources,” like energy, water, and landscape, he says. Social justice, living wages, and democracy are important issues, “but they are not sustainability issues. ... I think they get lumped in with sustainability because sustainability becomes the catchphrase for everything that is right and progressive and good,” he says.
Colorado’s Mr. Newport says that on the whole, colleges “really suck at bringing the social into sustainability.” But he believes that focusing on human needs is a sure way to keep a sustainability movement going.
Supporters say another way to maintain momentum is through education. Mr. Cortese, of the higher-education sustainability association, says the movement is hobbled if it is not incorporated into the curriculum.
“Helping to create a healthy, just, and sustainable society is the core mission of higher education,” he says. “If you look at the charter for higher education, higher education is given academic freedom and the ability not to pay taxes in exchange for creating a civil and thriving society.”
But mixing sustainability and education has already drawn accusations of indoctrination. Last year the Center of the American Experiment, a free-market think tank in Minnesota, attacked St. Olaf College when it injected sustainability themes into its curriculum.
“St. Olaf seems intent on dictating to students the ‘right’ way to live, work, and learn,” the center said in a statement on its Web site on education issues, Intellectual Takeout. “This is an altogether unsustainable approach for a college committed by its mission statement to stimulate critical thinking.” The center’s statement also said that “consuming fossil fuels is one of the great drivers of our economy.”
The view that environmental and economic issues are competing interests is old thinking, Mr. Cortese says. “The strategies that we have used to get where we are today have had such negative social, economic, and environmental side effects that we need a new lens.”
Higher education will need to come up with new energy sources, cleaner kinds of products, better designs for cities, and more effective ways of dealing with social problems if civilization is going to move ahead, he says. Universities should assume the role they took in winning the space race and in waging the war on cancer, he says, and take on sustainability as their next great challenge.
The University of Florida recently completed a tally of all the courses on campus that cover some aspect of sustainability, with the intention of putting together degrees or certificates on the subject. Dr. Machen says he is not convinced that sustainability initiatives will always save the university money, so he would rather identify sustainability with teaching and research to ensure its future at Florida.
“If there is not an academic component to something, it gets marginalized,” he says, “and there could come a time when it is seen as a nonvalued add-on.”
After all, teaching the idea is consistent with the mission of the university, he says: “I graduate 15,000 students a year. If I could turn out half of them with a sensitivity to sustainability and turn them loose on the world, that’s a hell of a contribution.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Special Report Volume 53, Issue 9, Page A10
