Recharging University Sustainability Efforts

With the winds of winter wandering into Ithaca, Oct. 22 may seem like an odd day to reflect on global warming and Cornell’s sustainability efforts. But despite the coming cold, students, faculty and staff will congregate today on Ho Plaza to celebrate the Seventh Annual Campus Sustainability Day. They will reflect on the University’s sustainability efforts, celebrate what has been accomplished, examine possibilities of what is next and begin to turn those possibilities into reality. We do this with good reason and imperative.

PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Perspectives in Higher Education 2009 cites green initiatives as one of several prominent issues facing colleges and universities in addition to risk management, tuition affordability and expense reduction. Institutions are under pressure to go green not only from students, but also from external organizations, impending regulations and cost reduction requirements.

Cornell has, of course, recognized this imperative. The recently released Climate Action Plan aims to aggressively reduce the University’s greenhouse gas emissions to zero, while greatly enhancing research opportunities, experiential education and Cornell’s impacts on the state economy. With some investment this plan will save the University hundreds of millions of dollars.

Beyond our facilities, the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future is fostering cutting edge research into the environmental, economic and energy needs of our planet. Student groups, such as our Solar Decathlon and Automotive X-Prize teams, are building the technologies of tomorrow. On Cornell’s West Campus, faculty, students and staff have come together to plant natural landscapes. Today at noon, Cornell will be named a Tree Campus USA by the Arbor Day Foundation at a tree planting ceremony in the north part of the Arts Quad.

However, recent developments highlight that structure needs to be brought to the University’s sustainability efforts. Despite Cornell’s surge in green endeavors, the Sustainable Endowment Institute’s College Sustainability Report Card dropped Cornell’s overall grade from a B+ to a lackluster B this year.

Cornell garnered lower grades in the categories of Green Building, Food and Recycling and Climate Change and Energy. For the past two years, Cornell has implemented a “LEED Silver plus 30 percent more efficient building policy,” a policy that garnered other schools As. Campus Life has ramped up its composting efforts and now employs a student sustainability intern. Cornell’s CAP has been nationally heralded as a clear framework to achieve climate neutrality.

Very soon, Cornell will take a big step towards that goal when the Combined Heat and Power Plant goes online, lowering the University’s carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent and fulfilling the University’s Kyoto targets two years ahead of schedule, a feat few other schools can claim.

Many of the University’s actions have been decentralized, bottom-up approaches, such as Professor Mike Hoffman’s Culture of Sustainability at the Agricultural Experimental Station, Keeton House Professor Jeff Cowie’s course on sustainable communities and the variety of student efforts across campus. The downside to these decentralized organic efforts is that they fail to maximize their potential in the absence of wider support and are often overlooked by external inspectors.

When rankings like the Green Report Card are being profiled in The New York Times it is clear that sustainability has become a marketing tool in higher education. In a recent study by the Princeton Review, 68 percent of students said they value knowing about a college’s sustainability practices and 26 percent of students said that that information would impact their decision on where to attend school. While other schools have green links on their main webpage and sections devoted to sustainability in their Wikipedia articles, many prospective students are missing what Cornell is doing. I should know — I was one of them and chose another school for my undergraduate study partly because Cornell’s commitment to being green was unapparent.

Despite the University’s far reaching efforts, we are currently missing an opportunity to focus and synchronize present and future efforts across the University. We should aim to connect the goals of our academic-oriented Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future, our facilities-focused Environmental Compliance and Sustainability Office, our outreach missions handled by Cooperative Extension and our student initiatives. A more concerted approach to extend sustainability research and education outside of our labs and classrooms and into the wider Cornell community will help these efforts to be more obvious to our community, potential students and sustainability minded observers. Doing so will also facilitate networks among faculty, staff, students and alumni to work towards a myriad of green goals on and beyond East Hill.

Within the past year the UA and the GPSA have tried to fill this void by creating sustainability committees supplementing the Student Assembly’s decade-old Environmental Issues Committee. The Sustainability Hub has stepped up its efforts to bring together student organizations by holding an annual sustainability summit. Though these grassroots efforts aim to coordinate what they can, they fall short without direct guidance, coordination and support from both the mission-oriented and operational leadership of the University.

As the University’s strategic planning process moves forward, it is imperative to Cornell’s educational, research and land grant missions that there be a University-wide framework to coordinate sustainability efforts. The risks are too great and the benefits too lucrative for this not to be made one of the central aspects for Reimagining Cornell. Our academic, student, facility and outreach efforts must be harmonized to maximize Cornell’s role as a sustainability leader and capture the many cost-saving opportunities associated with going green.

Michael J. Walsh, grad, is a student-elected trustee of Cornell University. He may be reached at mjw66@cornell.edu [7]. Trustee Viewpoint appears periodically.