Denver -- Ed Begley Jr. opened the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education with a kinetic and frenetic speech on some of the themes that attendees here are surely thinking about: How to go green on a tight budget (the St. Elsewhere actor did not always have money), for example, and how to reap benefits while you’re going green (in saving money or creating jobs). The planet is losing species like an airplane shedding rivets in midflight, he said.
“It’s not just about saving money, folks,” he said. It’s about saving our butts.
The conference marks a maturing moment for a higher-education association that has grown fast over the past several years. I’m told that the conference this year has 2,400 attendees, compared with 1,700 at the previous one, in Raleigh, N.C., two years ago. And the current figure doesn’t count some 500 students who turned up for a “student summit” on Sunday. They were treated to a speech by the Olympic snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler, who is also a climate-change activist and the name behind a line of eco-friendly outerwear.
The conference is hardly just a parade of eco-celebrities. though. The program is one of the most intense I’ve seen in higher education—even a bit overwhelming. Many higher-ed organizations treat their annual meetings not unlike vacations for their members—they knock off early in the afternoon to cavort through the city or hit the slopes or the beach, depending on where they are.
Not so at AASHE 2010. The sessions started at 7 a.m on Monday and went nonstop until almost 7 p.m, with more to follow tomorrow. And there are scores of sessions to choose from. Many of the slots have been split up into 10- and 20-minute chunks, sharing thematic threads. Some of the topics might seem soft, but others seem fairly complicated and wonky. There are sessions on cutting carbon emissions through technology, on sustainability culture at conservative and religious institutions, on sustainability and endowment investments.
A summit meeting of institutions that have signed the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment immediately follows the close of the conference.
The conference comes just days after The Chronicle ran an essay by Peter Wood, president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, who compared sustainability to the ethnic-diversity movement and said it had an agenda of indoctrination. As one might expect from an ideological group on the lookout for offending campus ideologies, the article had passages that might have puzzled people who have observed the sustainability movement for some time.
I mentioned Mr. Wood’s essay to a sustainability director on my way here, and was surprised that he seemed to take it in stride—he even welcomed it. Such expressions are what the sustainability movement needs to throw it back on its heels a bit, he said. Sustainability advocates need to prove that they are offering something of value, he argued, not just occupying some perceived moral high ground.
Updates on the conference will appear on this blog over the next couple of days.
