Join Us!

The Sustainability Office is hiring!

We’ve got 2 open student work-study positions for the right candidates. You might shoot video or sort trash.  You could conduct a transportation survey and construct a greenhouse.  We’re lookin’ for flexible self-starters eager to engage the campus community in the education work of the office.

Email Jesse or come by Koons 104 if you’re interested.

Sustainability Team, Fall 2011

 

Sustainability Cafe

The sustainability office led a “World Café” planning session with Resident Advisors and RA candidates during their January training yesterday.  Discussions focused on student engagement and sustainability programming.  We got some great input from some of our brightest student leaders and hopefully sparked some interest in residence life programming around sustainability concepts they explored.

The most prominent themes through three rounds of discussion included:

• Relatable – sustainability efforts/concepts should appeal to the interests of the individual
• Competition/Incentives – engage folks with contests and rewards
• Demonstrations – show how things work and how programs run

You can read more specific responses about student engagement and potential programs in this draft report of the event.

More photos of the session here.

Growing Awareness

Unity College documentary film students created this film and debuted it at our recent Student Conference. It follows a crop of pumpkins from a corrections re-entry garden project,  through a global climate action campaign, and to the local food pantry. There’s so much good learning in this project for our students — story telling, technical skill, outreach and professional development, project management, etc., etc..  What really impresses me, though, is the film’s demonstration of local responses to global challenges.

This connection of what we’re learning on our small campus to the broader social picture is exemplary of Unity’s approach to sustainability education.  Unity’s a small school with a special focus in a seemingly out-of-the-way place; yet the real work of sustainability is happening in this community and our students are a part of it.  Kudos to all the documentary film students and professor John Z. for telling the story so well.

Academic Conference Celebrates Student Work

Yesterday we gathered again at the Unity College Centre for the Performing Arts for a semester showcase of student achievement — the Unity College Student Conference. Photography, sculpture, poster sessions, oral and video presentations, multimedia demonstrations, and more served as testament to the work of this past fall.  We in the Sustainability Office served as judges for the “Sustainability Award” offered by the academic Center for Sustainability & Global Change, and I was impressed by the diversity of nominees.

As President Mulkey reminded us at the conference award ceremony, so much of what we’re doing at Unity College is exemplary of a trans-disciplinary approach to sustainability science and studies, even if we haven’t yet been thinking of our academic work in precisely those terms. The Student Conference highlights an important effort to broaden our community’s conception of sustainability.  We’re not exclusively concerned with recycling and turning off the lights; we’re addressing the social, financial, and natural resource implications of environmental and other problems. Our office is thinking carefully about how to develop the campus infrastructure – the built, educational, and administrative resources – to offer great opportunities for sustainability education.

So I’m thrilled to see that a photo exhibit exploring New England fisheries was nominated for the conference Sustainability Award alongside a poster on carbon tax policies and a multimedia project on building energy performance.  Several works nominated in other categories and a few that weren’t nominated at all emphasized multiple facets of sustainability in sophisticated and nuanced ways.  Congratulations to all of our students for your good work.  And special kudos to Jeanne, Tim, and Daniel, Sustainability Award winners for your Long Creek Watershed Contaminant Study.  See other nominees in the slide show below, and view the full list of award winners here.

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Deep cuts now. Get it done.

Must see statement at COP 17 from student at College of the Atlantic.  Her science is just a bit off (I would say closer to 10 years rather than 5), but she has it basically right.

I predict that these words will go viral:  Deep Cuts Now.  Get It Done.

A clarification:  Ms Appadurai is correct when she says that the IEA has estimated that we must begin steep reductions by 2017, 5 years from now.  Here is an article in the Guardian that references the source, which is the latest world energy outlook published by the IEA.  While compelling and very possibly correct, there are several other estimates of the date at which we will be committed to irreversible, dangerous climate change.  The key concept here is the “lock-in” effect, which is the time lag built into the production of emissions.  The IEA estimate references the date at which we will have built infrastructure in the form of power plants, inefficient building and fuel guzzling automobiles that will commit us to a trajectory of increasing emissions that will move the atmosphere into this danger zone.  My own reading of the literature suggests to me that 2020 is closer to that date, but this too is really “tomorrow” and not some distant point in the future.  The concept of commitment reinforces the concept that everything that we build today has profound sustainability consequences further down the road, and this is especially true for the climate.  We can no longer capriciously build or design unsustainable infrastructure, especially fossil fuel burning power plants.

It is very important to distinguish the IEA calculation, which is based on the emissions that are built into poorly designed infrastructure, from the discussions about climate sensitivity to greenhouse gas concentrations.  The greenhouse gases emitted from unsustainable infrastructure are not included in the modeling by climate scientists.  They consider only short term feedbacks and relatively quick atmospheric forcing from the greenhouse gases that occur in the atmosphere at a given point in time.  Clearly, the lag time that we build into the climate system through unsustainable practice will progressively hijack the planet if we fail to respond now.  We should have responded 20 years ago when the science was clear.

Thus, Ms Appadurai is right.  Five years is a very reasonable estimate, and I would add, quite conservative when you consider all the factors at play.  Here is Joe Romm’s analysis of the IEA results.

Root Cellar-bration!

The Environmental Citizen: Fall Harvest and Storage course invites you to join in the ribbon cutting and celebration of our new root cellar!

Come for an opening ceremony and tour at 3:00pm 12/9/11 (near the Maintenance barns), followed by a presentation at the Student Center at 3:45pm.  Light refreshments will be served.

Join us!

More info about this project, here:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLZuU6zJ6bE

Join it: http://www.facebook.com/events/301160396584820/

We’ve Moved!

Come see us in Koons Hall 104 . . . we’ll tidy up.

relocated

The most wonderful time of the year…

… is Autumn!  This year we’re getting treated to an especially long and unusually warm season.  Why is Fall so colorful here?  Among other exciting things, harvest time brings community together: meals, service, chores, celebrations, generosity, and activity.  Just when students have hit a groove in balancing studies, work, and play- they’re almost ready for a break.  Now they’re busier than ever as final projects, presentations, and exams loom.  But all this activity ends in some satisfying, concrete results:  gardens put to bed, papers submitted, root cellar stocked with veggies (more on this soon!), credits earned, experience gained.  In short, harvest.

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Diversity and Sustainability

Unity’s Diversity Committee yesterday presented the results of their spring survey to the campus community. You can see their presentation slides here. The survey aimed to assess attitudes about and perceptions of diversity on campus in order to determine needs and gauge diversity efforts in our community.  Survey respondents identified what the Committee is calling the “big four” diversity issues for our campus:

1. sexual orientation,
2. ethnicity,
3. political ideology, and
4. perspectives on the environment.

First, I’m not sure “environmental perspectives” makes it into very many campus diversity surveys — I often praise this rich aspect of Unity’s culture to my colleagues on other campuses for its influence on meaningful sustainability discussions.  Second, I think it’s important to recognize that more conventional aspects of diversity (e.g., sexual orientation, race, gender, physical ability, etc., etc.) are an important component of any institution’s sustainability profile.  Higher ed. sustainability, after all, is not only concerned with resource use and environmental impacts, but also social equity, community vitality, responsible governance, fiscal stability.

AASHE’s Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS) includes eight credits under its Diversity and Affordability subcategory, requiring schools to document their diversity efforts as integral to their sustainability performance.  The STARS Technical Manual states:

 In order to build a sustainable society, diverse groups will need to be able to come together and work collaboratively to address sustainability challenges…. [E]nvironmental injustice happens as a result of unequal and segregated communities.  To achieve environmental and social justice, society must work to address discrimination and promote equality.

Diversity work on our campus is an important aspect of Unity’s sustainability focus.  And the work of our Diversity Committee reinforces a conception of sustainability beyond simply recycling and solar panels.  Check out Unity’s STARS Report for documentation of our sustainability efforts in diversity.

Give Thanks

It’s student appreciation week at Unity. Seems appropriate at this point in the semester and this time of year to recognize the good work of our sustainability team — especially our students. Thanks Patricia, Franco, Katie, Hilary, Makayla, Shayne, Ryan, Ryan, Bethany, Desiree, Constant, Frank, and Kiera.  Your good work is so appreciated.