Passive House Certified

This just in, TerraHaus is officially Passive House Certified by the Passive House Institute US.

Choose Unity

Community Meal and Onion Planting Saturday

The monthly Community Meal to support Veggies for All takes place this Saturday at 5.  Join us at the Community Center on School Street for burgers, beans, fiddle heads , lawn games, and more.

And  help VFA plant onions in the library field at 3pm Saturday. No experience necessary.

Move Out Waste Diversion

One Stop Recycling and Free Box

Our campus recycling coordinator and waste diversion guru Martin Maines has been working with our student crew and the res. life team to make sure we keep as much stuff out of the landfill waste stream as possible during this spring’s campus move out.  One of these large bins will be placed in each residence hall in the coming week and monitored regularly through the end of the semester.

We’ve made it as easy on you as we can. Please place any items for recycling or donation in the bin, and we’ll take care of the rest.  No need to sort out recyclables or deal with overflowing residence hall recycling stations, just make sure it’s clean and usable.

We’ll Take:

• All papers: cardboard, newspaper, office paper, magazines, paperboard
• All containers: glass, plastic, metal, aluminum
• nonperishable food
• personal items
• electronics
• small appliances
• clean clothes

*REMEMBER: this is s a free box and resource exchange, so feel free to take what you want.

We will not accept:

• trash
• plastic bags
• styrofoam
• dirty or ripped clothes
• perishable food

White Oak

This spring, we’re celebrating the inauguration of Unity’s 10th president, Dr. Stephen Mulkey.  As is our custom, we planted a tree to honor the occasion — this time a white oak. Professor Doug Fox, campus tree man and director of the Center for Sustainability & Global Change had this to say about the white oak and its symbolism for Unity College and Dr. Mulkey’s presidency.

White oak, Quercus alba, is rarely found this far north. Its ability to grow in a wide variety of soils, its ring-porous vascular system, its monecious flowering, indicate that it may be one of the trees we see migrating northward with climate change.

While Unity College still promotes mitigation of greenhouse gases, we also recognize that adaptation has to be a part of any scientifically-grounded response to climate change. We don’t know if white oak will come out as one of the winners in the process of adapting to climate change in our area, but it likely will be, hence, today we are planting for the future.

White oak, with its 500-year lifespan, may also symbolize that Unity College is finding its niche in the landscape of academics. The landscape of Unity College has been dominated by many short-lived, aggressive pioneer species—paper and gray birch, aspen, and willow—appropriate for a young college gaining a foothold in the marketplace of higher education. It is time for our landscape to reflect our maturity and our intention to contribute in the long term to the intellectual life of humanity.

Lastly, the white oak is a symbol of resilience and hope. Systems ecologist Hank Shugart pointed out that if the progeny of a single white oak was grown to maturity, in just three generations the biomass originating from that single tree would equal the weight of biomass of all living organisms on earth. Working with the earth’s inherent recuperative powers, we at Unity College can become co-workers with nature in the Great Work of our generation.

Join us for official inauguration celebration will take place on May 12th prior to this year’s commencement activities.

Sustainability Education

“How do you define sustainability?”

If you’re a sustainability officer at a college you get asked this question all the time. “Does your institution have an agreed upon definition of sustainability or a campus-wide sustainability policy statement?” is the version we see from various ranking and rating agencies. “What, you mean like, recycling?” from some of our students. And, “Yeah, but what do you do here?” from some of their parents. It can be a useful exercise, for sure, to sharpen your message and your operational focus. But I’m guessing most of us, even if we have a sustainability definition, find it difficult to sum up what we do in a succinct statement.

If you’re anything like me, you fumble through the Brundtland Commission or the triple bottom line for key phrases that connect to the work you do to decrease emissions, build community, and save money.  Too often, however, we fail to connect this good work to the central aim of the institution – educating our students.  We talk about energy conservation, green building, waste reduction, local food, and transportation alternatives with little mention of learning outcomes. Of course, learning outcomes are the purview of our faculty and academic administrators, but education is the goal of the institution. In the current issue of Sustainability: The Journal of Record, I moderate a “Roundtable” discussion among campus sustainability officers who understand that our work demands great attention to education.

At Unity, our sustainability office team is focused on developing the infrastructure to deliver that education to all of our students, whatever their course of study. That infrastructure certainly includes buildings and grounds, but it also means partnerships, policies, positions. We put more than a dozen students to work on our crew, we influence campus governance on various planning committees, we sit on boards at area agencies, we write grants, we grow food, we lead classes, and yes, we sort through your trash. These efforts aren’t ends in themselves. We’re not tied to our own special sustainability agenda. Rather, we do this work to engage Unity students in the best sustainability science education they can get.

So we come to my confession . . . I’m not in this to save the planet (though I’m really glad some of you are).  I think of myself as an educator; if I’m an advocate or activist it’s for the student experience first.  Don’t get me wrong, I have a real personal interest in the sustainability agenda and the health of natural systems.  Professionally, however, my aim is to support a meaningful education for our students. I happen to believe that campus sustainability work provides the best opportunity for a meaningful education.

Unity FFA visits Waldo County Tech FFA

From Shayne:

A group of Unity College students who are part of the College’s FFA club visited the FFA club of Waldo County Technical Center to collaborate on the current Pastured Poultry for Food Security project that was made possible by the National FFA Food for All Grant. The meeting started out by playing the icebreaker game  “Have You Seen My Goat” so that students from both schools would get familiar and  be open for discussion later in the meeting, then we moved on to a presentation by the Unity College FFA members that informed Waldo County FFA students about the project, some basic information on pastured poultry, and general chicken knowledge.   After this the students from both schools came up with some ideas on how to build chicken tractors and made recommendations for the structures.   The collegiate FFA students brought 2 of the chicks along for the ride to show the high school students just how fast they are growing.  When the Waldo County students visit the College, they will be spending time assessing the animals and the pasturing system- but they will also get shown around campus by of one of our student tour guides.  The Waldo County Tech FFA adviser says her students are excited to see the chicken’s progress, but they also want to “get a chance to look inside some of the College buildings.” Overall both groups had fun and look forward to the visit.

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Growing Pains: Student Response to Mulkey’s Vision for Sustainability Science

Last month, President Mulkey made a presentation to the faculty introducing the ideas in the white paper he wrote, titled The Imperative of Sustainability and Opportunities for Unity College. His speech, as well as the white paper in greater detail, (both available here: http://www.unity.edu/AboutUnity/PresidentWelcome/PresidentMessages.aspx ) outlined how Unity College’s instructors should go about integrating the concept he refers to as sustainability science into the way courses are taught. The goal of integrating sustainability science into all of the courses is to equip students with what Mulkey calls the “right tools” for facing a changing climate and an economy which has to step up to the task of addressing those changes.

“The thing that matters most for Unity College is that climate change will be the single-most important determinant of our environmental practice and programming,” Mulkey told faculty after beginning to delve into some of the hard facts behind climate science, which he feels will affect every field offered at this college. “It will amplify everything that we do…especially,” he emphasized, “in conservation and natural resources.”

In the white paper, Mulkey, whose previous experience as a research-gathering climate scientist predisposes him to trusting peer-reviewed literature, supports the need for sustainability science with information about climate change and the need to address it. One of the more practical applications of this that I saw was his mention of the zone maps that tell growers where their plants will survive based on the temperatures the plants can tolerate. These zone maps may normally only play a small role in horticulture, but the changes in the location of the zones in the past ten years has much larger implications, such as those that Mulkey warns about. As a sustainable agriculture major, I couldn’t help but notice when the recently revised map was released, and couldn’t help but wonder, How many times will this map have to be re-released to reflect the changing climate across the country before the world will realize what the changes mean?

Mulkey’s plan caused me to realize that Unity College students should already be, and if not, should start, asking in-depth questions about these maps. Almost all students here have chosen to dedicate their lives to managing living organisms whose range is very likely dependent on those USDA-developed zones. To “give our students the tools to deal” with climate change, Mulkey believes we need an “increasingly sophisticated curriculum.” This curriculum, in his vision, will be based around the framework of sustainability science.

The idea of sustainability science as an interdisciplinary tool –rather than a course or degree track –is one that is rapidly being developed by graduate institutions across the country, Mulkey tells us. At Arizona State University, one of the country’s largest universities, a whole school has been devoted to sustainability. There, students can attend a School of Sustainability just as easily as they could attend a School of Technology and Innovation or School of Journalism and Mass Communication. It’s hard to deny that sustainability is an up and coming issue in the world and in education –one that is increasingly in demand, and for good reason. Mulkey assures us that the numbers of green jobs will burgeon as the world realizes a need for sustainable practices.

New Local Foods on Campus

This semester, Unity College’s Dining Services are putting some new local foods on their students’ plates. Heiwa Tofu and Northern Girl, LLC have now come to be a part of the local food family offered in the Unity College cafeteria.

The tofu comes from nearby Lincolnville, Maine, where a family of four presses their own tofu from soy grown in Pittston and Skowhegan, Maine. The protein-packed food is featured in most vegan dishes served in the cafeteria, said Lorey Duprey, Manager of the Wyman Dining Commons. In addition to being local, Duprey commented on the tofu’s superior quality, being “more firm and easier to work with” than tofu they have worked with in the past.

Located in Aroostook county of Maine, Northern Girl, LLC, is run by a second generation of farmers that have taken on their family farm to create a distributor for cold-weather-hardy vegetables. Starting with potatoes, they expanded to include carrots, beets, cold-resistant broccoli, and more. These vegetables, distributed by the Crown of Maine Organic Cooperative, expand the number of local vegetable options available to us in the winter, says Duprey. At Wyman Dining Commons, these vegetables are often featured as the ‘Veggie of the Day’ on Thursdays of each week. This week, they’ve got an order of beets coming in. Their potatoes make it into the skillet most days at breakfast, too.

Students have been eating these great foods in the cafeteria all semester!  ”We are always looking for new ways to incorporate local foods” into the dining commons’ repertoire, Duprey reminded me. Check out last year’s  local foods map, for more on foods from the region.

Recycling at Unity College

Big thanks to Connor W. for putting together our first Sustainability 101 video.