The sustainable university
By Tammy Griffin-Kumpey, M.S.P.C. '06
Photos by Rob Carlin | Illustrations by Amy Wasserman '81
Clark commits to a greener profile; Clark professors weigh in on some of the challenges and issues of environmental sustainability
Warnings that the Earth’s environment is in trouble were once contested as nothing more than a lot of hype surrounding a doomsday prophecy. But things have changed since Woodsy Owl first asked Americans in 1970 to “Give a hoot. Don’t pollute.” Today few would argue that human action has not had a profound, multifarious and volatile impact on our planet. Global warming, pressures on natural resources, diminishing air quality, carbon dioxide emissions, fossil fuels vs. renewable energy sources, waning fisheries and wildlife, deforestation, the greening of industry—these are just a few of the issues and challenges that the world now faces.
Clark University and its faculty, students, staff and alumni have long been at the fore of such issues, examining the key drivers that endanger environmental sustainability and studying the diverse complexities involved in implementing changes to make our world a better place.
A greener future As Clark continues to address changing environmental trends and challenges, it asks, “What impact does Clark have on the environment?”
Last year, the University created a new position—campus sustainability coordinator held by David Schmidt ’04—and formed the Clark University Environmental Sustainability (CUES) task force to answer that question. They are examining a variety of environmental issues and challenges on campus, making recommendations to the president, and instituting practices that will help Clark move into the next decade with a cleaner and greener profile. The genesis of CUES and many of its initiatives began with a push from the student group Clark Sustainability Initiative.
“Global climate change is very real—and the threat has been increasing. This has prompted many to think about the way they live on this planet,” notes Schmidt.
Thus far, CUES has recommended a variety of initiatives including the development of an annual report card on campus environmental sustainability (see page 14). CUES prompted President John Bassett to sign the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment to develop a plan to help the University become carbon neutral—which means zero net emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (see page 2). It also instituted a student-designed composting project in the dining hall this fall, a cleaner alternative to burning food waste for electricity, says Schmidt.
Other initiatives have included Campus Sustainability Day and a student-run campaign to encourage students to invest in wind power to offset the amount of “dirty” electricity they use. The Clark Energy Awareness Program (CEAP) was founded by a group of students, staff and faculty to educate others on campus about energy conservation and begin a dialogue about simple ways to conserve energy at work. Clark continues to hold an annual “Dump and Run,” where students donate re-useable items, like clothing and furniture, which is sold at a campus yard sale; and the long-time student-run campus recycling program recycled more paper and plastic last year than ever.
Schmidt says Clark has always done things like replacing drafty windows in buildings and retrofitting fixtures for more energy efficient lighting; now the University is stepping it up by instituting green buildings on campus. The Lasry Center for Bioscience recently received a Gold Leadership in Energy and Design (LEED) certification; and the new student residence Blackstone Hall is in the process of LEED certification. According to Schmidt, there are also plans to convert older buildings on campus to green status. Higgins University Center will be the first, serving as a model to transform other buildings on campus.
“In essence, campus sustainability efforts involve looking at the University as a whole and everything that we do here—all the waste that is accumulated, all the emissions that are generated—and asking, ‘What is the effect of this institution on the health of our planet?’ Then take action to mitigate those effects.”
Adapt to a new way Environmental scientist and CUES task force member Jennie Stephens teaches The Sustainable University, a project-based course that challenges students to think about sustainability in the context of “the university” as an institution with potential to act as a change agent within society. This year, she says the course will be completely paperless. Students will read papers online and submit their projects to her electronically; likewise she will use technology to send back grades and comments.
“There’s resistance to going paperless,” says Stephens, recognizing the power of old habits. “The course is trying to demonstrate, by reconsidering our own practices at Clark, that we need to make some changes. They may not be convenient; and we’ll need to adapt to a new way of doing things. But maybe it won’t be as difficult as we thought.”
Stephens recently attended an international workshop on integrating sustainability into higher education. Campus greening is a hot topic, she says, and there’s a push for campus communities to not only demonstrate good environmental sustainability practices and integrate sustainability more broadly into the curriculum and across disciplines, but also to reach out beyond the university to facilitate societal change toward sustainability.
“One goal is that every student regardless of academic major should graduate with a really good understanding of these challenges,” she says.
Last year, students in this course worked closely with Schmidt and others on campus to define potential opportunities for energy conservation at Clark through group projects. One group designed a reusable mug program that was instituted at the campus Bistro. Another analyzed cleaning products that the University used and recommended greener options. Another examined the feasibility of incorporating green roofs—putting plants and soil on campus rooftops to insulate and reduce energy usage and rain runoff. This year, students will take on projects that help identify opportunities and strategies to help Clark fulfill the Presidents Climate Commitment.
Stephens, who researches carbon capture and storage technologies that remove carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants before it’s emitted into the atmosphere, says climate change is rapidly becoming the most urgent sustainability issue. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing dramatically as a direct result of human burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, which in turn leads to increasing global average temperatures, rising sea levels, and more frequent extreme weather events.
The energy we use for transportation, electricity and the heating and cooling of buildings is dominated by fossil-fuel burning which contributes to the increase in CO2 emissions and climate change, she says. Our dependence on fossil fuels makes it very difficult to scale up renewable energy sources like wind, solar and geothermal, alternatives that generate electricity without emitting CO2, and transition to a low-carbon emitting energy system.
Stephens advocates for this transition, but says it’s complicated by entrenched political and economic systems. Currently many of those in power, who are needed to influence this transition to a renewable energy system, are associated with the fossil fuel industry. And despite all the talk about transitioning, government funding for the research and development of renewable energy has not increased.
The sustained reliance on coal is a pending danger, says Stephens. “The United States, China and India are among the countries that have the most coal resources and it’s going to be very difficult, especially as oil gets more expensive, for those high energy-consuming countries not to use their coal resources. But burning coal emits more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than any other energy source.”
Although carbon capture and storage is technically possible, she says, the real challenges are more sociopolitical, including questions about enforcing regulations, measuring and monitoring, liability, and the challenges of public perception and opposition.
Transformed by human action Geographer B.L. Turner II teaches The Earth Transformed by Human Action—a course that examines history and policy questions that are critical to sustainability and that considers the increasing capacity of humankind to manipulate the structure and function of the Earth’s system. The course takes students back about 10,000 years to the first human-induced global change, the eradication of the megafauna—the sudden disappearance of many large animals of that time such as the mammoth and saber tooth tiger. Then it delivers them to the present, where they learn about contemporary climate change through many of the topics covered in Al Gore’s global-warming film, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Students also grapple with how the social sciences attempt to explain human relationships with nature and policy questions, such as why the Kyoto protocol has been so controversial and unsuccessful in trying to get the industrialized world to commit to reducing its carbon emissions, while the Montreal protocol to eradicate CFCs—substances responsible for depleting the ozone—was so successful.
Turner warns that humankind is matching nature in many ways in terms of sustaining the Earth’s system, which is the structure of land, atmosphere and oceans and the relationship and processes that operate among them. In many ways, he says, humans have superseded nature.
According to Turner, humans are now the single largest input to the nitrogen cycle (by the massive applications of synthetic fertilizer that releases into the atmosphere and creates greenhouse gases), have significantly disrupted the hydrologic cycle with consequences for human water uses worldwide, and are the single largest source releasing stored carbon to the atmosphere, where it forms the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
“The Earth system is like that of your body. If you add chemicals and substances that are not part of its natural state, the body is going to react. That’s exactly what we’ve learned about the Earth’s system. When society changes the biogeochemical cycles—nitrogen, carbon and water—it changes the Earth’s structure. Nature can’t absorb the hit without changing.”
Turner is a leader in a burgeoning subfield called sustainability science, which examines ways to adequately provision for the world’s population without harming or threatening the Earth’s system.
“Sustainability doesn’t mean that you’re going to maintain the environment the way it is; it means that you’re not going to threaten it to the point where it is going to bite back—threaten life,” explains Turner.
Clark’s School of Geography has a long history in the development of sustainability science—Turner was tapped by the international community to lead the development of a land-change science component.
“We’ve learned that you can’t study the depth of these dynamics unless you treat land as a coupled human-environment system. You’ve got to put the human and environment subsystem together and study the interaction.”
Since 1997, Turner has been involved with a project in Yucatán, examining this coupled system in a tropical forest and how it relates to deforestation. “Land is the key,” he explains. “When the use and cover of some segment of the Earth is changing, it has social and environmental implications. Understanding the nexus of those is what the coupled system is all about.”
Sustainability science marks a new relationship between science and society. Understanding human-environment relationships is key, he notes, as even the best technological solution may not be used because of societal decisions. The science community is in negotiation with society to identify what important problems need to be solved concerning human-environment relationships. Scientists and society work together to develop deliverables in such a way that the decision-making community truly understands them.
“Sustainability science is not just about finding a solution that decision makers can deal with. It’s about understanding the whole litany of things below it that allow society to take the steps needed.”
Choices and trade offs “Essentially, sustainable development is progress today that doesn’t sacrifice the future,” says economist Jackie Geoghegan. “It sounds nice, no one can argue with it, but economists say, ‘but how do we operationalize it?’”
One focus of economics is generational trade-offs, says Geoghegan. We make choices today that affect the future. But future generations aren’t here yet to let their ideas be known, so another is predicting crucial links between today’s actions and the future effect of those actions on our communities and the world.
Geoghegan explains that things that you wouldn’t typically think to be challenging for the environment, like rising incomes, increasing demands for beef, or even U.S. immigration reform policy, can have impacts. For example, Geoghegan mentors geography doctoral student Birgit Schmook, whose research in Mexico indicates that cattle ranching is now becoming a bigger driving force of deforestation than farming in the region. As incomes rise across the planet, people can afford to buy more beef and the demand for beef goes up, says Geoghegan. As farmers recognize this, they clear more land for pastures to raise more cattle, which leads to deforestation.
“Economics is known as the dismal science because economists are always pointing out, ‘you don’t get something for nothing.’ Economics focuses on trade-offs. If you want more trees, then you need to have fewer cows.”
Schmook also discovered that Mexican villages with higher levels of migration have higher levels of forest regrowth. Many Mexican farmers are illegally sending family members to the United States to find jobs. Typically, they work in the United States for a short time and then go home. This extra income frees them from using their land so intensively—they can buy food, rather than farm it.
“But immigration is now a very contentious topic in Washington,” points out Geoghegan. “If illegal migration is really curtailed, without this extra income, these people will need to clear more land to grow food—they need to eat, it’s a matter of survival—but this will impact deforestation. Who would ever think that immigration policy in the United States would play out on the landscape in Mexico?”
According to Geoghegan, there’s recently been a large economic focus on biofuel, such as ethanol, a renewable fuel made from corn, which is blended into gasoline. A huge spike in corn prices in the United States has been driven by ethanol demand for fuel. And high corn prices have resulted in a spike in milk prices, as corn is a feed staple of dairy cows.
Although ethanol is supplementing fossil fuel use, Geoghegan is quick to point out how energy intensive it is to turn corn into fuel, not to mention the impact that farming massive quantities of corn will have on the environment, like deforestation, land erosion, and increased greenhouse gases from fertilizers.
“It’s not necessarily a win-win situation,” says Geoghegan. “Yes, we may be using less fossil fuel, but there are other implications. There may be biodiversity issues, or poor families will need more support as the cost of milk and food rises, or something could be happening in another market that you would think is unrelated. But actually everything is related.”
The rising costs of fossil fuels certainly has implications. Geoghegan says she’s trading in her Subaru for a Honda Civic.
“People will make choices, whether it’s buying a smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicle, or making their home more energy efficient by upgrading insulation, replacing drafty windows and doors, or switching to high-efficiency light bulbs or renewable energy sources. But making an investment that takes 10 years to pay off isn’t an alternative for people who are restrained by budget. These things are expensive; this can be an impossible choice for some people to make,” says Geoghegan. “Once again, it’s hard to get something for nothing.”
Greening the supply chain “Businesses are under a variety of pressures,” says management professor Joe Sarkis. They face pressures to be environmentally responsible from government regulators, competitors, consumers, communities, supply chain members, and even employees—after all, no one wants to work in a place that might kill them or make their community unhealthy for their families.
While OSHA and EPA regulations do exist, Sarkis says there are a lot of reasons why businesses would want to be greener. But finance and economics are still the main drivers in business and there’s controversy as to whether or not good environmental responsibility relates to good financial performance.
So should companies attempt to be green? Sarkis, who has taught Corporate Environmental Management at Clark since 1996, says if longevity is a company goal, then yes.
“Companies that are spending a lot to be environmentally sound may not realize the returns for many years; but part of that return is that they exist many years down the line. Companies that look for the easy buck in the short term might lose out in the end.”
“Environmental issues deal with the natural environment and whether or not man is a part of it or man benefits from it,” says Sarkis. “Sustainability brings in more human issues such as sweatshops, slave labor, poverty, poverty in third world countries, social justice issues, equity issues, discrimination—these are social issues that organizations have to address.”
According to Sarkis, more and more businesses today are concerned with corporate social responsibility, which emphasizes a balance of economics, environment and equity, which may also deal with issues of safety and security of people. He asserts that environmental issues should take the lead. Perhaps in the short run, some practices that do not take the environment into account might be good for reducing poverty, or the economical viability of the company. “But in the long run, you’re just borrowing from the bank,” he says.
“Each function within the organization has some sort of relationship to environmental issues. That’s one point that I try to get across to students,” says Sarkis.
From a financial perspective, there’s great benefit for a company to be part of an environmentally responsible mutual fund’s portfolio, which only includes the stocks and bonds of environmentally responsible companies. From a marketing perspective, there are “green consumers”—people who will buy and maybe pay a premium price for green products. There are also companies who will only buy from environmentally sound companies because their customers want to buy environmentally responsible products. ISO 14000 certification—a voluntary certification given to companies that have environmental processes in place and meet certain standards—gets a big push among corporations, he says.
“That’s one reason the supply chain gets green. You want to do business with us, show us your ISO 14000 certification—it’s worldwide.”
Sarkis’ class also examines ecological footprints—essentially, what the average person uses in terms of resources. He says Americans’ footprints are the largest and in theory, if everyone on the planet lived like Americans, at least three planet Earths would be needed to sustain it.
“Examining ecological footprints confronts issues of fairness and equity,” he points out.
According to Sarkis, a popular management course is Social Entrepreneurship. Many Clark students are not only interested in starting up companies in poorer areas, but also companies that focus on environmental issues, products, energy alternatives, research and consulting.
Sarkis, who says academia may well be ahead of industry with its ideas about sustainability, hopes his students will leave Clark with greater consciousness of environmental sustainability and the knowledge and skills to critically analyze business proposals with respect to environmental implications.
Freedom for future generations Philosophy and environmental ethics professor Patrick Derr asks tough questions: “Are there any things in nature, besides human beings, that have intrinsic value? Do chimpanzees and gorillas and orangutans really have natural rights? What things deserve our respect for their own sake regardless of any value they may have to us?”
According to Derr, most philosophers believe that things either have the same value as humans or none at all. “So that’s one of the issues that gets worried about in environmental ethics—which things have intrinsic value?”
Derr says arguing about this is pointless. “Humans have value, and humans need a functioning ecosystem to survive. If we don’t take care of the ecosystem, we’ll all be doomed.”
Four generations ago, no one could guess what we would need today, says Derr. He doubts anyone would’ve guessed aluminum or petroleum.
“We talk about future generations as if we know what people would need a million years from now. The truth is—we don’t have any clue,” he says. “Any reasonable understanding of sustainability would at least entail this: we ought to meet our needs in a way that doesn’t make it impossible for future generations to meet theirs. I’m pretty confident that being able to make their own choices and decisions will be valuable to them.”
Then the question becomes, “What is a basic need?”
“Does anyone in the world really need a 62-inch high-definition plasma television? I would say no. You could provide 10 notebook computers to schoolchildren in Nigeria for the same environmental impact and that’s probably closer to being a real need,” he explains.
“I’m not a vegetarian, but I think one of the most interesting arguments for vegetarianism is that the amount of grain needed to produce tasty beefsteaks could feed an amazing amount of people. So maybe I don’t need a beefsteak—my cardiologist would probably agree.”
Derr, an advocate for nuclear power, says the biggest policy question that will affect our grandchildren is “coal or nuclear?” According to Derr, Congress recently passed a $14 billion energy bill including massive subsidies for coal, which is disconcerting to him because coal is the worst choice for global warming.
“As a rough estimate, the total fuel cycle of coal—the mining, the transporting, the trains, the air pollution, the long-term cancer induction, the asthma—kills as many people each year as Chernobyl did,” he explains. “But deaths from air-pollution related diseases are completely invisible. We don’t care about it. We’re all afraid of the big melt-down.”
Derr is optimistic that we could increase our reliance on green energy by 1,000 percent in 20 years. The question is whether the other 90 percent of our energy would come from coal or nuclear.
“The bottom line is, we can talk about 1 percent, 3 percent, 5 percent from whatever—solar, wind—it’s all important, because every ton of coal we don’t burn is good for our grandchildren. In the end, you get down to the great bulk of energy that makes an industrialized country run. You don’t get process heat from a windmill or solar panel. Your basic options are petroleum, natural gas, coal and nuclear. The first three produce carbon dioxide. Nuclear doesn’t.”
“Do we believe in the tooth fairy? Are our children just going to live with a dead planet? I don’t know. I don’t get it. At some point you realize that you’ve just got to stop,” says Derr.
“Our grandchildren would like an energy policy that would leave them a planet that was livable.”
Trees for life
After years of working in corporate America, Jason Sohigian ’93 says he tired of the bureaucracy and wanted more interesting and purposeful work. In 1999, he became editor of the Armenian Weekly newspaper in Watertown, Mass., where he worked with activists in Europe to break a story about the human rights and environmental concerns related to the oil pipeline running from Azerbaijan to Turkey. It was a very exciting, geopolitical topic and a turning point for him, he notes. The experience was the catalyst that inspired him to pursue his passion.
The grandson of Armenian genocide survivors, it’s not surprising that Sohigian, who majored in environmental science and technology at Clark, would gravitate toward a career that was connected to both his heritage and international environmental issues. Today, Sohigian is deputy director of the Armenian Tree Project (ATP), an organization founded by the late John O’Connor ’75 and his wife Carolyn Mugar. The organization has planted and rejuvenated 1.5 million trees—that’s one tree for every victim of the Armenian genocide.
“The Armenian Tree Project planted 720,000 trees throughout Armenia last year,” says Sohigian. In a time when global warming is a dire concern, he says, this represents a major contribution not only to Armenia’s but to the world’s efforts to combat serious environmental challenges such as deforestation and dangerous increases in greenhouse gas concentrations.
According to Sohigian, ATP programs have also helped reduce poverty and increase job growth in Armenia. For example, in addition to running three nurseries, ATP partners with over 300 family farmers who grow trees in their backyards. The organization’s trees have produced more than 250,000 pounds of apricots, apples, peaches, plums and cherries annually for the benefit of local communities. ATP also provides environmental education, which is critical to empowering Armenians to create a sustainable future and create jobs, through lessons and fieldwork opportunities. And it is training 5,000 science teachers, who can use ATP’s curriculum to teach their students about tree planting and maintenance.
Recently Sohigian has been working with Jeff Masarjian ’75, the executive director of the Armenian Tree Project which is funded by more than 5,000 Armenian Americans, on a variety of public relations and fundraising initiatives to advance the organization’s mission to reforest Armenia while providing jobs, environmental education and community development.
People care about the future of their familial homeland and the Tree Project makes the connection between the two, says Sohigian.
To read more about Sohigian’s interests visit: http://sohigian.blogspot.com/
—Colleen Mullaney
Clark's first sustainability report now online
The Clark University Environmental Sustainability (CUES) task force is pleased to present its first campus environmental sustainability report. The report is available online at www.clarku.edu/sustainability. The report focuses on four dimensions of the University’s environmental footprint—energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, waste and recycling, and paper consumption—and also includes an overview of educational programs offered by the University. In the future, the CUES task force hopes to expand the report to cover other areas of concern, such as water use on campus.
Established by President Bassett in April 2006, the CUES task force includes faculty, administration, and graduate and undergraduate students and is chaired by Provost David Angel. The task force’s mission is to promote environmental sustainability at Clark by increasing awareness of environmental and sustainability issues on campus, researching environmental impacts of University activities and making recommendations for improvement, and coordinating activities related to the environmental sustainability of the University.
Alumna snubs Big Oil for the environment
Angela Mwandia M.A. ’05 says she has always been interested in the environment. At one point she worked for an oil company, but decided to can the well-paid job for good prospects to intern in environmental work. She knew she was giving up a prosperous opportunity, but the oil business just didn’t suit her.
After working in Somalia to help developing communities cultivate natural, sustainable resources, Mwandia was struck by the connection between environmental issues and poverty.
“We cannot talk about improving the lives of poor people or alleviating poverty without considering the contribution of the surrounding environment to their situation or without trying to understand the role poverty plays in the further degradation of environmental conditions,” says Mwandia, who decided then to devote her career to these issues.
Mwandia decided to go back to school for a master’s degree and was looking for a program that would allow her to combine development with environmental management studies. She had heard good things about Clark and met international development, community and environment (IDCE) professor Richard Ford, while she was working in Kenya. Mwandia decided to enroll in IDCE’s master’s program in environmental science and policy because its global outlook appealed to her.
“There are few places that I can think of that would have provided me with the international flavor, family atmosphere and academic challenge that the environmental science and policy program did,” says Mwandia, who credits IDCE professor Halina Brown and her “Management of Environmental Pollutants” course with giving her the knowledge and skills to critically explore policy options in managing pollutants.
Currently, Mwandia works in Nairobi with the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) Toxics Program, which focuses on policy advocacy and community sensitization regarding issues related to chemicals and waste management on regional and international scales. She is a program coordinator for the Africa Stockpiles Programme, which aims to clean up and safely dispose of all obsolete pesticides from Africa and help to prevent future accumulations. Virtually every African country has stockpiles of obsolete pesticides and associated wastes that have accumulated over periods as long as 40 years, explains Mwandia. These pesticides pose serious threats to the health of both rural and urban populations and contribute to land and water degradation. Her work emphasizes capacity building, training and awareness to ensure that people are equipped to deal with obsolete pesticides and overall pesticide management.
—Colleen Mullaney
Paper or plastic?
How about cloth instead? EcoBags, a line of environmentally friendly reusable totes, are “saving the planet one bag at a time.” EcoBags have been a featured green product on “Oprah” and looked “eco-chic” in the green suite as the celebrity give-a-way at the 59th annual Emmy Awards. What’s more, EcoBags were created by a Clarkie—social entrepreneur Sharon Rowe ’79. Visit www.clarku.edu/ecobags to learn more about Rowe and the inspiration behind EcoBags.
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