Environmental sustainability on college campuses throughout the country has been gaining greater visibility in the last few years. Oberlin College started the trend of eco-building and sustainable design with its construction in 1999 of the Adam Joseph Lewis Center. In the current issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, an article by Scott Carlson highlights Ithaca College’s construction of two environmentally sustainable buildings. These two buildings will house the business school and other administrative offices. The total price tag for both buildings is 39 million dollars.
Mr. Carlson explains in his article that the buildings, once completed, will receive a platinum rating from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Program (LEED). “‘The point of these two buildings was to show that you can do it without a whole lot of bells and whistles,’ said Peter W. Bardaglio, a former provost.”
In his foreword to Degrees that Matter: Climate Change and the University by Ann Rappaport and Sarah Hammond Creighton, Tufts University President Lawrence Bacow writes, “Colleges and Universities… have an opportunity to lead by example, by taking action to reduce our own contributions to global warming. As stewards of a complex physical community, a university … can exercise leadership in reducing the climate implications of a wide range of decisions related to resource use. Implementing these decisions requires the innovation, practical knowledge, and hard work of our institutions’ best minds, be they faculty, staff, or students."
David Orr’s book Design on the Edge: The Making of a High-Performance Building outlines the challenges and opportunities of a community in constructing an ecologically sustainable building, and focuses specifically on his work at the Adam Joseph Lewis Center. He explains, “My intention here [in this book] is to tell the story of the project, placing it into its larger educational, design, and institutional context…. It is also a story of institutional behavior in a global context we are only beginning to fathom. Against the backdrop of global change, the question is whether institutions that purport to advance learning can themselves learn, measured not just by their success in the competition for available students and funding but in response to human-driven changes in the biogeochemical cycles of Earth (Steffen et al. 2004). We have good reason to believe that those changes will alter the human prospect to our disadvantage, perhaps sooner than later. That alone gives us cause, both individually and collectively, to adjust our priorities and behavior; hence, the attempt to make the substance and process of education accord with the ecological realities while equipping the young for a world different from any humankind has even known.”
We can only hope that more colleges follow the lead of these two campuses.
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