Getting to Green

Sharing is good, and bikes are good, but bike-sharing can be tricky.

Some success criteria if the organization is to thrive.

Challenges for a sustainability organization for higher ed.

Questions about a capstone project....

Thinking about Boston and history....

One of the oft-unspoken norms around here is that economies of scale exist, so bigger is more efficient than smaller. Another, of course, is that efficiency is a good thing. But a temporarily overlooked (at least, by sustainability wonks) report out of the Edison Electric Institute seems to say that neither scale nor efficiency is necessarily advantageous.

If the root cause of our sustainability problem set (not just climate change, but neither excluding climate change) is societal behavior patterns and the habits of thought that facilitate them, then there's no institution better positioned than higher ed to address the problem. Yet, for practical purposes, we seem not to be doing so in any significant manner. Most of the sustainability-related research of which I'm aware focuses on metrics ("how bad is the problem this week?"), mechanics ("how do these two elements of the problem seem to interact?") or technology ("how can we continue to do -- as much as possible -- what we've been doing, while decreasing the negative unintended consequences?"). The researchers, almost without exception, consider themselves to be seriously engaging with the problems at hand. And, within the conventional mindset, they are. But it's the conventional mindset that got us into this mess.

My previous post explained how a portion of the sustainability community is coming to view our challenge not primarily as an environmental issue but as a societal one. The difference is far more significant than just its effect on the wording we use in our job descriptions and performance reviews -- it fundamentally reshapes the relationship between higher education and issues of sustainability, and vastly expands higher ed's capacity to address the problem. Let me try to explain.