Education for Sustainability

By Bill Barnes, PhD, Associate Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies at the University of Portland.  Second Nature awarded a posthumous Visionary Leadership Award to Ray Anderson during the 2012 Climate Leadership Awards at American University, June 21-22nd, 2012.

The first Industrial Revolution is flawed; it is not working; it is unsustainable; it is the mistake.  And we must move on to another, and better, Industrial Revolution, and get it right this time. -The late Ray Anderson, Founder of Interface Global, the world’s largest modular carpet manufacturer

Ray Anderson, Founder and CEO of Interface Global

The most refreshing thing about Ray Anderson was his transparency.  When he spoke as a representative of the business community, his sheer honesty and humility would typically astonish, bringing the audience to tears.  His main message was simple and powerful: we must change, and we can change. And he would typically build his case by detailing how Interface learned to continually monitor and improve the life cycle impacts of modular carpet, and how to make money doing it.

According to Anderson, increasing consumer awareness was the initial key to the conversion of Interface in the mid 1990s.

By Stephen Muzzy, Senior Associate, Second Nature

(This article appears in the June, 2012 issue of The ACUPCC Implementer)

The ACUPCC’s 5^th year celebration also marks an important stage in the ongoing, unprecedented efforts of the network to publicly report on activities to eliminate operational greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and to provide the education, research, and community engagement to enable the rest of society to do the same. Because of these tremendous efforts the ACUPCC Reporting System now includes 1585 GHG reports, 465 Climate Action Plans, and 240 Progress Reports on the Climate Action Plan! Public reporting by ACUPCC signatories demonstrates transparency and integrity for each institution’s commitment and contributes to the collective learning of the network and general public. The ACUPCC Reporting System also allows signatories to track, assess, and communicate progress to their campus community and beyond, demonstrating to prospective students, foundations, and potential private sector partners that their institution is serious and transparent about its commitment to climate change and sustainability. The individual efforts taken together are demonstrating impressive results and the growing impact of the network to prepare graduates and provide the necessary solutions for a sustainable future.

Making an Impact

The ACUPCC’s earliest signatories have had more than four years to assess, plan and begin implementing their Climate Action Plans allowing them to:

The American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) is celebrating five years of higher education’s leadership on the critical issues of our time, with new data from signatories’ public reports showing unprecedented success and innovation in renewable energy, curriculum, energy efficiency, green building, and financial savings. 202 institutions have submitted Progress Reports on their implementation of the commitment in the first five years, showing the following results, which are indicative of progress throughout the network.  While reports are still coming in and numbers are subject to change, preliminary analysis of the latest data shows:

By Sarah Brylinsky, Program Associate, Second Nature

(Download the symposium agenda, or a PDF version of this summary here.)

The first American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment(ACUPCC) Regional Collaborative Symposium – the 2012 Northeast Regional Symposium – took place at Bunker Hill Community College November 3-4, 2011. The Regional Symposiums focus on fostering collaboration among ACUPCC signatories facing similar challenges and opportunities in their geographic regions. This inaugural conference garnered participation from 36 universities in 19 states throughout the Northeast, achieving cross-institutional dialogue, knowledge exchange, and solutions to climate action planning, curriculum reform, and other key issues.

Engaging students in the process of fulfilling the ACUPCC is a great way to get things done - completing greenhouse gas inventories, creating a climate action plan, implementing specific projects, and reporting on progress.  But more importantly, it provides a variety of excellent experiential education opportunities, exposing students processes and systems that will be in growing demand in workplace.

Students can gain marketable technical skills related to carbon accounting, reporting, renewable energy systems, green building, and more. There are also a whole host of relevant disciplines where students can earn valuable experience, such as economics and financing, law and policy, and strategic planning and management.  Maybe most important, it's a chance to experience firsthand how organizations work, and the exciting challenges of managing complex change.

The Campus Climate Neutral project from the National Association of Environmental Law Societies (NAELS) has helped many schools engage students in climate action planning process, including UC Santa Barbara, Tulane, Bard, and the University of Arizona.  The Climate Corps Public Sector program from the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is also training students and placing them in internships on campuses to conduct energy audits and make cost-saving recommendations for energy reductions.

There are hundreds of examples of ACUPCC institutions that have engaged students in this exciting process in one way or another.  Here are just a few:

By Anthony Cortese, President, Second Nature

Ray Anderson, founder and chairman of Interface, great leader, mentor and friend passed away this week after a long bout with cancer at age 77. He was and continues to be the icon of what a successful business must look like to survive indefinitely and lead society on a more healthy, fair and sustainable path.

Last week, we released a new video that answers the two questions most frequently put to us since Second Nature was founded in 1993:

Why is Education for Sustainability so important?

Why focus on the higher education sector?

Heres’s our answer:

Watch the video on YouTube and Vimeo.

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Photo Credit: Sheryl Gay Stolberg, New York Times

Second Nature’s Advancing Green Building intern Vanessa Santos recently shared her thoughts regarding President Obama’s points on education and clean energy in his 2011 State of the Union address. Vanessa writes:

“President Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address on Tuesday evening inspired optimism that future investments would be made in education, as well as in clean energy technology. Though skeptics can criticize whether the President will be able to hold true to his remarks yesterday evening, his address was successful in noting the connection between sustainable clean energy reform and the need to support higher education, specifically in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education.”

Read Vanessa’s full post on the Campus Green Builder blog, here.

By Anthony Cortese, President, Second Nature

(This article appears in the December, 2010 issue of The ACUPCC Implementer)

As you know, Second Nature is a non-profit organization whose mission is to transform the education, research, practice and community engagement of higher education in order to foster a healthy, just and sustainable society for all now and in the future. Senator John Kerry, Teresa Heinz and I founded Second Nature in 1993 to help lead this transformation.  Our view of “sustainability” includes and goes well beyond the environmental dimension to embrace the bigger questions of how we create a world in which all current and futurehumans are healthy, live in secure, thriving communities and have economic opportunity on a finite planet whose capacity to support life becomes more precarious daily.

We did this because of three beliefs.  First, despite heroic efforts on public health and environmental protection in the last 40 years, society was and continues to be on an unhealthy, inequitable and unsustainable path that threatens the viability of a complex modern civilization.  Secondly, we need transformative change in the mindset and actions of individuals and institutions that must be led by higher education.  And thirdly, the current structure and direction of higher education is largely (though unintentionally) reinforcing the unhealthy, inequitable and unsustainable path that society is pursuing.