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.