Wellness

Ultimately, the point of a sustainable campus is to provide a nourishing and supporting learning environment that promotes personal, community, and planetary well-being. Placed in an ecological context, we emphasize the importance of biodiversity, atmospheric and oceanic circulations, and ecosystem services in relationship to the human community. The idea of sustainability necessarily implies that human health is linked to ecosystem health.

Yet wellness also provides an extraordinary lifelong learning opportunity. How do we model the importance of sustainable personal and professional lives? Don’t most students, staff and faculty, complain about being overworked, time stretched, and maxed out? Is it just the demands of the job, the context of American professional life, or the culture of higher education? Many campuses deal with a wide assortment of student (and staff/faculty) human health problems, often related to stress, including smoking, alcohol, funky diet, and poor physical conditioning.

Given the urgency of addressing the “planetary emergency,” there is no choice but to work intensively and thoroughly. But if work is perceived as meaningful, purposeful, service-oriented, and collaborative, it is considerably more fulfilling. This is a crucial curricular and administrative mandate—how to provide meaningful work, balanced with a healthy work place, and opportunities for relaxation and leisure. Working hard doesn’t always mean working well.

As a foundation for campus wellness, I encourage curricular and workplace efforts that generate reflective awareness about diet, nutrition, exercise, spending time outdoors, stress-reduction, and meditative activities. A healthy campus is a more interesting and vital learning community, provides students with wellness habits and routines, and may even save money on health insurance. I suggest that it’s hypocritical to advocate for a sustainable planet and community when we don’t maximize human wellness.

Investment

Every college campus has a significant economic impact on the surrounding community. Colleges, communities, and businesses can work together to transform their regions into thriving sustainable economies. Colleges serve as dynamic economic multipliers. Their investment decisions have profound ramifications. What would happen if these decisions were made so as to train a new generation of sustainability leaders for a green economy?

Imagine our dynamic sustainable campus with its innovative energy systems, expansive gardens, and creative use of recycled materials. Consider these initiatives as the source for partnerships with green businesses. The campus becomes an incubator, the place where businesses and faculty work with students and community members to develop innovative entrepreneurial approaches. Faculty and business leaders work together to consider the technical skills, life experience attributes, and knowledge foundation that will best equip the new sustainability professions.

When large universities support green businesses they provide secure and stable markets that allow those businesses to reinvest in research. Smaller colleges can help support local farmers or other green vendors for whom the extra business may be crucial. By awarding contracts and opportunities to green businesses, campuses support the elements of a green regional economy.

Similar approaches can be applied to college investments. Are our portfolios sufficiently green? Which of our investments support sustainability initiatives? How might endowment investment guidelines incorporate rigorous ecological cost accounting? Is investment measured exclusively by the percentage return in a financial portfolio or do we consider criteria such as zero-carbon energy initiatives, ingenious recycling programs, or other green investment opportunities?

Governance

How does an organizational culture support and implement sustainability as a way of life? What is the relationship between sustainability and participatory governance? How do you use sustainability as a means to motivate, unify, and inspire an entire campus?

Benjamin Barber in his groundbreaking book Strong Democracy describes thin (or representative) democracy as a small group of elected officials making all of the decisions all of the time. In contrast, with strong democracy everybody makes some of the decisions some of the time. This makes good sense in a setting where all constituents contribute ideas, voice, accountability, and leadership to sustainable practices and policies.

On a college campus there must be alignment between mission, governance, and curriculum. If the motivation is entirely generated from the grassroots, it will always be a struggle to influence senior leadership and the Board of Trustees. If leadership for sustainability comes mainly from the administration, the people may not necessarily follow. This is why sustainable practices must built into the mission, master plan, and strategic plan for a campus, conceived as crucial to its educational philosophy. Otherwise, sustainability will be marginalized, trendy, and viewed as just another special interest.

Leadership at all levels of an organization provides meaningful support in dozens of ways: building sustainability initiatives into job descriptions and performance evaluations, setting curricular objectives, following reasonable but firm guidelines regarding procurement, commencement, transportation, and other aspects of events or operations.

Two caveats: Sustainability is not the political philosophy of an esoteric, green politics. It is beyond traditional left/right categories, embodying elements of traditional conservative and progressive political approaches. Second, decisions related to governance will be complex and controversial, and not always consensus-driven.

FOOD

Conceive of a college campus as a food-producing, edible landscaping, demonstration-garden laboratory. Lawns are bisected by garden strips and framed with permaculture shrubbery. Rooftop gardens supply food for high-rise dormitories. Administration buildings have small greenhouses attached to their entrances. Cafeterias not only serve more local and organic food, but they have compelling exhibits that illustrate farm to garden food pathways, or calculate the energy costs of different methods of food production. The campus becomes a local and regional center for cooperative food growing efforts, a home for intergenerational, culturally diverse, bioregionally based experiments in food preparation and production.

Everybody has to eat and the curricular potential of learning about food unveils dozens of learning opportunities from lessons about biodiversity to practical, real world food-growing skills. Where does your food come from? How is it prepared? How much energy is used in its production? What foods are best suited for the ecology of our campus? What’s the cultivation and domestication history of the food we eat?

College administrations can lead the way by incorporating food production schemes into campus master plans, or by looking for inexpensive and innovative ways to initiate food landscaping opportunities, or by using more local and organic foods at college and community events.

MATERIALS

Just outside of Austin, Texas, the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, has a small complex of office buildings and residences exclusively using recycled materials, oriented towards energy efficiency, water conservation, and low cost. With his ingenious collaborators, Pliny Fisk, the lead architect, has developed a style resembling advanced tinker toy. The buildings are constructed so there is a seamless connection between design, sustainability, and transparency. Visitors and dwellers alike immediately understand the purpose, function, and origins of all of the materials. This is an outstanding template for construction approaches on college campuses.

Materials refers to the manipulation, rearrangement, and heating and cooling of matter to produce the stuff of our goods, appliances, dwellings, and tools—from laptop computers to Nike sneakers. Sustainable materials practice emphasizes minimizing the energy use and byproducts involved in the manufacture of these goods, valuing resilience, durability, and recyclability. Whether you choose to use recycled materials in campus construction projects, or initiate “paperless” meetings, the mindful use of materials is intrinsic to countless procurement decisions.

From an infrastructure perspective, life cycle analysis and ecological cost accounting have a major role to play in coordinating sustainable materials practices. Every campus purchase has both an ecological and economic impact—from using green cleaning materials to installing recycled carpets. Materials originate someplace on the planet, derived from the biosphere and delivered to your doorstep. What do we use and where does it come from? Which materials are most likely to minimize ecological impact?

A campus is an ecological location with a geographical, cultural, and landscape context for its materials use. What works best in Arizona may not be well suited for Maine. However, we can share our experiences and experiments by developing common expectations about sustainable materials practice. Why shouldn’t this awareness become a priority for a whole campus pedagogy—a way to build interdisciplinary focus and meaning among engineers, architects, artists, ecologists, and educators? What better way is there to learn about how we use (and abuse) our place and planet?

ENERGY

In the late 1970’s, the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) hosted an annual Toward Tomorrow Fair, a showcase for what was then called “appropriate technology.” I vividly remember the poster advertising the fair. It depicted a small city in a campus-like setting, with windmills, solar panels, passive solar architecture, bicycles, monorails, and all manner of farms, gardens, and orchards. Imagine a college campus with a similar landscape—buildings displaying a full range of renewable energy resources, creating a uniquely educational energy architecture. Each building serves as a model for conservation efficiency, ecological design, and interactive learning, powered by an innovative renewable energy source.

Energy refers to the transformation of matter to produce heat and electricity. The point of sustainable energy practices is to maximize the efficiency of those processes so as to minimize unwanted byproducts. We require a new energy algorithm that enables us to heat and cool our buildings, move people and their goods from one place to another, and power our machines, without simultaneously altering the biosphere.

For colleges and universities a primary challenge is how to approach zero-carbon energy use. This can be accomplished through a combination of ingenious technical innovations, renewable energy sources, and rigorous conservation/retrofitting. It’s essential that these efforts are fully transparent so that all energy users understand the flow from source to destination to byproduct, or what is typically described as life cycle analysis.

Energy cost accounting, the foundation of a truthful ecological economics, should be built into all budgetary approaches, incorporating not only the short and long term campus dollars and cents (sense) but also the ecological and climatic ramifications of such decisions. On a more tangible level we can link the magnitude of energy choices to the scale of daily behaviors. How does turning on a switch or turning up the thermostat impact both the traditional budgetary spreadsheet, but also the planetary carbon budget? I can think of no better educational project than outfitting all campus buildings with the capacity to monitor such choices by calibrating all of the necessary equivalencies and ratios. Campuses can become monitoring cooperatives, defined by the ubiquity and transparency of their energy networking systems.

Energy structures serve as instructional landmarks on the campus landscape. Windmills, solar panels, and geothermal installations all require interpretive displays that help campus users better understand the complexity of energy choices, while allowing our students to develop new habits of thinking about their energy use.

The Nine Elements of a Sustainable Campus: Introduction

When I visit college campuses or educational conferences, I often give a talk on "The Nine Elements of a Sustainable Campus."
I recently finished an essay on that topic. Over the next few weeks I will post the essay as blog entries. The first section explains how my original inspiration for this came from The Whole Earth Catalog.




From the Whole Earth Catalog to a Sustainable Campus

Forty years ago, in the late 1960’s, I was a college student in New York City. Every Friday afternoon I would hop on the subway, get off at Bleecker Street, and wander through the record stores and bookshops. It was an exciting time to be a student given the profound social, cultural, and political changes. Every week there would be new books, magazines or records in the shops and I wanted to read and listen to all of them.

One day I spotted an unusual, oversized paperback book with a stunning picture of the earth on the cover. Laced across the top in a familiar 60’s San Francisco style font was the title: The Whole Earth Catalog. I flipped through the pages and glanced at the sections—whole systems, natural history, land use, community, learning, tools—and each page was organized like the “things to do” books I used to play with as a kid. The catalog recommended books to read, maps to peruse, ideas to consider, and tools of all kinds. Implicit throughout the text was a message of sustainability posed as a challenge for an impending era of ecological limits. For many years and through many editions I did the best I could to track down the various resources in the Whole Earth Catalog. It became my most treasured reading list and guide.

In retrospect The Whole Earth Catalog served as a visionary inspiration for living a sustainable life. It provided an enduring, resilient, community-based, do-it-yourself, hands-on guide for living and learning. Forty years later, I realize that my entire career path is a response to that challenge. Now as a college president this is the educational philosophy that continues to guide me. Sustainability is not just a LEED certified building or providing more local foods in the cafeteria. It is a powerful philosophy of life, derived from ecological principles, common sense, and a respect for the complex magnificence of our remarkable planet.

Sustainability as a “way of life” has a long tradition in American higher education. Whether its Thoreau’s musings and experiments, Helen and Scott Nearing’s homesteading, Lewis Mumford’s vision of ecological cities and technology, or the countless attempts to link character, community, and ecological living (see David Shi’s pertinent history The Simple Life), the Whole Earth catalog served to coalesce and revitalize a perennial philosophy.

Forty year later, the ecological stakes are much, much higher. It’s crucial to understand that sustainability is a response to a planetary emergency. We are in the early stages of the sixth megaextinction (a catastrophic loss of species), plunging declines in biodiversity, and a rapidly destabilizing climatic/oceanic circulation.

This response poses an immediate challenge for all educators. How do we teach sustainability as a way of life? Make no mistake—this is the single biggest challenge for higher education—ultimately connected to turbulent economic times, the accessibility and affordability of schooling, and how we think about the future of the planet. Our goal should be nothing less than to train a new generation of sustainability leadership, graduates who understand the intricate connections between economics and ecology, place and planet, how we live and the consequences of our actions.

As a means for meeting this challenge, and as a guide for both curricular and institutional transformation, I propose nine elements of a sustainable campus, designed to evoke a whole new twenty-first century catalog of transformational sustainable practices. These entail three broad categories—Infrastructure (Energy, Materials, and Food), Community (Governance, Investment, and Wellness), and Learning (Curriculum, Interpretation, and Aesthetics). Imagine these categories as dynamic, unfolding, emergent, and intrinsically interconnected. Any sustainable practice may involve multiple categories. For example, a sparkly and ecologically efficient Platinum-LEED building may reduce the carbon footprint of a campus, but if it doesn’t also serve an inspirational curricular or interpretive function, it may not achieve its full educational potential. These nine elements aren’t a checklist, nor are they criteria for measuring success. They are meant to evoke the necessity of envisioning and applying sustainable practices to all aspects of campus life.

A sustainable campus requires a balance between protocols, behaviors, habits and routines, along with creativity, deliberation, and reflection. We need peer-reviewed protocols such as those developed by the ACUPCC (American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment) so we have a common agreement as to appropriate standards. Such protocols serve as the basis for supporting sustainable daily life practices, from energy conservation to growing local foods. The subsequent behaviors must also be the subject of deliberation. Why exactly are we doing this and what do we hope to accomplish?

At Unity College in Maine, we aspire that our campus becomes an exemplary learning and living laboratory for a sustainable culture. We hope that people who visit our campus (students, parents, community members, donors) will get dozens of ideas that will in turn inspire their own practices. We feel that if we can do this in rural Maine where the winters are very long, at a college that is undeniably “resource strapped” we can set an example for any campus anywhere. Like many other excellent colleges that share similar aspirations, we are learning how to do this, and many hours of effort and intention separate our aspirations from our accomplishments. We are collaborators and learners. Just because Unity College has an environmental mission, it doesn’t mean that we lack controversies, contradictions, and countervailing influences. Sometimes we slip into self-righteousness in our efforts to be virtuous. That’s why a healthy dose of humor is always required. As the poet Jim Dodge writes, purity is the end of potential!

As a college president, these nine elements are the source of my motivation and ambition. They reflect how I attempt to apply what I learned from the Whole Earth Catalog. This is way more than a career challenge. It’s deeply rooted in a search for meaning and purpose, a values-based orientation, and a commitment to fulfilling my responsibility as a planetary citizen.