This past weekend I attended a conference on campus sustainability at Pace University put on by the Environmental Consortium of Colleges and Universities. The conference was titled “Sustain What? Preparing Our Students by Greening Our Campuses” and while there was a huge amount of information on sustainability projects at various campuses, the underlying theme of the weekend was the importance of higher education in the sustainability movement.
On one level, campuses are uniquely positioned in their communities to serve as role models of sustainability. Thanks to large endowments and government and privately funded grants, they are often able to invest in renewable energy projects, sustainable construction of new buildings, sustainable food systems including composting projects, and other efficiency projects that the general population is often unaware of or unable to afford. Colleges and universities can implement relatively new technologies, educating the community and providing business to new companies.
However, higher education has a greater responsibility within the movement towards sustainability than simply incorporating efficiency into new building design and urging people to turn out the lights. The language of sustainability, argued some at the conference, should be incorporated into all classes offered by a university. I attended a break-out session directed towards faculty that led to a discussion of this issue. Coming from SUNY ESF, where all (or almost all) of our courses and programs are directed towards the environment and sustainability, it was interesting to see the perspective of faculty from other campuses, including predominantly conservative campuses.
The faculty members in the session discussed the lack of basic knowledge that their students had about the environment, including the connection between food production and climate change, and the history of environmental disasters including Love Canal and Bhopal. They also discussed the existence of environmental science/studies programs at their campuses, but the isolation of these programs from the rest of the schools. We came to a few conclusions about the role of higher education in our session (and the conference as a whole):
– Incorporation of sustainability concepts into classes other than those in environmental science/studies programs is not only possible, but necessary to making students more well-rounded as they enter a world facing ecological crises.
– If students learn about sustainability within their field of study, they are likely to take those concepts into their future jobs. Ideally, this would mean the next generation of bankers, businessmen and women, scientists of all stripes, educators, and so on will view the world through the lens of the need for sustainability.
– And most importantly, if higher education is not involved in sustainability, it is not performing its role as higher education.