Getting to Green

Parallel, but in reverse

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 02:07:24 GMT

No, I'm not thinking about backing up to parallel park (do drivers know how to do that any more?), although my topic is auto-related.

I was reading an article in New Scientist magazine (available online, but by subscription only I'm afraid). It spoke about the hydrogen economy -- or the lack of the one which had been predicted -- and mentioned Arnold Swarzenegger's seemingly futile aspiration for a "hydrogen highway" with 200 hydrogen refueling stations. (To date, California has 5.)

And I was listening on NPR on my drive home to a story about a San Jose entrepreneur who's trying to jump-start the electric vehicle/plug-in hybrid market by deploying electric recharging stations around his city. It reminded me of a similar print story (in the Guardian) about how the California government had similar (although, of course, more ambitious) plans for San Francisco.

And, somehow, I was reminded of the story of the demise of another, earlier, form of automotive propulsion. One which, in its day, proved itself more effective than the internal combustion engine which was both its primary competitor and its successor. For years, it out-sold any internal combustion powered car -- the Stanley Steamer. It set a world land speed record which no internal combustion-powered car broke for five years. (FWIW, the most powerful railroad locomotive built to this day was steam-powered.)

If you do a little research, you'll find a lot of different explanations for the demise of the Stanley. Disallowed from racing. Too heavy. Too pricey. Bad suspension. Design obsolescence. The development of the electric starter (hand-cranking being a previous disadvantage of internal-combustion cars). Poor management.

But what really killed the Stanley was hoof-and-mouth disease. In the 1910's and early 1920's, hoof-and-mouth raged across the country. The informal network of water troughs which had been set up to allow horses to drink was closed down, to prevent transmission of the disease through saliva. (Some still survive adjacent to town squares or small parks, but most have long-since been converted to planters.) Drivers of steam cars had depended on these same water troughs to refill their tanks. (Think of the pictures you've seen of water towers alongside railroad lines in the first half of the 20th century. Same sort of thing.)

So, with no convenient way to refill the water tank (which was required more often than gasoline/kerosene), the steam car fell out of favor. Maybe it would have died anyways, but the lack of watering-spots surely contributed to its demise.

I guess if the lack of watering-stations could kill a popular old form of propulsion, the lack of refilling or recharging stations can prevent adoption of a promising new one. Not sure that has any sort of cosmic significance, either forward or reversed. But I'm sure it goes to show ... something.

A new sheriff in town

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:27:41 GMT

One of the most frequent topics when sustainability wonks get together, in person or online, is "greenwashing". Greenwashing -- the design and production of products which can be marketed as contributing to sustainability, but which in practice change little or nothing for the better -- is a frequent practice and an even more frequent accusation. Would switching to product X, or service Y, or process Z really reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Are the benefits real? Is the approach well-intentioned but fundamentally flawed? Is the manufacturer doing the right thing internally, but using raw materials which are themselves extracted or transported in a non-sustainable way?

So many questions. So many factors. So much to know. So little (truth be told) in-house expertise.

When it comes to getting sustainable, we don't have time to wait for folks who are better qualified, better educated, more expert than ourselves. I know at Greenback, we'll welcome those folks with open arms, if and when they arrive. Our academics (at least some of them) are actively engaged in doing the scholarly and educational work which will provide more and better answers. But, as I've mentioned before, the hard questions don't fit well into our traditional academic disciplines -- they're in fields like "industrial ecology". (Does your school have a program in Industrial Ecology? Greenback certainly doesn't.) Our academy (writ large) needs to reinvent itself before it can invent the answers we need.

In the meantime, what would help those of us whose boots are on the ground (well, it's been kind of a wet and muddy fall, so "in the ground" might be more accurate) is some knowledgeable, honest and independent arbiter who will cut through the marketing hype and qualify/quantify/certify those products which actually make a substantial contribution to sustainability. The good news is that a credible candidate for just such a role is throwing its organizational hat into the ring.

When I was small (well, smaller than I am now), my dame wouldn't buy any electrical appliance which didn't have a little cardboard washer on the cord. The washer was printed with the trademark of Underwriters Laboratories (UL), and it certified that the appliance was safe for consumer use. Electric appliance safety may be less of an issue than it was in decades past, but UL is still around and has found a new calling. UL is undertaking to be the certifier of choice for product sustainability claims. They've got a history of independence and integrity which well suits them to the job.

Details (such as they exist) are here. Most of the verbiage is still phrased in the future tense, but you can sign up to be kept in the loop as things progress. I'm certainly encouraged; this is a step in the right direction. It's not the only step we need -- by a long shot -- but it's a big one.

Creature comforts; dealing with dinosaurs

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:29:10 GMT

Last summer, executives at three of Japan's largest banks decreed that all their offices would be cooled only to 82 degrees Fahrenheit. It's part of a nationwide initiative called "Cool Biz", whereby businesses compete for customer loyalty by demonstrating leadership in greenhouse gas reduction. Salarymen have reportedly made a significant sacrifice of social status by going to work tie-less as a result.

What caught my eye was a comment attributed to an unnamed professor of physiology: “82 degrees can be comfortable only if you’re thin, naked and stay still.”

What BS! I'm not particularly thin, I rarely (if ever) work outside naked, I never stay still while I'm working outside, and it's often over 82. Hell, over the years it's often been over 92. Sometimes, it's been over 102! Sure, the higher the temperature and the humidity get, the lower my activity level and the shorter its uninterrupted duration, but let's get real here -- bank employees working indoors don't typically do a lot of heavy physical labor. Pushing pencils (or computer keys) at 82 degrees F isn't going to make you sweat unless you're morbidly obese or otherwise extremely ill. If it does, see your doctor, not your building operator.

I reacted pretty strongly to that little quote, I admit. When I first read of the joint executive decision, I thought how impressed I was by a culture where businesses work together to address (in whatever small part) a social problem, and where consumers actually consider demonstrated social responsibility levels in determining which firms to patronize. What a concept!

But the physiologist's inane little comment made its way into virtually every US news article on the subject that I could find. Don't know whether it was featured as prominently in the Japanese press (I don't read Japanese), but the US media clearly loved it.

That professor, and the reporters who so consistently quoted him, reminded me of just how much social inertia the sustainability movement still has to overcome. I shouldn't have needed reminding -- some of the key decision-makers at Greenback are still in the Pleistocene when it comes to acknowledging anthropogenic climate disruption. Moving a campus towards sustainable practices and a sustainability-imbued curriculum is an extended exercise in managing organizational change. Dinosaur decision-makers don't like change very much. Sometimes they go along with high-toned pronouncements in public fora but, when push comes to shove, passive resistance is a favored technique.

I try not to use the term "dinosaur" in open discussion on such matters (or such people). And I make a conscious effort never to use the phrase "brain the size of a walnut". Ever. Even in the abstract. It doesn't help me get the policy, and other high-level, organizational decisions that I (and Greenback) need.

And I understand that dinosaurs were hardly evolutionary failures -- failures don't stay at the top of the food chain for hundreds of millions of years. Dinosaurs were supremely well adapted to their environment, and only became unable to compete when that environment changed drastically around them. Similarly, the folks who have made it to the top of the food chain at Greenback (as, I'm sure, at many other institutions) aren't stupid. They're merely superbly conditioned, and so still reactive, to an environment -- a paradigm -- which has been overtaken by events.

Since they're not stupid, they can be reasoned with. As opportunities arise, their fears (and it's usually fear which is driving that resistance, passive or otherwise) can be addressed and a useful compromise reached. But each policy-level change decision is slowed and made more difficult (and less certain) by the fact that the people who have to buy into it are, by conscious selection, the ones most thoroughly adapted to the status quo ante.

One of the patterns I noted at the recent AASHE convention was that the schools which have had the most success in addressing sustainability issues are typically ones where the required chain of decision-makers is short. Either the sustainability office(r) reports high in the organizational structure, or there's a dual-reporting relationship which allows a similar amount of political sway. Several successful sustainability folk described their role -- at least in part -- as serving as a bridge between faculty and staff. Getting the sustainability message out at a high organizational level can lead to success, and getting it out at multiple points in the org chart (even if lower down) can also be successful.

But stimulating change in a large, super-stable organization requires a large enough lever and a place to stand. And it helps if that place isn't directly beneath a dinosaur.

Higher ed opportunities -- hi-tech, lo-tech

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:37:02 GMT

First, the hi-tech -- a tremendous opportunity for innovative engineering and business schools.

I know this isn't going to win me any friends at MichState, but it's pretty obvious that the "Detroit 3" (formerly the "Big 3") automakers have run their course. They've had their day and, not that long ago, they were making money hand over fist. Ford, for instance, was able to give its investors a 200+ percent run-up over a 3-year period (1996-1999). Unfortunately, that sort of return came from externalizing lots of environmental costs -- those were the days of big SUVs, big markups, big profits (up to $15,000 per vehicle). The money that went into Ford's stockholders' pockets is being paid off right now by you, me and everyone else on the planet.

Go a little further back in history, and the same pattern is even clearer. In the 1920's, GM conspired with at least two oil companies and a number of GM suppliers to purchase and dismantle US electric trolley systems. The initial objective was to replace them with internal-combustion-powered buses. Then, after World War II, came the era of interstate highways, multi-car families, and suburban sprawl. Lots of profit to the automobile industry and associated trades; lots of costs (some of them only now coming due) to all the rest of us.

Sure, a country as large, and as prosperous, and as economically active as the USA will need lots of transportation capacity, but where's the evidence that Ford, GM and/or Chrysler have any better idea than my idiot uncle of how to provide that in an ecologically and economically sustainable way? Every success they've ever had would indicate that their natural abilities lie in precisely the opposite direction.

But what about the investment, what about the infrastructure, what about the factories, and the dealer networks, and the labor force? Isn't it realistic to think that these companies, with their tremendous capabilities already in place, can get up to speed faster than just about anybody else? Not the way I see it. Even the most "fuel efficient" models currently being offered aren't even close to what we need. GM's promised game-changer, the Chevy Volt? An overweight, overpriced subcompact with a 1.4-liter gas-powered engine. A marginal improvement at best, and so strong evidence that Detroit's newest thinking is still well inside the box that they've created in the last hundred years.

And as for the existing investment, please look up "sunk cost" in any dictionary of business terminology. What those factories and office buildings originally cost is irrelevant. The factories are designed around existing products and existing production processes, and the offices only make sense at a scale of production which is based on planned obsolescence, worldwide. They're worthless, or close to it. Wall Street currently values Ford at $4B, and GM at only $2B. That's total market capitalization -- all in. Heck, a Deutsche Bank analyst recently estimated that GM is totally worthless! (Chrysler numbers are not available, since it was taken private last year. However, its parent company, Cerberus Capital, is struggling. Hardly encouraging.) A government bailout will only prolong the inevitable (and who wants to take a $25B position in a $6-8B industry?). There's no sense pouring money, or engineering grads, down those holes.

Where the USA, and Canada, and every other similar country should be pouring its money, its research, and its graduates is into start-up companies. The pre-great-depression (the last great depression, that is) auto industry had literally hundreds of players, most of them serving regional markets with quality products at good prices, and most of them turning a profit. There's no law that transportation has to be an oligopoly, that's just the situation we've all gotten used to. Since localized electric-powered transit is inherently more efficient (especially if it's on steel rails), local/regional transit companies might be a good place to start. Good public transit sustains and revitalizes central cities -- homes and commercial locations on the transit line become more desirable (and so more valuable) than real estate you have to drive to. This isn't hypothetical, see Portland OR, or Vancouver BC, or Montreal QC, or any of a large number of European and Asian cities, all in thriving, developed countries.

An economy that needs to reinvent itself, in a society that needs to reinvent itself. Sounds like an educational market opportunity to me!

And the low-tech opportunity? Well, that comes from re-envisioning another industry that's been a major contributor to climate disruption -- construction.

We know that there's enough energy available in sunlight, wind, and other sustainable forms to keep the world humming along -- particularly if we start consuming more intelligently and efficiently. But we also know that harvesting sun, wind, etc. takes infrastructure we don't yet have. We'll need to build that infrastructure. It's gonna be a helluva construction project.

Unfortunately, mainstream construction (and, for that matter, fabricating) processes consume huge quantities of fossil fuels and emit even huger quantities of greenhouse gases (e.g., creating a ton of concrete produces about as much CO2 as hauling it to the job site does). Multiply typical project-related GHG emissions by the size of the necessary infrastructure project, and it could well be that we can't build the facilities we need to avoid tipping the climate over the cliff, without tipping the climate over the cliff in the process. (Sharon Astyk has an interesting essay on the problem here.)

So, the opportunity (again, mostly for engineering and business faculties) is to design large-scale construction processes which emit small-scale greenhouse gases. I'm presuming that the solution will be low-tech, but I could be wrong. (I know there are low-tech solutions possible. Think Giza. Think Stonehenge. They might present social sustainability issues, but their fossil fuel emissions were minimal. So, how much have we learned in the last 3,000 years? How much better can we do?)

Time for some original research. Time for some organized chaos. Time to throw some technologies and some business plans up against the wall, and see what sticks. Is there a high likelihood of failure? Probably. But higher than the likelihood of GM going bust in the next ten years? Higher than the price of doing what we've been doing, and getting what we've been getting?

Another way not to sustain ourselves

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 20:27:07 GMT

As a campus sustainability wonk, much of my work has to do with carbon dioxide equivalent. How much did Greenback emit last year? What can we do to reduce emissions from heating our buildings? From driving on (or to) campus? How much did we save with this innovation, that initiative, or the latest competition? How long will it take us to get down to (supply your own target level here)?

My first response if someone seems to think that reducing CO2 (or even greenhouse gas in general) emissions defines the entirety of my job is to point out that sustainability is a three-legged stool -- if any leg (ecological, economic or social) is missing, you fall on your kiester. Sustainability takes more than just counting CO2 molecules.

Or, it takes less than that. I mean, CO2 is kind of light and airy, which means a metric tonne of it is pretty large (figure about 22,000 cubic feet). And Greenback puts out many tens of thousands of those, every year. But climate disruption due to the greenhouse effect isn't the only way what we are (and have been) doing is unsustainable. Civilization (that's you and me, at least for the moment) is running out of a lot of critical resources, all at the same time.

This isn't the first time a civilization has destroyed itself by depleting the very things it depends on to survive. My understanding of the Anasazi is that their civilization died when all the available firewood (used for heating and cooking) within walking distance had been consumed. (If you're an expert on that subject, and I'm off base here, feel free to correct me.) Whatever ended civilization on Easter Island, end it certainly did; resource depletion of some sort was almost certainly at the root of the problem.

So, a culture failing to sustain itself would hardly be a first. (And, if we survive this one, will probably happen again in future.) But every resource on which we depend -- since none of them is, in truth, inexhaustible -- constitutes another opportunity to fail. Climate is one of those resources. So is breathable air. So is topsoil (or other fertile medium for growing food). So is potable water.

And it's the imminent water crisis which has my attention, at the moment. According to the World Health Organization, over a billion people don't currently have access to clean water. The IPCC predicts that this shortage (which climate disruption will aggravate, but didn't create) will affect twice as many people by 2050, and three times as many by 2080. If nations (and "illegal combatants") are willing to go to war to protect their access to oil, what will they do to protect their access to water? Doesn't sound like a good time to me.

On campus, we're used to thinking about water issues in terms of refillable versus disposable bottles. (For an interesting take on this, see a recent column by Wendy Williamsof the Prairie Writers Circle.) But our patterns of water utilization go far beyond what we drink, and how we carry it around before we drink it. The technologists (and part of what I do is to try to get campus planners and architects to pay attention to appropriate technologists) are finally beginning to realize that the 4-6 gallons each of us flushes every day has a bigger impact than the 1-2 gallons we each drink daily. (Including coffee. And soda. And beer.) Time magazine had an interesting write-up on just how far over the top flush toilets have gotten (no physical imagery here, please!), and what steps are being taken to address the problem. (Aren't you glad I didn't say "get to the bottom of it"?)

See, anything we're doing that our descendents aren't going to be physically (or sociologically, or economically) do forever, that activity is inherently unsustainable. If we think about it, we realize it. Of course, we prefer not to think about it. (Kind of like we don't think about what happens after we flush.)

Of course, a metric tonne of water (or effluent) takes up only about 35 cubic feet. A lot less than 22,000. See what I mean about it being a smaller problem?

Research in the eating lab

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:31:41 GMT

There's been a thread recently on the Green Schools List about the impacts experienced by colleges and universities which have removed the traditional cafeteria trays from their dining facilities. Results range widely.

UC Santa Cruz (enrollment 14,400) reports that they're saving 20,000+ gallons of water (presumably, heated water) per month. The savings result not just from not having to wash trays, but also from washing fewer dishes -- fewer instances of students grabbing an extra dessert which they may not eat (and certainly don't need).

St. Lawrence U says they're saving 23 tons of food a year. With an enrollment of 2200, that's about 21 pounds of food per student. (Note that both UCSC and SLU house almost all their undergrads on campus.)

The National Wildlife Federation's Campus Ecology program published a study of a half-dozen schools who reported both positive and negative responses from students and staff. (Negative responses from students in dining facilities -- you can do that one in your head.)

On the cautionary side, Ohio U reported food savings which, statistically speaking, disappeared into the noise level. Results are described here.

So, in a nutshell, we don't yet have good data on what sort of input reductions (food, water, energy) a campus can expect from elimination of cafeteria trays. Administrators like me tend to say "do it anyways, what's it going to hurt?" But there's clearly a research opportunity here, and an evolving set of data upon which to base that research. What characteristics contribute to successful (or unsuccessful) input reductions from tray elimination? Is it about campus culture? The food being served? Other steps (signage, etc.) taken at the same time? Are the apparent differences really an artifact of measurement error? What?

If I were a Masters' student in a sustainability program or a Senior honors student, I think I'd be looking at a great thesis topic here. And I wouldn't even have to go off campus(es) to get my experimental data.

Meanwhile -- for students at schools which still provide trays, I suggest you grab one now. There's snow on the ground (at least, in the northern USA), and it's tray-sliding season! (Hint from an old hand at this -- coat the tray bottom with car wax -- you'll go farther and faster.) (Oh well, so much for getting the dining hall managers on my side! <lol>)

Think globally, AASHE regionally

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 17:48:01 GMT

OK, just one more post emanating from AASHE 2008, and then I won't mention it again. I promise. Unless I'm provoked.

Anyway, if I evaluate last week's AASHE conference, I have to say that the folks who organized it did a marvelous job. Sure, there were some minor logistical glitches -- last minute meeting room changes, meal mis-estimations, that sort of thing. But, on the whole, they had good speakers, good topics, lots of options, a really decent set of vendors (got to pay the freight somehow), and a maximum of information in a minimum of time. So, on the basis of conference qua conference, things were pretty good.

However, a campus sustainability conference isn't just a conference. It's also an opportunity to model sustainability to the campus community and the world. On that basis, AASHE 2008 was less successful. AASHE 2010 needs to do better.

This is not to take a shot at the AASHE staff. Rather, it's to recognize just how successful their organizational efforts have been. AASHE has grown faster, and its biennial conference has gotten bigger, than anyone would have guessed a few years back. However, since that's what's happened, that's what needs to be dealt with.

The fact of the matter is that AASHE as an organization is now big enough that it needs to stop being a one-level hierarchy. Flat structures are good up to a point, but the time comes when we have to salute Max Weber and get organized. AASHE needs to establish regions.

Having a regional structure would facilitate AASHE member institutions' communication and coordination with other IHEs which share the same basic climatic conditions, and so the same basic efficiency problems. Universities in the same region are more likely to share similar socio-economic conditions, and so similar social justice and economic sustainability problems. While a school in New England and a school in Arizona do have some things in common, the schools in New England (or in the desert Southwest) collectively share far more in terms of conditions, concerns, problems, practical solutions. This is hardly unique to issues of sustainability -- most membership organizations, once they reach a certain size, find a regional organization is worthwhile. AASHE is (or should be) no exception.

And, once AASHE has a structure with smaller than continental granularity, its convention schedule should be modified accordingly. AASHE 2008 was in Raleigh, and drew people from as far away (at least) as British Columbia. Sure, there was some emissions offsetting going on, but offsets are the least satisfactory way to manage emissions. Pulling lots of people together in a single location -- any single location -- is one of those habits we've formed as a society. Doesn't mean it makes sense, going forward.

What might make sense, going forward, is a set of regional conferences. If AASHE wants to get some truly big-name speakers (as it did this year), the regional conferences could be scheduled simultaneously, so that plenary sessions could convene electronically and in real time. For breakout (concurrent) sessions, different regions could have different offerings -- but the offerings would be locally (+/-) applicable. Some attendees might find their selections more limited, but the vast majority of conference-goers would certainly be able to find what they were looking for.

More to the point, total air miles -- read "total travel emissions" -- would go down precipitously. Figure the average AASHE 2008 attendee traveled 1200 miles, one way. (That's just a guess, but it's probably not too far off.) With regional conferences, intelligently located, the average AASHE 2010 attendee might only travel 300 miles, one way. At 1200 miles, it's tough not to fly. At 300 miles, it's easy. So air miles would be decreased by an even bigger percentage that total travel miles. And for a 300 mile trip, lots of schools would send a van or a bus, which makes it easier to send massive quantities of students. AASHE 2008 had a good showing of students, but AASHE 2010 attendees could (if things get regional) be mostly students.

And wouldn't that be a step in the right direction?

Breaking hab - its hard to do

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:17:04 GMT

Over the last year or so I've gone to 1 or 2 conferences, taken 1 or 2 training classes, visited a number of campuses outside the Backboro metropolitan area. Traveling always presents me with a quandary -- do I really need to go? if I really need to go, what's the most ecologically responsible way to get there? is being ecologically responsible worth the hassle?

In years past, I used to travel a lot. My business took me regularly across the country, and occasionally around the world. In my best (?) year, I got credit for 100K miles on one airline, and 50K miles on each of two others. When I didn't get a free upgrade to Business Class, I was pretty much assured of an exit row aisle seat with free drinks for the duration. Not a bad way to fly, at least in pre-9/11 days.

Now, I try not to fly. First, it's a hassle. Second, it's ecologically injurious. Notice that, even as a sustainability geek, I put the hassle issue first. I've lived on farms for most of my life, and I'm used to making do, to finding a way. But the farms I've lived on have been in the USA, and I'm as imbued with the culture of convenience as any other American citizen. There's no amount of grief and aggravation I won't put up with, to save myself some grief and aggravation.

So riding a bus or taking a train or carpooling is something I justify to myself, at least in part, on the basis of avoiding the hassle of flying. The hassle of ground transportation (including actually driving part of the way) is easier to justify emotionally if I compare it to the hassle of air transportation. In my mind, I build up the air transportation hassle because it makes it easier for me to break the air transportation habit.

See, breaking habits is hard. (Like you didn't know that.) But since we're all products of modern society, the things that modern society makes easy are at the root of habits we've all formed. Still, the fact that something's a habit doesn't make it healthy. (Ask any smoker.)

Flying is a habit, especially if the destination is more than a couple of hundred miles distant. Getting a retail receipt is a habit, and think of the tons of paper used each day in the USA to print receipts no one's ever going to look at. (Even if rational Chinese restaurants and mom-and-pop grocery stores have made a habit of turning the receipt-printing function off.)

Privileging familiar brands is a habit. If I've heard of a brand, and especially if I've formed a positive impression of it, then I'm more willing to believe that the product bearing that label meets a minimum acceptable quality standard. No guarantees, of course, but the Levis jeans do get some preference over the never-heard-of-it label. Mea culpa.

All this came to mind today, as I was hearing on the radio about the government's efforts to bail out the "Big 3" auto makers. The radio commentator was going on about how it was bad news that "the votes aren't there". So, no massive quantities of low-interest loans. It was presented as a tragedy. And, if you're an auto worker who gets paychecks from one of those companies, on a micro- level, it is.

But on a macro- level, the best thing that could happen to the auto industry in this country is that one or three of the existing carmakers should go belly-up. If you look at the products they turn out -- both the SUV's they've insisted on producing for years after marketing intelligence told them the game was up, and the "green" vehicles they promise are just over the horizon -- the car companies we've got are not the car companies we need. The USA and the world don't need two-ton single-person transporters. If we're going to continue transporting solo drivers (and there's every reason to believe we are), we need to find a way to do it which minimizes vehicle weight. Moving 4,000 pounds of steel and plastic in order to transport 175 pounds of human is inherently inefficient. And, if we're going to build 500-pound personal transportation pods (for example), there's no evidence that the existing car companies know any more about how to do that than the average man on the street. In fact, rather the opposite.

Look, technologies change. And when they do, the companies that benefited most from the old technologies rarely make the most of the new ones. Western Union was offered the rights to Bell's telephone patent, but thought the price was too high. Studebaker was a premiere coachmaker, but an ultimately unsuccessful car company. IBM absolutely dominated the world of computing until the PC came along, and then failed to make the most of its own invention.

In the final analysis, Mother Earth doesn't care whether the next generation of personal transport vehicles have a familiar logo on them or not. What's going to make a difference in the long term is whether we (and, to a disproportional extent, "we" means Americans) find ecologically sound solutions to everyday problems. Whether those ecologically sound solutions have familiar brandnames associated with them is merely a question of whether or not we manage to change our habits.

AASHE 2008 - Tuesday, Nov. 11

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:27:12 GMT

So if the title is "Tuesday", why am I posting this on a Thursday? Simple -- when the conference ended late Tuesday afternoon, I rode/drove back to Backboro, arriving in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. As a result, I was wiped out yesterday. And when I'm wiped out, I can hardly read, much less write.

Still, the second day of AASHE 2008 was pretty useful. Not as long a schedule as Monday (thank you!), but still lots of stuff. The morning opened with a plenary address by Vananda Shiva, with the theme of "food as a solution to climate change". Now, my response to anyone who thinks they've got a silver bullet which is going to solve global climate disruption is that (s)he's playing with at most 51 cards, but if there is a single central issue at the root of the problem, food might well be it. Modern agriculture, informed by the "Green Revolution" which started at major US land grant institutions, has greatly increased farming productivity per unit labor -- virtually the only measure of efficiency at the macro level. However, what I remember from my managerial economics courses is that the important efficiency measure is the one per unit of your most constrained resource, and for agriculture that's not labor. In the US and other developed and developing countries, willing farmers are going broke for lack of a market price which reflects both the production costs and inherent risks of their product. In undeveloped countries, willing farmers are starving for lack of water, or topsoil, or the simple security to be able to plant a crop and stick around until it's time to harvest.

Most of us have heard that the processes by which the world raises, processes and distributes meat create more climate disruption than all the transportation on the planet. If you look at meat production efficiency in terms of any input other than labor, it's tremendously inefficient. Ten times as many calories go into creating a pound of beef than you or I can derive from eating it -- how can anyone consider a process with a 90% wastage rate to be efficient? But, the powers that be say that raising beef the old-fashioned way (cattle walking around, eating grass, that sort of thing) takes a lot more time and effort. Well, the farm families around me need places to profitably invest their time and effort. And they could make a decent profit on beef production if they weren't competing with the government-subsidized factory agriculture that's responsible for most GHGs from food production. Why doesn't the necessary change happen? In a nutshell, the old fashioned way of raising beef puts money in the pockets of farmers, both directly and through their regional agricultural cooperatives. Factory farming puts money in the pockets of agribusinesses -- grain processors, chemical firms and the like. Notice the $upport in both partie$ for dunderheaded product$ like ethanol, which was $old as a way to $ave the factory farm but is in fact ruining farmers a the $ame time it $tarves people around the world. Do the political math. If you're not cynical, you're not paying attention.

Shifting gears, the first breakout session I attended shared perceptions of "next steps" from Harvard, Yale and Johns Hopkins -- some of the campuses which are ahead of most of us in their sustainability efforts. The major emphasis was on how to institutionalize sustainability initiatives, kind of like moving from the entrepreneurial to the professionally managed phase in the life of a business undertaking. Lots of good info, which I'll try to mold into a future post. One of the bits that I'll share right now is that it really takes about three years (even in a best case scenario) to get out of start-up mode. Makes me feel better that, at Greenback, it's still very much an uphill battle.

Next I sat in on a presentation about retrofitting existing buildings to meet LEED standards. The delivered text was that it's a lot cheaper to build energy efficiency into the building during original construction, or at least major rehab. The subtext, for those paying attention, was that even as a stand-alone project, building retrofit can make a lot of business sense. The specific example presented involved a 180,000 sq ft building erected in 2003 (not normally, I hope, yet a candidate for major rework). Cost to achieve LEED Silver was about a dollar a square foot. Resulting energy savings were estimated (hard numbers not yet available) at $192K per year. Even if the energy savings estimates are grossly optimistic, we're talking payback in less that two years. At Greenback, we'll take as much of that as we can get -- even in the current financial market situation.

My day (and my conference) ended with a set of presentations on how to incorporate sustainability considerations into all levels of institutional planning -- not just campus (facility) planning, but curriculum planning, enrollment planning, development planning. Some good ideas here (several of which I want to do some research on before writing about), but the overarching theme was that most constituencies on campus feel ill-informed about what everybody else is doing. Communication, shared information, shared goals and objectives and values are the lifeblood of successful integrated planning -- the sessions made it clear that, major efforts and some significant successes notwithstanding, we're not there yet.

All in all, a useful (if exhausting) conference. One final macro-level observation, though. Attendee demographics were significantly bimodal -- lots of folks over 45, and a good number of people under 25. It looked to me like the generation (+/-) in the middle was significantly under-represented. I guess that's consistent with my observation that the students at Greenback are more sustainability-aware with each entering class, but I hope we're not headed for a significant inter-generational struggle.

AASHE2008 - Monday, November 10

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 02:52:00 GMT

It doesn't make sense. Fourteen hours of mostly sitting around shouldn't leave me more tired (and certainly more stiff) than fourteen hours of farmwork, but it does. Or it has. Because I am.

Still, it was a day generally well spent. Bookends of problem perception surrounding useful insights into solutions.

The opening bookend was Van Jones. Inspirational and celebratory, but with a hands-on, pragmatic perspective. Three underlying problems:

a long-dominant economic theory based on lots of nature, and very few people,
a mid-term neoliberal paradigm leading to an economy based on consumption rather than production, debt rather than thrift, and destruction rather than conservation, and
a somewhat more recent politics of distration and division, intended to elicit irrational choices from the electorate.

Balanced with three necessary achievements for the new administration:

putting a price on carbon,
retrofitting America to move toward energy efficiency, and
repowering America with a new (smart) energy grid fed from renewable sources.

Jones is a master of getting people to look at a picture one step bigger than the one they're used to and, as a result, seeing things in a different light. His opposite number was Peter Senge, whose perspective is perhaps three steps bigger yet, whose point is not that we're getting the wrong solutions but that we're totally failing to ask the right questions. Immediately preceding dinner, his presentation drew linkages between industrial organization, lack of community in modern Western society, the stultifying effects of K-12 (really, K-6) education, and resource utilization as if the natural world were infinite. Perhaps his most striking story told of W. Edwards Deming telling the assembled state secretaries of education that the thrust towards standardized testing and "accountability" was designed in imitation of a management approach (management by objectives) which had proven itself a miserable failure. In a letter to Senge, Deming wrote that "our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people", and that the prevailing system of management started in grade one.

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.

(This last struck me as ironic, in that many of the folk working to enable the current generation of activist student leaders work in one or another department of Student Affairs, a field which came into its own as universities took steps to minimize and control a previous generation of student activism. I guess what goes around really does come around.)

Still, ironic observations notwithstanding, it was a good day. Just too long. Fourteen hour conference sessions may be less globally destructive than GHG emissions, but from my point of view they're no more sustainable in the long term. Or, for that matter, the short one.

AASHE2008 - On the road again

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 01:22:20 GMT

To save gas, money and GHG emissions, a number of us from the Backboro area shared a ride to AASHE 2008. Specific jobs differed, but everyone was concerned in some way with campus sustainability. That's why it struck me as odd when, while we were driving through a particularly commercially dense portion of Virginia (I-95, a bit south of Washington DC), someone in the car remarked on how much they'd love to live in an area like that. You know, with any store you wanted, so you could just go out and buy what you needed.

Now, Backboro isn't northern Virginia, but it's hardly a commercial desert. Anything you need, you can get. And the prices are generally moderate -- there are enough stores to create some competition in most lines of product. So the real-world advantages of having 27 different places to buy the same item (as opposed to only 4 or 5) are pretty minimal. I guess even sustainability folk aren't immune to the blandishments of high-dollar advertising.

More to the point, my traveling companion seemed not to realize that the sort of commercial density she was seeing is but the visible tip of the entire automobile-dependent emissions-maximizing suburban-sprawling lifestyle that got us (at least in part) into this mess. We had a number of hours yet to go in a vehicle most graciously described as "cozy", so I restrained myself. (Mrs. Rendell would have been proud.)

Anyways, we get to Raleigh and check into the hotel. It's one of the major chains, and on checking in they hand you a paper describing how the hotel is trying to be sustainable: turning lights off, moderating temperatures, changing sheets only every three days, that sort of thing. (They may have known that there was a sustainability convention in town.) I was fairly happy until I went to make a cup of coffee in my room and found that the coffee packet was sealed in a filter bag, in a plastic bag along with a disposable (non-recyclable) plastic tray -- the tray holds the filter bag into the coffee maker, so every time you replace the coffee you also replace a piece of the machine. Just struck me as a step in the wrong direction.

Even more jarring was one bit of the convention center. AASHE did a pretty good job of greening the convention -- pre-announcing that they wouldn't be handing out (yet another) conference bag, and asking that folks reuse old bags and bring their own drink containers. All well and good, until the convention center food folk brought out the meal and lots (I mean LOTS) of individual, disposable water bottles. I mean, really, how hard is it to put out some glasses and fill a few pitchers of water?

So that's today's news from the front. Lots of people doing lots of the right things, but we're all still screwing up some of the simple stuff. Looks like the low-hanging fruit will be available for a bit longer, yet.

Must-see in Raleigh?

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:19:31 GMT

Greenback U is located in the northeastern quadrant of the lower 48. Raleigh, NC is in the southeast quadrant. And Raleigh is where this year's AASHE conference is taking place, so I guess it's not just the Dow that's headed south.

It will be a pretty full schedule -- pre-conference workshops on Sunday, opening plenaries Sunday evening, sessions from 7:00 a.m. until 9:00 p.m. on Monday, then again from 8:00 a.m. until about 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday. I'm already looking forward to getting back to work, so I can get some rest!

Given the schedule, I don't anticipate having much time to get out and experience Raleigh. Still, for anyone who lives/works in the area or anyone who has a chance to get away from the convention center (even briefly), an invitation:

Comment on this post. Give those of us from out of town a hint -- where to eat, what to see, what to do. If you're a visitor, what did you find that you want to share an opinion of (good or otherwise). Use this post as a bulletin board for info only tangentially related to the conference. For stuff that's directly conference-related, there will be other posts. Trust me.

My! Oh, my! Oh, Myco!

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:39:43 GMT

Lost among the stories about the ongoing election, NPR's "Day to Day" program on Tuesday carried a bit about a really interesting fungus, recently discovered. The discoverer, Dr. Gary Strobel of Montana State, described the organism as an endophyte -- an entity that lives within plants -- and its most interesting property (at least to my ears) as the fact that it puts out a liquid which is directly usable as a fully satisfactory diesel fuel. (Please note: this isn't something that can be refined into diesel fuel, this is diesel fuel directly as its excreted by the fungus.) Strobel calls his fuel "myco-diesel".

Diesel engines, of course, are extremely foregiving when it comes to fuel requirements. Petroleum middle-distillates (other than gasoline), various alcohols, liquified animal fats, even whiskey (in dire emergencies only, of course!). But a naturally created substance which is directly usable as a fuel is, to my knowledge, a first. (BTW, anything usable as diesel fuel is also usable in oil-burning heaters/furnaces/boilers, so we're not just talking transportation fuels, here.)

Sure, there are lots of implementation issues to be dealt with. But whether we're talking mass cultivation, genetic manipulation, innoculation of plants common to the areas where fuel is in demand (the fungus is native to southern Chile), or industrial-scale bio-mimicry, the prospect of an efficient, non-polluting method of creating energy-dense liquids based on current-cycle carbon is exciting, at the very least.

For those with a tolerance for bio-chemical terminology and detail, Strobel's article as submitted to the journal Microbiology is available here.

First things first

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:34:23 GMT

Officially, it's not yet over. Effectively, it ended past my bedtime. But even at the relatively early hour that a farmer retires, the outcome was obvious. Obama might only take a modest majority of the popular vote, but the electoral count was going to be pretty one-sided.

This morning, my good half told me about the speeches I'd missed. I went online and watched them. Each candidate, to my eyes and ears, gave the best speech of his campaign. (My wife said that if McCain had campaigned in the same tone as he conceded, he'd have won the election. She could be right.)

Now I've been watching national and local politics too long to put much faith in rhetoric. (Old joke: How can you tell when a politician is lying? His lips move.) (Any newer version is probably gender-neutral, but I've only heard the old version.) Still, one turn of phrase in Obama's oratory caught my ear. As he was transitioning to his section about the work ahead of all of us, he listed some of the major problems we face: "two wars, a planet in peril, and the worst financial crisis in a century." (The quant in me sat up at that last bit but, if you measure time in centuries, the statement is accurate as worded.)

Now good rhetorical exposition doesn't leave list sequencing to chance. You can put the items (problems, in this case) in order biggest to smallest, smallest to biggest, oldest to newest, whatever -- but put them in order, you do. Maybe the President-elect was putting them into chronological order, based on the point at which each became prominent in his campaign. I prefer to think that the order indicates his understanding of the sequence in which they are best addressed.

First, do something about the wars. The larger of the two (at least, currently) has been ideologically motivated, geo-politically disastrous, socially disruptive, incompetently administered, and economically unsustainable from its beginning. Sure, the war generates a certain level of economic activity, but the domestic multiplier is very low -- even if you look at war (and by "war" I mean massive military occupation half-way around the world) in cold-hearted investment terms, almost any other option is preferable. An orderly withdrawal will back us out of quagmire-without-end. Sure, the situation it leaves probably won't be pretty, but any realist will concede that all potentially pretty situations left the building a long time ago. And an orderly withdrawal will allow us to focus more of our national attention, activity, and investment domestically, where they're all needed.

Addressing the peril of the planet will take as much attention, activity and investment as we can muster. In the back of my brain, I'm working on a taxonomy of what that will mean to IHEs of various sorts, but the demands and the impact will be real. More to the point (in terms of national politics), all the investment and activity which results from addressing climate disruption will have large domestic multiplier effects. First, the vast majority of our immediate work can only be done in the USA -- whether it's upgrading electrical generation and transmission infrastructure (macro- or micro-); improving residential, commercial and industrial building performance; or decreasing transportation demand, each of those problems can only be solved locally to where it exists. That means the jobs get generated locally, and that means that the purchases made by the workers who get the jobs get made locally. Even if alternative fuel research (btw, there are some really interesting developments in the area of biofuels -- more later) takes place worldwide, industrializing whatever products result will need to take place where the demand is. And unlike strategic military research, alternative energy/sustainability technologies we invent here can be exported, leading to further economic stimulus and growth.

And economic growth is what it will take to solve the financial crisis. What we're all experiencing is called "global" because of its impact, but it had its origins right here at home. One of the watchwords of management is to be careful what you measure, because that's what's going to increase. For too long, we have measured only the size of the economy, without worrying much about the quality of the earnings which generated the increase in size. Slicing and dicing financial instruments may generate profits, but the profits have no underlying physical reality -- they're "paper". When the tide is rising and everyone has a boat, paper profits stand up pretty well. But when Gresham's law kicks in -- when bad profits drive out good ones by raising the required rate of return to the point that normal economic activity can't measure up -- then things go south. It's important that we remember that the purpose of economic activity isn't to see whose is bigger, the purpose of an economy is to provide goods, services, quality of life to the polus. Whatever sequencing of challenges allows us to achieve that on a sustainable basis is the one that works for me.

Economic and Ecologic Elucidations

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:21:06 GMT

One of the issues which often raises its head when I speak about sustainability to local groups -- both on the Greenback campus and in the community of Backboro -- is best phrased as "we can't afford to be sustainable." To my mind, "I can't afford it" is, like "I didn't have time", a less confrontational way of saying "it wasn't important enough to me." That being the case, I try to address the objection strategically, not directly. Not "spend the money, dammit!', but "here's why we need to find a way to make it affordable". As of Wednesday, however, there are new resources which will help address the issue -- one for auditory learners, and one for visual/verbal quantitative types.

At the University of Vermont, the issue was addressed in a more head-on fashion on Wednesday afternoon. Localist Bill McKibben (of Middlebury) debated globalist Russell Roberts (of George Mason). The UVM write-up is pretty descriptive of the proceedings, and contains a link which will let you listen to the entire debate. (You can even download it to your ipod for future reference.) It's about an hour long, and well worth the investment of time.

Meanwhile, the inherent link between solving the sustainability crisis and solving the global economic crisis is gaining both political and intellectual currency. Whoever's elected US President will unarguably come out with a plan to solve the latter by creating jobs to address the former, and the Worldwatch Institute has just published a report quantifying the relationships between the two. The summary is free, but the actual report (hardcopy or electronic version) runs $12.95. That price is by no means exorbitant, but I do wish they'd made the digital copy cheaper, if only to provide a disincentive to kill trees. Still, with 60 pages of (mostly quantitative) data, it's likely most purchasers of the electronic version will print it out anyways. (Sigh ...)

Cleaner Air, Cooler Planet

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:18:24 GMT

Doing a greenhouse gas inventory for a college or university involves crunching a lot of numbers. Activities which generate emissions, factors for calculating the emissions generated, forcings to translate other gases into CO2 based on global warming effect, lots of stuff. The tool Greenback used to prepare its baseline inventory was the defacto standard of such things -- Clear Air - Cool Planet's Campus Carbon Calculator. A large majority of ACUPCC signatories used exactly the same toolkit.

But the version we used for our inventory was version 5. There's a new toolkit in town -- version 6. While v5 was strictly a spreadsheet for inventorying the past, v6 includes functionality to project the future -- both likely trends if your school continues with business as usual, and any number of "what if" scenarios based on combinations of emission reduction projects you might decide to undertake.

Actually, the way the thing is set up, if you want to really compare a number of different scenarios (combinations of projects), you have to embody each scenario in its own copy of the spreadsheet, but how hard is that? And each scenario comes complete with both financial calculations (IRR, NPV, discounted payback period) and graphics to show the effective emission reduction over time, coded to the particular project which produced the result (what's often called a "wedges chart").

The graphics are a little ugly (my opinion), but the thing's an Excel spreadsheet -- what do you want? For presentation purposes, you'll probably want to clean them up some. But most of the heavy lifting, as in the previous version -- so September!! -- is done for you. And given that most of my work is indoors already, avoiding heavy lifting rates high on my list.

BTW, if your school is still completing its inventory, there's no rush to convert. On the other hand, there's no need to hold back converting, either. Version 6 will import whatever data you've already entered in V5. So long as you played by the rules in the older model, the import function seems to work just fine.

Bad news/good news

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 12:19:41 GMT

First, the bad news. (And I guess the bad news could be good news, if you look at it a little bit sideways.) The bad news is that the green movement is now spawning Kitty Kelly-style exposes with a definite Ann Coulter twist.

The particular expose I have in mind is Green, Inc. by Christine Catherine MacDonald. The author, a former media manager (and, presumably, mole) at Conservation International tells a sordid story of sustainability promotion as big business, including tales of executive salaries in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and compromising cooperation between big green and big business. The bad news is that this book will give those who wish to believe that the whole "global warming" issue is a red herring designed to separate the American people from their God-given wealth another thread to cling to. The better news is that, to any discerning reader, MacDonald's story is fairly thin gruel. The worse news is that most of MacDonald's readers probably won't have much in the way of discernment.

The reason I think this could be good news in disguise is that, if the sustainability movement is deemed worthy of an expose, we must be achieving something like mainstream status. I mean, think about it. Kitty Kelly didn't do exposes of ordinary folk, nor of the Harold Stassen's of the world. If you're worthy of an expose, you must be pretty important. (Of course, I could be wrong about that.)

The real good news comes out of MIT. It's actually a couple of months old, but now it's getting the necessary attention to have a significant impact. One of the main problems with existing renewable energy technologies is that they're intermittent -- you only get solar power when the sun's shining, you only get wind power when the wind's blowing. What the researchers at MIT have discovered is a simple, nature-mimicing way to store excess power generated during sunny or windy (or both) periods, so as to allow round-the-clock power availability without significant GHG emissions. And the technology is easily scalable down to the point where each household could well serve as its own power source. A quick description is available here. (Lots of other energy research going on at MIT -- just look.)

The fact that energy storage, like generation/collection, is scalable down to the household level is something I find tremendously encouraging. Given the global credit crunch (and the next three global financial crises, in whatever forms they take), I'm betting that gazillions of dollars will never be available to totally rework all of the world's energy infrastructure. And, if it were, we'd just end up with a 21st century power grid which exhibited an even higher degree of brittle interreliance than the 20th century grid that got us into this mess. Local communities, local households -- the technologies are rapidly becoming available to let power generation be expanded at the same granularity -- indeed, the same locations -- as does power consumption. Collection and consumption in local equilibrium gives the most efficient -- and, with luck, the least destructive -- global energy infrastructure.

And, with small-granularity energy infrastructure, we won't need big-granularity energy businesses. So our major environmental organizations can avoid a whole raft of compromising situations (and situational compromises).

Realistic radicalism

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 03:24:06 GMT

I just received my electronic copy of the Rocky Mountain Institute's Solutions newsletter. It contains an article by Cameron Burns about a study of successful campus greening strategies, the results of which will be published next spring (don't you just love the lag time involved in publishing academic studies -- by the time the data gets into print, it's nearly obsolete). Conducted by Michael Kinsley and Sally DeLeon, the study sounds quite comprehensive -- I'm looking forward to its publication (can you tell?).

The part of the article I found most immediately riveting, however, was material quoted from David Orr of Oberlin. Orr was commenting on why it's so hard for most schools to "green" their curricula. He's quoted as saying, "The main architecture of the curricula is sacrosanct ... Conversations still don’t easily cross back and forth between disciplines. And anything that begins to threaten that structure dies a pretty quick and painful death.”

I respect Orr's work immensely, and I have to say that his observations parallel my own. But I very much hope that past curricula are not a guarantee of future outcomes. The need to start teaching, and researching, and thinking in ways that are unconstrained by the set of familiar academic disciplines is immediate and immense. Whether we're talking about ecological, economic or social sustainability, the systemic problems the developed (and the developing) world faces are all created by thinking that focuses itself based implicitly on academic discipline. Taking a hint from Einstein, we need to start trying to solve our most difficult problems by moving beyond the level of thinking we were at when we created them. What Greenback has been (and still is) teaching within the disciplinary framework isn't wrong, but it's significantly incomplete in that it typically assumes away any constraints imposed by the relevant higher level system. Assume away constraints on the ecosystem's ability to absorb waste, and you disrupt the normal cycles of climate, ocean and soil. Assume away constraints on society's ability to price financial risk, and you disrupt the confidence necessary to conduct an efficient trading economy.

In a nutshell, the complexity inherent in the information we need to exist in this world intelligently has surpassed the organizational capacities of our current system of academic disciplines. This isn't the first time: the fight to include sciences; to de-emphasize dead languages; to offer engineering, business and other career-focused concentrations of study; all of these shifts caused tremendous upheaval in the halls of academe. The faculty at Yale rather famously came down in 1828 on the side of giving up their classical curriculum when it was pried from their cold, dead fingers, and not before.

Those changes took decades, sometimes generations, to accomplish. We don't have decades. If we're lucky, we have a few years. Realistically speaking, we're already well behind the eight-ball. We need to do something, and do it fast.

At Greenback, as at most schools, the patterns of thought we encourage in our graduates are clearly structured around the principles of academic discipline. We meekly encourage multiple majors, or majors combined with minors, but those are just changes at the margins. The vast majority of our degrees go to students who major in single subjects, and fill out their degree requirements by taking courses which are selected not to contradict the tenets of their major subject in any way.

Getting new, trans-disciplinary curricula designed, approved by the Senate, blessed by the appropriate state governing board, staffed, scheduled, and taught is enormously difficult. But what's the alternative? If we keep teaching like we've been teaching, we're going to keep graduating what we've been graduating. And let's face it, the dominant paradigms for all developed societies -- specifically including the economic and technological paradigms -- were created by graduates of our global higher education system as it has existed for the last century or so. We can't keep graduating what we've been graduating, because we can't afford for society to keep thinking like it's been thinking. Change is no longer optional.

So here's a modest proposal -- no more single-subject, or even single-faculty (in the British usage) degrees. If your major is already trans-disciplinary, you're fine. If you have two majors, drawing on differing academic traditions, you're fine. However, if you're majoring only in a subject among the humanities, you need to at least minor in a social or a physical science. If you're majoring only in a physical science, you need to at least minor in one of the humanities or social sciences. And so forth.

As a solution to strict disciplinary thinking, this is an incomplete solution. But it's one which could be implemented more quickly and with less resistance (note, not zero resistance) than a true trans-disciplinary reworking of the academic organization. Professors could continue to teach their established subjects, and use much of their existing material. But students would be better positioned to interrogate material presented under the auspices of one discipline based on information understood from quite a different perspective. Not all students will do that, of course, but some will. And not all professors will be well positioned to answer questions posed from perspectives with which they are not, themselves, familiar. But the quality of academic discourse, even in undergraduate classrooms, will likely improve. And so will -- I hope -- the quality of the thought processes used by our alumni as they design and implement the world in which their children will grow up.

Sustainability work #7 - More plotting and planning

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 09:38:21 GMT

So, when all is said and done, what matters is getting Greenback to a position of sustainability. We need to get out of the habit of taking more (of anything) than we put back. We need to learn how to stop creating wastes we don't resorb. We need to get out of what the cyberneticians call "positive feedback loops" because, after a while, the feedback doesn't seem all that positive. We need to find, and model, and pass on to our students a sense of balance, of equilibrium, of stability.

The task is certainly complex. Anyone who says (s)he understands what's involved is a fool, a liar, or both. Attaining a reasonable approximation of ecological balance will require a significant change in paradigm from what we've lived for the past half-century or more. That would be a daunting task even if we had unlimited resources -- which we clearly didn't six weeks ago, and even more clearly don't now. Getting to a stable, healthy economy from the doddering wreck we've made for ourselves would seem quite a challenge even if we could afford to spew wastes solid, liquid and gaseous -- which we clearly can't since, if reports are to be believed, we've already passed at least one major climate disruption tipping point. And dealing with both of these issues is made much more complex by the fact that the solutions have to be built out of people -- an unstable raw material at best, prone to violent outburst when not handled with systemic respect.

But the longest journey starts with a single step. Or at least a small set of steps. Some of them, baby steps. The nature of Greenback's journey was sketched (at least in part) by our greenhouse gas inventory. We now have a measure -- incomplete, imperfect, impeachable -- of our ecological impacts. We've made the commitment to reduce these, in net, to zero. What we know we do is what we know we've got to stop doing. So, the inventory provides a starting point. To move away from that starting point in an orderly manner -- with some reasonable hope of attaining our goal -- we need a plan.

If we just want to leave the starting point -- if we don't have, or care about, a goal -- no plan is necessary. Greenback's gaseous wastes change every year. Some of it is fluctuation, some of it is a secular trend. But, absent conscious and intentional management, the trend is in the wrong direction. Failing to plan is ...

So, if the inventory is step 1, then step 1a is to project what the future will look like if all the current behaviors and modes of operation remain in place. This is what sustainability wonks call the "business as usual" scenario. Look at the trend in electrical usage per student FTE, presume it will continue in the same (upward) direction, multiply by the expected student body size for each future year. Look at the trend in energy usage per square foot (upward, particularly as lab and residence space per student expand), presume and multiply as above. Look at employee commuting patterns, notice that folks are living farther and farther away from campus, do the math in your head. For all those sources of emissions, and more, plot the trends over as many years as you can, project into the future for two or three or five decades. It's not a pretty picture. But it's one we need, for purposes of comparison.

Some folks want to proceed directly from drawing a "business as usual" scenario to creation of a fully-formed carbon mitigation plan, but that doesn't work. Knowledge of the starting point and the objective are necessary, but insufficient. Before you can put meat on a plan, you have to give it bones. And the skeleton -- the defining germ -- of any plan is the set of priorities and constraints it embodies. Remember those "unlimited resources" and "unlimited wastes" strawmen? Those were fully discounted examples of the sort of planning which goes on before (or in the absence) of significant priority/constraint determinations. They're fairy tales, as is any plan which can't be correlated to a clear set of priorities.

What are the financial constraints? How much funding is Greenback willing to invest? How fast? How long can we invest before we start seeing financial return? Before we repay the initial investment? Even it we're willing to invest, can we get the dollars to do it? At what terms? What prices are going up? How fast? How certainly? How high before they're likely to flatten? What costs can we avoid? What costs do we need to avoid?

What are the organizational constraints? How much are we willing to change how we operate? Whose ox can get gored? Whose must be protected? Are there some functions we're willing to eliminate? Outsource? Insource?

What are the market constraints? How much can we change what we do? What we deliver? What we emphasize? Will our regulators, our accreditors approve new programs? Will our clientele go along with out elimination of old ones?

And speaking of our clientele, what constraints do they bring to campus with them? If we start changing our identity, will they see us as improving, or as having lost our way?

The truth is that achieving even climate neutrality (forget social and economic justice) will require significant changes. Change hurts. Universities (Greenback among them) may be more willing than some other institutions to implement change, but the change steps need to be pre-sold. Why those steps, and not some others? Why this department, this program, this job, this process, this service? All the signatories to the ACUPCC have agreed to reduce GHG emissions to net zero, but each will do it in its own way, based on its own priorities which express its own identity.

Getting all parties on campus to agree to a single set of guiding principles is a pipe dream. But establishing a working consensus, getting enough agreement so that most of us can move in the same direction at more or less the same time, is an absolute necessity. Maybe it can be done in classic strategic planning fashion -- have an extended, open and honest discussion, identify communities of interest, drive out our core values, codify them, agree to the code, live happily ever after. (Maybe, but not at my school.) And maybe it can be done by executive fiat -- the governor, the state department of higher ed, some other established authority can simply mandate what the priorities are. (Maybe, but the last time anyone tried that at Greenback, the local peasantry stormed the castle.) What I'm hoping will work is to float three differing sets of potential priorities, and a rough plan based on each, and determine what our values are by what we're willing to consider implementing. I'll likely have to draw up plan four (and maybe, plans five and six) after seeing the reactions to the first set of three, but those reactions will (I hope) give me the information I need.

See, any plan will consist of a set of "wedges". Charted over time -- a little reduction in the first year, a little more each year afterwards -- the plot of each savings/reduction achieved takes on a triangular aspect. Each source of emissions will need to get addressed -- some sooner, some later; some slower, some faster. But it we're doing it, and it's emitting greenhouse gases, we need to find a way to fix it. For some sources of emission (e.g., purchased electricity), "fix it" means reduce, then source what can't be reduced renewably. For others, such as operation of the campus fleet or heating and cooling buildings, fixing it will likely involve shifting to quite different technology (solar, geothermal, whatever). Some emissions will simply have to be offset, at least for the foreseeable future -- emissions from air travel would seem to fall into this category. But, how soon do we start offsetting? How long do we wait for new technologies? What limitations, or incentives to reduce, are we willing to implement? How much behavioral change can we engender with carrots, and when do we need to start thinking "stick"?

The key success criterion isn't whether Greenback, over time, follows through and executes the carbon mitigation plan which we must soon publish. The obvious fact of the matter is that we won't. At least, not in its specifics. The plan will change over time. Technologies will change, schedules will change, cost factors will change, people's willingness to change will change. Those wedges will change shape, get moved around, shift sequence. The first version of the mitigation plan needn't be perfect, because we would have no way of recognizing perfection if we saw it.

What the initial carbon mitigation plan needs to be is acceptable. It needs to be challenging enough that it provides a basis for behavioral and institutional change, but not so challenging as to be offputting. It needs to exemplify virtue so that everyone at Greenback can feel good about implementing it, but not be in any sense Utopian. It needs to exceed our grasp, but not our reach. And it needs to say "Greenback" all over it -- in every line, and between the lines as well. It needs to remind us of who we are, and what we do, and why we do it.

Is that a tall order? Of course it is. But if I truly want my campus to be carbon neutral in 25, 35, or even 45 years, that's what's required. Getting those three alternatives out there is something I need to accomplish pretty quickly. Greenback is committed to publishing a (one, not three) carbon neutrality plan by sometime next year. And I've got less than six months to design and build a skeleton.

Sustainability work #6 - Plotting the course

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 22:32:19 GMT

First, a word of clarification about the title. "Plotting the course" was a phrase that first popped into my alleged mind in reference to preparing a campus carbon neutrality plan. But then, I realized that such would only lead to confusion. I might think of a carbon neutrality plan as a "course of action", but (somehow) the term "course" brings other images to most minds on campus. So, bowing to the inevitable, lets think of "course" as a unit of curriculum.

One of the commitments Greenback made, by signing the ACUPCC,was to provide "the knowledge and the educated graduates to achieve climate neutrality." The logic presented to justify this effort is based on the belief that "campuses that address the climate challenge by reducing global warming emissions and by integrating sustainability into their curriculum will better serve their students and meet their social mandate to help create a thriving, ethical and civil society. These colleges and universities will be providing students with the knowledge and skills needed to address the critical, systemic challenges faced by the world in this new century and enable them to benefit from the economic opportunities that will arise as a result of solutions they develop." Pretty clear-cut logic to my mind, but not logic that has yet had a huge curricular impact on my campus.

Now, nobody expects that an administrator outside the Academic Services org chart is going to be able to influence the curriculum directly, but the reality is that if sustainability doesn't get significant curricular emphasis, building "green" momentum on campus is very difficult. So influencing the curriculum indirectly makes the rest of my job easier in the long term. And making the contacts which will let me influence the curriculum indirectly helps me find faculty members to participate in co-curricular events with sustainability-related themes.

Some schools and regional consortia have encouraged the development of sustainability-related curriculum by offering grants and awards. Nothing like money to get the old creative juices flowing. But, particularly in the current financial environment, Greenback isn't likely to do that. We're a major university but, by major university standards, we're not exactly rich. (No, Greenback isn't a cryptogram for "Harvard"!) Throwing money at a problem is something we do, but typically only as a last resort.

So far, the only ways I've found to encourage the development of sustainabilty-related curriculum are to lobby students, lobby faculty, and offer to either be or find a guest lecturer.

Lobbying students has probably been the most successful, although it's the tactic with the longest resultant cycle time. Getting students to raise sustainability-related questions within appropriate classroom contexts has led to a number of successes. Not new course offerings based on sustainability-related themes (at least, not yet), but shifts in the emphases of existing courses. Analysis or deconstruction and criticism of just about anything from a sustainability perspective. Case studies which incorporate sustainability goals. Reading assignments which address qualitative local impacts of unsustainable practices. That sort of thing. The course remains the same, but the message students receive is somewhat enriched.

The biggest challenge I've had, particularly with first- and second-year undergrads, is getting them to understand the meaning of "appropriate classroom context". A course which provides an introduction to Shakespeare's comedies is probably not the right context in which to ask a question about climate disruption. And the poor adjunct teaching first-semester French shouldn't be forced to go over the names of the six Kyoto gases in that language. Even freshman chemistry class may not be the right context -- although freshman physics or freshman biology might very well be. Still, the number of courses in which sustainability issues could profitably be discussed, without in any way distracting from the intended focus of the class, is surprisingly large. And when teachers get asked questions from a particular perspective repeatedly, sometimes that perspective finds its way into the formal syllabus.

(If we ever get to the point that there's an introductory statistics course based solely on global-warming observation datasets, I'll know I've won.)

Lobbying faculty works best when someone in the department, or a closely related department, provides me with entree. Most professors don't seem to like getting cold calls from self-absorbed staff members, asking impertinent questions about the virtue (one way or another) of their curriculum. But if I can mention a fellow faculty member who suggested I get in touch, I can usually get the professor's attention for a moment or two. And if I then broach the subject in the right way, I can typically extend that time to a useful span.

"Broaching the question in the right way," so far as I have been able to determine, means figuring out what motivates the faculty member, and aligning my motivations in the same direction. Most often, faculty seem to find the prospect of increased student demand for their course offerings to be of personal benefit. So I generally open with a statement that students have been inquiring which courses will help them understand the broad topic of sustainability (which is true), that I'm collecting course numbers to include on a web listing to help students identify just such courses (which is true), that the referring faculty member has suggested that some of this professor's courses might fall into that category (which is at least marginally true -- the suggestion might be pretty tenuous, but not totally imaginary), and that I'd like to be able to promote any courses which do to interested students (which is true, if an incomplete description of my motives). Sometimes, the faculty member has one or more courses which (s)he already thinks of as containing (or offering the potential to contain) sustainability-related material; those conversations tend to go quickly, and end with me offering resources and then requesting referrals to other professors whose courses might also qualify. More often, the faculty member will hem and haw about how sustainability isn't really their topic, and I'll respond with a description of just how broad a topic sustainability really is, and emphasize some aspect of the economic or societal bottom lines which might be relevant to the subject being taught. Those calls often end with me requesting that the professor think about the possibilities, and offering to get back in touch in a month or two.

Lobbying the students seems to work best in a group setting, and I get a lot of opportunities. Lobbying faculty might work in a group setting (department meeting?) as well, but I don't really know -- I've never yet had the opportunity to try. Lobbying professors one-at-a-time is obviously time-consuming. I end up playing lots of telephone tag, and there are only about twenty weeks out of the year when I have any success making contact. But, when contact gets made, the success rate seems pretty good. (Of course, maybe the folks who allow me to get in touch at all are the ones already at least somewhat on board. Hard to tell.)

When time permits, I do sometimes email junior faculty members who teach courses where the sustainability connection is pretty clear. I offer to be a guest lecturer on any subject relating to greenhouse gases, or to try to find a guest lecturer on any other sustainability-related topic. Guest lecturers seem pretty popular, both with students and with faculty, so I've had a number of hits with this approach. Its even gotten to the point that one assistant prof called me out of the blue, asking if I'd speak to her class next semester. Not sure where she got my name, but I'm happy she called.

Of course, I do run into a significant number of (often, older) professors who clearly resent being asked (by me, or the president, or anyone else) to consider changing the way they teach their courses. Some would probably react the same way, even if the emphasis I encouraged weren't sustainability. And some (never yet the scientists) dismiss the whole topic of sustainability as a politically correct phantasm. Either way, I don't push. I make it clear I've heard them, thank them for their time, and disconnect as quickly as I can without being impolite. You can't win them all. And, with the number of students and faculty at Greenback I haven't even talked to yet, I don't have the time or the excess capacity for frustration.