Indonesia is on fire. Greenland is melting. The strongest tropical cyclone on record hit Mexico last month. Scientists and policy makers are worried about energy security, drought, the health of ocean life, the implications of global urbanization, and what it all means for a socioeconomically divided world.
This is the that future student environmentalists saw coming, and higher education was supposed to lead the way to take on those challenges.
A decade ago, campus sustainability emerged as the big activist movement at many colleges. Students, with allies on the faculty and staff, pushed their colleges to reduce waste, construct green buildings, buy local food, and run on renewable energy.
By 2010, nearly 700 leaders had signed the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, which bound them to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to zero. The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education was one of the sector’s fastest-growing organizations, and there was buzz everywhere about new bike-sharing programs, campus gardens and farms, even green sports teams.
In the past few years, that buzz has become more like a low background hum. Sustainability no longer gets as much campus attention as sexual assault, affordability, or institutional viability. Among the top results of a Google search for “the sustainable university” now are links to articles about financially troubled institutions.
What happened? It’s not as if students stopped caring. Nearly 70 percent of them believe that responding to climate change should be a federal priority, according to the most recent Freshman Survey by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles. Pushing colleges to divest holdings in fossil-fuel companies has gained traction. And the sustainability association is still going: Its annual conference in Minneapolis last month was the biggest ever, with more than 2,300 attendees, many of them students or recent graduates.
But a question permeated discussions there: Now that campus sustainability has been talked about for 10 years, what do the next 10 hold? Advocates see the movement at a precarious moment. It has been largely confined to operations — highly visible projects in green power, recycling, or local food — and needs now to be infused into missions and curricula.
“Sustainability in higher ed is at such a critical point, such a threshold, and we are all collectively holding our breath,” says Denice H. Wardrop, a professor of geography and ecology and the director of Pennsylvania State University’s Sustainability Institute. She has started working with a group of sustainability directors from major research universities — a club dubbed the “Big 10 and Friends” — to outline how sustainability principles contribute to the their educational priorities.
The big challenge after 10 years, says a consultant, is for the movement to find a way to advance its agenda now.
Penn State took a potentially significant step last month: In a public draft of its new strategic plan, the university included “ensuring a sustainable future” as one of six values that will guide its educational mission. Fund raisers are pitching the university’s sustainability efforts to donors.
At other colleges, projects chug along, but there are broad worries about the future of institutional commitments. Stephenie Presseller, sustainability manager at Moraine Valley Community College, near Chicago, says green efforts started small there, with the formation of a “green team” of faculty and staff members and students in 2007. Eventually the scale grew, as Moraine Valley signed the presidents’ climate commitment and pursued climate neutrality.
Broader Proposition
But lately momentum has stalled, says Ms. Presseller. At many colleges, sustainability has gone from being an ambitious campaign pursued by enthusiasts to just another office, just another staff member. The administration at Moraine Valley still strongly supports sustainability, she says, but it competes for attention: “The biggest conversation right now is budget.”
Colleagues at other colleges, she says, worry that leaders will cut sustainability programs, thinking of them as just a fad of the new millennium.
Those were heady days for the sustainability movement. In 2006, An Inconvenient Truth hit movie screens, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma lined shelves at the bookstore, jump-starting popular conversations about climate change and local food. In 2007, high gas prices got people talking about energy and limits on natural resources. After the recession hit, in 2008, pundits like Thomas L. Friedman called for a “green revolution,” while the activist Van Jones outlined a “green new deal” that would put people to work retrofitting buildings with insulation and solar panels.
The enthusiasm was dampened after Republicans won decisive victories in the 2010 elections, and climate-change skeptics took control in Washington. Leading environmental causes — like the Keystone XL pipeline and campaigns to divest from fossil-fuel companies — became slogs with incremental victories. And in the wake of the recession, survival was the main focus for many colleges.
That was also true for the main sustainability groups — the sustainability association and Second Nature, which runs the climate commitment — amid stumbles and leadership transitions. Anthony Cortese, Second Nature’s co-founder and longtime president, who had been a key figure in the sustainability movement, retired in 2012.
The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, meanwhile, has had three executive directors since then. Meghan Fay Zahniser, who has been with the group since 2009 and took over as executive director in December, says that during those tumultuous years, the organization had overestimated its membership and had budget deficits. Many employees were laid off or quit, making it hard to forge ahead.
“Instead of being able to advance sustainability in higher education, which is what we’re here to do, it was crisis management,” Ms. Zahniser says. “It’s disheartening that we lost momentum.”
Now the group is ramping back up. It plans to connect more campus-based sustainability programs, allowing directors to collaborate on projects and to share resources and information, and to help them make the case for sustainability. In partnership with a consulting firm, it is providing free help to colleges looking to set up big green-power deals. The goal is to get one gigawatt — or 1,000 megawatts — of energy in higher education from renewable rather than fossil-fuel sources.
The climate commitment, too, is getting a reboot. Second Nature has added a “resilience commitment,” encouraging colleges to work with local communities to adapt to climate change. The group says it will also drop colleges from the signatory list because many have not kept up progress on going “climate neutral.” Integrity, says Timothy Carter, the group’s new president, is more important than numbers.
It makes sense for colleges to take the lead on sustainability because of their longevity, nonprofit status, and educational missions, says Blaine Collison, managing director of network services at Altenex, the consulting firm working with the sustainability association on the green-gigawatt goal. Corporations are not going to take up climate neutrality, he says. That and many other sustainability efforts, he says, colleges are uniquely positioned to pursue.
The big challenge for the campus-sustainability movement, as Mr. Collison sees it, is finding the right way to present its agenda. “Some of these people have done a fabulous job talking about the broader value proposition,” he says, pointing to students and sustainability directors moving around the exhibit hall at the last month’s sustainability conference. “Some of them have not.”
Advocates should be able to make the case for how green programs can reduce costs and risks in energy prices, appeal to prospective students and forward-thinking businesses, or keep educational programs relevant for the future.
“Some of them are still talking about rescuing a polar bear on an iceberg,” says Mr. Collison. “If they don’t get to the next level, we’re doomed.”
Scott Carlson is a senior writer who covers the cost and value of college. Email him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.
