Sustainabilify your student union

The Association of College Unions International has come up with a new resource for student unions and university student services wanting to go green.

Information and the report can be downloaded here at the ACUI website.

I don't have prior knowledge about this organization.

This information may be useful for those student unions looking to look at sustainability within their own operations, and also looking to make changes in other areas of campus - what sorts of events and best practices can be achieved throughout campus.
Included is information on STARS, a new sustainability rating system out of the US.

Post a comment if you think this report is helpful or if you have any other ideas on student unions & sustainability.

Getting out of the classroom

"This is the best thing that's come out of the York strike."

Students don't often have a lot of time on their hands, but many remain active - on campus sustainability and beyond. Sustainability for students also means going beyond the university campus, "greening the campus and community", and working on political gains, learning how businesses are changing and having impact in strengthening the work of environmental organizations.

The current strike at York University didn't hurt as environmental and theatre students came out to support the acting out of street theatre at a rally for green energy outside of the Ontario energy minister's office.
See a teaser of their show below, featuring "curious" George Smitherman off on his tour of world renewable energy sources (see The wind at his back).

Find coverage of the rally with photos and audio at the Toronto Social Justice Magazine.

Young people, including past and present from campuses in Scarborough, also went out to support a proposal for a wind turbine research off the Toronto coast at a community meeting today. A little extra time is getting these students into trouble, and pushing other generations to consider the need for a greener future.

Yes We Can: signing the President's Climate Committment and Joining AASHE

593 American university presidents have signed pledges to becoming carbon netural, and developing accountable plans to get there.
Turns out that during eight years of Bush, someone's been stepping up to the plate.

Now universities in BC - though initiatlly just an American plan - have taken up the task, and students at Ontario universities are working to get the same work done there.

So that brings me to posting the first of my 11 thesis recommendations (how many did Martin Luther have again?)

 Ask your university to join AASHE if not yet a member. Have your student group join external networks that match your goals. Remain knowledgeable and connected with various organizations, strategies and achievements.

This is a good first step in getting your university to that great committment of signing onto the President's Committment. AASHE provides resources, effective solutions, networking and positive hope (see previous post). If your campus is not a member of AASHE, the ask is much less of one than it is for joining the President's Committment. Basically, you just have to ask.

But for both items, building coalitions is possible. Students can have an association make the request for joining AASHE, and having the university put down the $2000+ per year. Your student union could ask (or undergrad and grad could make the request), or supportive professors, staff/faculty associations, unions, etc.
It's a no-brainer for any university or college to be a member of AASHE if they want to be a leader in sustainability or shown as such.
The main point is to build coalitions - get lots of groups and individuals who have sway on campus to support your initiatives that ultimately need administrative support. And then find a way for these folks to show that support.

External networks are very important to keep sharing strategies and learning how to make change. The Sierra Youth Coalition is another.
Or the Energy Action Coalition.
The difference with AASHE is that it's mostly paid sustainability practitioners (like university sustainability coordinators) and faculty who participate.

So here's a study of mine on a group of students who influenced their president to sign on.. though it was difficult at first.

Cornell University – a case study
This influential university in central New York State has had its share of campus environmental controversies and more recently, achievements. It is a worthy case to review because of its past and current activism, leading to much failure and success in sustainability initiatives. In October of 2004, then Cornell president Jeffrey Lehman gave his State of the University Address, challenging the community on three main issues, one being sustainability, and leading to further commitments. Lehman said in the speech:
The list of what we are doing now is long - but we must do substantially more. We must draw these disparate efforts together into an integrated whole. We must develop structures of collaboration so that insights in one domain might stimulate correlative insights in another. And as we develop a mature understanding of the different dimensions of sustainability, we must employ our various extension resources to disseminate our findings to the public (Cornell University, 2006).
In 2004, the University made known its intention to pave a tract of historic Redbud forest to make way for parking lot extension. With students and faculty members opposing the action, campaigns ensued which included classic protest including sit-ins at the office of the president and tree-sits, physically blocking the cutting of trees, and activists who felt their safety was at risk. In addition, professors created the Faculty Working Group to stop the paving by researching parking alternatives and lobbying their administrators. Roughly 380 faculty members signed a petition, and the administration also received pressure from community members and City Council against their proposal (Sanders, 2005). The situation ended when acting president Hunter Rawlings issued a statement July 13, 2005, and followed through with clearing the forest, and signed an agreement reflecting broad sustainability and transit commitments with some students who were occupying the space (redbudwoods.org).
Fast forward to 2007 - a new president and a different kind of student priority. A student group called KyotoNOW! claims its inception in the “campus climate action movement”, which formed with an initial goal to convince Cornell to meets Kyoto greenhouse gas targets. A current campaign called BEYOND KYOTO! “Seeks to move beyond the Kyoto framework and onto more ambitious emissions reduction goals” (KyotonNOW!, 2006).
This student group appears to be well integrated with the broader campus movement as a member of the Campus Climate Challenge, and promoter of the American University and College President’s Climate Commitment, supported by AASHE and signed by 145 other college presidents (as of March 17, 2007). In much different fashion, President David Skorton in an open letter to KyotoNOW! on February 9, 2007, endorsed its work and that of the President’s Climate Commitment, and setup a committee to give recommendation on the signing of the Commitment. By February 23, 2007, he had announced its signature on behalf of Cornell University (Skorton, 2007).
On March 12, 2007, Cornell students in a referendum passed by a margin of 80%, a proposal to include a five dollar fee on their student fee to pay for green energy. The proposal would cover the costs for 10% of the campus’ electricity consumption to be switched to renewable sources. After a presentation from KyotoNOW!, the student union unanimously agreed to holding a referendum, and with the result, will now work with administration to incorporate a fee, perhaps optional. A student champion of the resolution commented that just one year earlier, the student union had been unsure about holding such a referendum because of the low level of support it might draw.
The referendum questions were proposed by the student organization Kyoto Now!. According to former Kyoto Now! President, Matt Perkins ’08, the S.A. [Student Assembly], was originally skeptical about the idea, but recently has become very receptive to the issue. ‘In the past year and half, people have become more aware of the issues of climate change,” Perkins said. “If you look in the New York Times or Washington Post, global warming is not just in the news once a week, it’s there everyday” (Ramachandran, 2007).

The theory behind their latest campaign puts them past “climate neutral”, a current trend for campus groups to push for either “carbon/climate neutrality” or “beyond carbon/climate neutral”. As in the Redbud case, petition signatures were collected from faculty, though only 95 of a goal of 500 were received, before the President’s announcement (Cornell Faculty for Climate Neutrality, 2007). Skorton’s initial open letter was very supportive of the student group and indicated a change in approach in dealing with students. The commitment announcement weeks later also praised students and the other motivators: “I applaud the determination of our student body, the dedication of our staff and the path-finding work of our faculty, all of whom contributed to making this decision possible. In particular, I commend the KyotoNOW! students and other members of the Ad Hoc Committee (Skorton, 2007).

Not on the AASHE Bulletin?

What's AASHE?
The wonderfully effective organization with the non-concise - I've heard that many Canadian organizers still don't know of this organization, foudned and still based out of the Western US.

Join their bulletin - it's the best source for information you can get, filled with resources and hope. I've seen it grow tremendously over the years, following the exciting changes happening on campuses.
And it does include cancon.. but we have to catch up to the American movement if we're going to have more successes shown.

Check it out and subscribe here:
http://www.aashe.org/archives/bulletin.php

Sustainable Campuses - Sierra Youth Coalition also posts success stories periodically, and you can contribute your own from campus:
http://syc-cjs.org/sustainable/tiki-browse_categories.php?parentId=27

Campuses moving past the green phase

by Darcy Higgins

If you believe James Lovelock, we’ve got the whole thing lost. But most of today’s students go by the logic of James Hansen, whose research is echoed by climate author Bill McKibben whose writing and speaking engagements have been giving students reasons for hope. But this hope comes with restrictions. At the first major conference of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) in 2006, McKibben told students and sustainability staff about the decade or less left to take action to stabilize global greenhouse gas emissions.
Students have taken this to heart and are doing interesting things across the continent, and indeed throughout the world. Through a new movement known as “campus sustainability”, students in universities and colleges are stepping up their actions to force institutional change, aware that the need now exists for more significant actions than the those taken in the smaller “greening the campus” movement of the 1990s. Universities are taking actions because of the concerted effort of their students. Universities are going beyond policy efforts like signing the Talloires Declaration, to implementing offices of sustainability to examine their own efforts, and committing to carbon neutrality. They are doing so because of the effective strategies of a very interesting new student movement, one which contrasts significantly from that of the 1960s.
Students began to take organized stances on political issues in the United States in the 1930s, but rumblings occurred even earlier. “The first recorded rebellion occurred in 1766 at Harvard University, over the poor quality of butter served in the commons. The rallying call of the protestors was, “Behold our Butter stinketh” . Fast-forward to 1962, the year of Silent Spring, a student movement again stirred in the United States, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) met to author the Port Huron Declaration.
“We believe that the universities are an overlooked seat of influence”, the statement read. Because of this institutions’ permanence, social influence, educational and knowledge distribution, its sometimes negative influences, and its openness to all viewpoints, it was believed to have the potential ability to change societal thinking in a significant way. These, at least, are facts, no matter how dull the teaching, how paternalistic the rules, how irrelevant the research that goes on. Social relevance, the accessibility to knowledge, and internal openness: these together make the university a potential base and agency in a movement of social change” (Hayden 1962). This is by-in-large the same argument made by Michael M’Gonigle and Justine Starke in Planet U: Sustaining the World, Reinventing the University. This time, about sustainability.
Two years after the Port Huron Declaration, the radical student movement began at the University of California Berkley with tactics and goals much different to those of today. Students throughout the 60’s reflected the direct action techniques used in protests in the peace-ecology movements of anti-nuclear proliferation and the Vietnam War. But they also challenged the basic structures of the institutions. When little of the movement’s deep desires were impacted by the protests, the early 1970s proved to be a sober second look at the tactics with a renewed look at the issues. A book written by Ralph Nader and Donald Ross at that time provided insightful commentary into the less visible problems of the 1970s. “Pollution can’t be solved by a sit-in, but university students have the means to test chemicals dumped by a company and warn the public, and even come up with sound pollution abatement measures. This is a much stronger technique.” Problems of continuity within student activism were met with the creation of Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) in Oregon and Minnesota, and in Canada, at the University of Waterloo.
The student movement since the 1960s has mimicked the broader environmental movement in becoming more sophisticated. This can be seen in its strategies, institutionalizing and networking of its organizations, and its use of technology. With end goals having generally changed from deep institutional change or destruction, to societal transformation to sustainability (environmental and social justice aims), strategies are also much different. Sustainability organizations are becoming institutionalized within student unions and often use a great deal of professional style, such as report-writing and fundraising. The work is being accomplished by a very small proportion of the student body at any one campus. The sustainability initiatives put forth by students somewhat challenge the underlying structure of their institutions as students are actively demanding further input in university and college governance. The initiatives are generally good for the campus, even financially, and university administrators need not fear, but work with the proposals.
With the environment as the top issue among Canadian youth, campus sustainability becomes the most important branch of today’s student movement. Student action is much less visible than it was decades ago when protests and campus police shootings made headlines. Campus sustainability initiatives do make the news, but generally “sexier” solutions like renewable energy projects or green roofs get more press than a change in ethical purchasing policies or comprehensive sustainability assessments.
Although the university can be a bastion of free thought and innovative research, the ideas can be difficult to get past the research or the classroom because of the traditions and culture of the centuries-old institution. However, outside factors that have influenced the popularity of the environmental movement in 2007 helped to turn things around. By providing outside pressure, external influences such as the wake-up call of Hurricane Katrina; the film An Inconvenient Trut;, various reports by the International Panel on Climate Change and economist Nicholas Stern; and federal inaction on climate change in Canada and the United States have acted as catalysts for change.
Bigger fishes, like the President’s Climate Commitment that sets goals and action plans for carbon neutrality, are much easier to move ahead today. In Ithaca, New York, at Cornell University and Ithaca College, the Commitment was signed with relative ease, compared with the petitions needed to sign a sustainability policy or the attempt to stop the paving of a Redbud forest, just a few years earlier. Evidence for this change is seen elswhere. In some cases though, work is still difficult. At the University of Waterloo where the environmental movement of the late 1980s helped spur an innovating greening the campus program, the current campus sustainability movement has been met with resistance from the top.
An even greater level of institutional change will be required to affect student participation in university governance and make a massive difference in campus sustainability. But this is what was attempted and failed by SDS. The more urgent aspects of global sustainability can’t wait for these snail-paced institutions to change. It is difficult enough in two or four years for students to move universities to adopt minor greening initiatives. These projects take student leadership and a significant commitment of time.
Perhaps it is those campuses that have already embraced sustainability upon student demand, where students should now begin prodding for further institutional change and democratic governance. After working closely with administrators on sustainability initiatives for a few years, students may be in a better place to work for deep-seated change. Let that be a challenge to the students of present sustainability leaders like Arizona State University, Oberlin College or the University of British Columbia.

New site for students

Introducing this new blog, I will use to post articles and information on campus sustainability with regards to new research and strategies.