Getting to Green
An administrator pushes, on a shoestring budget, to move his university and the world toward a more sustainable equilibrium.
An administrator pushes, on a shoestring budget, to move his university and the world toward a more sustainable equilibrium.
February 28, 2013 - 5:23pm
Giving our curriculum, our co-curricular activities and our research a regional emphasis -- an explicit awareness of, and engagement with, local geography -- can do more than just improve town/gown relations. It can position our communities to survive an increasingly challenging future, and our institutions to serve an increasingly central role in that future.
Comments
February 18, 2013 - 7:06pm
Town and gown. How long we've all heard about the tension between a college or university and the community that surrounds it. As a trope, it's been around for decades -- maybe longer.
February 14, 2013 - 4:27pm
From time to time, I rant about sustainability explicitly from the point of view of a farmer. That's because I believe that farmers -- more and more unlike the majority of folks in North America -- experience and interact with the biosphere directly. Which is not to say that we always gain great wisdom from, and exercise exquisite stewardship in, those interactions of course. But even our most ineffective (or negatively effective) interactions are -- as a result of direct physical involvement -- informed by a wider range of considerations and potential understanding than could possibly be conveyed in a YouTube video. Or a textbook. Or a lecture.
February 7, 2013 - 2:30pm
One of the key reasons that North American society has become so unsustainable in so many ways is that we don't see the results of our own decision-making processes. When I say that to folks who work to promote sustainability on campuses, the most common reaction is "right - greenhouse gases are invisible." The second most frequent response has to do with time lags.
February 6, 2013 - 8:36pm
I'm more and more convinced that assessing/accounting for environmental sustainability only makes sense at a regional scale. While "region" isn't precisely defined, it's something smaller than most nations, smaller than most US states (except maybe on the eastern seaboard), larger than a city, certainly larger than any campus. But sustainability extends beyond its environmental aspect, and for other (social, economic) forms of sustainability, the regional scale is even more critical. Certainly, it seems so in a US context.
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