AASHE Sustainability Discussion Forums Launched

AASHE has launched a suite of campus sustainability discussion forums covering topics in education and research; campus operations; and campus planning, engagement, and administration. Anyone with an interest in learning about or contributing to the growing body of knowledge on campus sustainability may participate in the forums. The aim is to provide a central place for sharing ideas and best practices and asking and answering questions. Contributors are expected to be largely North American, but the forums are open to all. The forum topics parallel the 17 sub-categories in AASHE's Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System (STARS), released in September (STARS v.1.0 Early Release). The 17 topics are: co-curricular education, curriculum, research, buildings, climate, dining services, energy, grounds, purchasing, transportation, water, waste, coordination and planning, diversity and affordability, human resources, investment, and public engagement.

Paul Rowland to Head the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education

AASHE's new executive director is Paul Rowland, "who has been serving as Dean of the College of Education at the University of Idaho since 2006, brings to AASHE an outstanding record of administrative leadership and a life-long commitment to environmental and sustainability issues."

Read all about him here:
http://www.aashe.org/highlights/press-releases/paul-rowland

Climate Action Planning Wiki

AASHE and ACUPCC have recently begun a Climate Action Planning Wiki, wwith initial textual content from Walter Simpson, formerly of the University of Buffalo and UB Green. This Wiki enables anyone to enter changes to the current content.

It would be very helpful to the sustainability movement and to climate action planning, if SCUPers with deep experience in institution-wide planning were to go over there and check it out. If you've always wondered how it would be like to use a Wiki, this is a good chance to find out.

We haven't had a chance to read through it yet.

Lester Brown: Mobilizing for a Clean-Energy Civilization

Lester Brown was the opening keynote speaker for AASHE 2008:

Today's environmentalism has been called a 'Third Wave.' Unlike the conservation ethic of the early 1900s, or the calls for anti-pollution regulation and the mass nostalgia for a more agrarian past in the 1970s, we are now looking at a fully globalized world, in which the decline of one nation would send shockwaves through the rest of the world, due to our linked economies, limited natural resources and shared climate.

Therefore, says Lester Brown, author of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, "Sustainable development is not a sexy term, but a sound concept. You hear a lot about a 'more sustainable this,' or a 'less sustainable that.' But the reality is, we're sustainable or we're not. The only way to avoid decline and collapse is a sustainable economy--a sustainable civilization."

The idea was met with cheers from the audience, a group 1,700 strong from universities and colleges all over the country, most of whom have spent years if not decades trying to make their colleges greener, and their students prepared for a world of rapidly shifting priorities and problems.

Campus-Sustainability Conference Is the Biggest Ever

From Scott Carlson at The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Buildings & Grounds" blog, comes this post: (He could also have mentioned that in late November of 2006, only three years ago, AASHE did not exist; and we will mention that SCUP has meaningfully supported the AASHE startup and growth from its inception.)

Among higher-education conferences, the one that got underway here Sunday is unusual. In the exhibit hall, vendors show off $15,000 composters as if they were sports cars. The registration clerk asks you if you require a vegan meal plan. People calculate the environmental impact of taking the stairs versus the escalators to conference sessions.

It’s the national conference of the Association for the Advancement for Sustainability in Higher Education, and thanks to the popularity of sustainability these days, the conference is bigger than ever. This year’s event drew about 1,750 attendees from more than 400 institutions. Compare that to the association’s conference two years ago at Arizona State University, which drew about 600 people.

How to Shop for Carbon Offsets (+ Update on STARS)

From Elizabeth Redden at Inside Higher Ed: At the AASHE conference, representatives from the American College and University Presidents Climae Commitment released guidelines to assist colleges and universities in their purchase of carbon offsets and AASHE representatives discussed progress with the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS):

Under the Presidents Climate Commitment, colleges set their own time frames for reaching a climate-neutral state. In the short term, given current constraints like fossil fuel-based electricity grids and inefficient older buildings, a college looking to quite quickly cut net emissions to zero would probably have to rely in part on the controversial and confusing process of purchasing carbon offsets, according to new, 73-page guidelines released by the Presidents Climate Commitment at the conference Monday.

The authors of the guidelines are sensitive to the criticism that offsets allow wealthy institutions to “buy their way out” of their sins by purchasing credits for emissions reduced elsewhere but not through their own activities. The guidelines emphasize that colleges should focus on reductions within their own organizations first, while “investments in offsets can be made as soon as these activities are initiated” (in other words, the two steps can happen simultaneously, so long as internal reductions are first pursued and prioritized).

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In addition to conducting inventories of their greenhouse gas emissions, many colleges have been conducting more general sustainability audits, a process described in depth at a session on “Assessing Sustainability” Monday afternoon. Several speakers described using the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System, a common self-reporting framework being piloted by about 90 institutions that offers the promise of comparisons across institutions over time.

Others described institution-specific efforts. Beau Mitchell, sustainability coordinator for the College of the Menominee Nation, in Wisconsin, described combing through other colleges’ sustainability audits to identify 108 indicators applicable to tribal colleges. Given the high value many Native American tribes place on the land, he described incorporating cultural indicators, quantifying how many students speak a native language or attend ceremonies, for instance, and gaining qualitative data through interviews. “What did your elders tell you about the woods; what did your elders tell you about the water?”

Sustainable Curriculums

Elizabeth Redden reports on some of the AASHE conference for Inside Higher Ed:

Here at the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education conference, which concluded Tuesday, plenty of sessions focused on the operations side of things — energy savings, transportation demand management, and commercial composting. But also in town to give talks were a significant number of faculty members, from a wide range of disciplines, interested in leading from the classroom lectern.

“When you go back to your colleges and the math faculty say ‘I can’t do sustainability in the classroom,’ you can say, ‘No, no, I know someone who does it,’ ” said Thomas Pfaff, of Ithaca College.

Pfaff does it. As outlined on his Web site, his classes use real-world data, such as data on world grain production or atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, as a starting point for standard calculus problems. “None of this in my mind requires changing the calculus content,” said Pfaff, who said that in solving the problems students find opportunities for reflection.

“They’re not simply being told there is a problem, and I’m not telling them there is a problem…. I just give them the data and you tell me what’s going on,” said Pfaff.

From Van Jones to Peter Senge - On Sustainability

Can you sustain 14-hour days at a sustainability conference? "G. Rendell" provides an initial overview of the AASHE conference by connecting the opening plenary by Van Jones with thelater plenary by Peter Senge:

Both Jones and Senge depicted the current sustainability crisis as having origins dating back to the 19th century, and both indicated that the solution lies in a return to the basic human values which all religions teach, but which modern social paradigms have perverted. In Senge’s terminology, there is a disconnect between who we really are and how we’re currently living; we need to remember how we want to live, and ask ourselves how we should educate our children in order to live that way. Both speakers were clear that the real problem we face is based in the fact that we haven’t been living, or educating, that way.

Between the opening and pre-prandial plenaries, however, the message got less philosophical and more directly encouraging. Reports from the front — from colleges and universities which have found ways to encourage faculty members to incorporate sustainability principles and examples into their curricula, from schools who have taken significant strides towards decreasing transportation demand, and from universities which have had remarkable success in facilitating and supporting active student leadership towards various forms of sustainability.

Guest Blogger: Are American Colleges Living Labs for Renewable-Energy Use?

This first item was not a session at the AASHE conference, but is a guest blog post from AASHE staffer Niles Barnes on the "Buildings & Grounds" blog at the Chronicle:

What worries me is that I don’t see much happening with renewable-energy sources such as ocean thermal, ocean current, or tidal power. Is it cost that is holding back development of these and other potential resources?

I’m interested in hearing from others who may be involved in or know of other innovative and creative renewable-energy projects on campuses. What else is being studied, installed, or perhaps flying under the radar? Will the United States, through the leadership of colleges and universities, reach the goal of achieving all renewable electricity production by 2018, as Al Gore has advocated? Is there specific legislation that the next administration will need to support to encourage the development of the necessary infrastructure?

The Year in Sustainability - AASHE's Latest Digest' Available

The AASHE Bulletin is a weekly email newsletter that documents accomplishments and shares resources related to advancing sustainability in higher education. If you don't subscribe, you should. AASHE has just released the 230-page "digest" of all of its newsletter content from 2007 (PDF, free).

The Digest offers ample evidence of a broadening and deepening of campus sustainability efforts, with more institutions of all types getting involved and campuses undertaking more significant measures than ever before to improve their sustainability performance. Of particular note is the fact that over the course of 2007, 452 presidents and chancellors committed to climate neutrality by signing the American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment and at least 35 other colleges and universities announced their own climate commitments and energy conservation plans

Digest stories also document the emergence of ranking and rating systems that compare campuses on sustainability criteria. There were at least 6 separate attempts to evaluate campus sustainability performance in 2007, ranging from the Sustainable Endowments Institute's College Sustainability Report Card to Grist magazine's "15 Green Colleges and Universities." AASHE entered the field as well with the release of the first draft of its Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS).