We learn a lot about ourselves by taking a closer look at our utopias. A few years ago, The Chronicle's Web site featured an interactive image titled "Elements of a Sustainable University." In the foreground was an institution's entrance sign, with three overlapping circles representing sustainability's ecological, economic, and social dimensions. Behind this sign was Sustainable University itself—a place of wind-powered generators, green roofs, and organic gardens. In the background was ... well, just rolling hills.
This innocuous image may capture the zeitgeist of early-21st-century college sustainability. It by no means stands alone: Take a look at the common features among colleges atop the Sierra Club's "Cool Schools" list, or the Sustainable Endowments Institute's "Green Report Card": solar panels, locally produced food, and lots of new LEED buildings. As director of an environmental-studies program at a West Coast college, I find nothing inherently wrong in any of these practices. But what I fear is that, if that's all there is to college sustainability, we are seriously limiting our students' horizons.
The approach is limited in two important ways. The first is perhaps obvious: While sustainability is promoted as encompassing a broad range of overlapping ecological, economic, and social concerns, in practice it largely boils down to good green technologies. The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, for instance, approaches sustainability "in an inclusive way, encompassing human and ecological health, social justice, secure livelihoods, and a better world for all generations." But its logo is a leaf. And I dare you to find a member profile on its site that isn't about good green practices.
Sustainability is about more than being green, surely. But less obvious is another way in which our approach to sustainability quite literally limits our horizons: We have effectively defined sustainability in higher education as campus sustainability. It focuses on, and often stops at the boundaries of, our college campuses. It is instructive that many utopias over the ages have been similarly limited: Sir Thomas More's Utopia, in the early 16th century, was an island. More recently, Nicolai Ouroussoff has commented critically on a similarly utopian isolation in an article on Masdar, a city rising in the United Arab Emirates, arguing that what has been called the world's first zero-carbon city may be "grounded in the belief ... that the only way to create a truly harmonious community ... is to cut it off from the world at large." Is this the lesson of campus sustainability?
Almost every definition of sustainability harks back to the 1987 U.N.-sponsored Brundtland Commission report, "Our Common Future." It repeatedly emphasizes that sustainable development must meet "the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Presumably, then, energy efficiency and local food and green roofs are sustainable practices because they promote intergenerational equity: They minimize the squandering of resources now so those resources will be available for future generations. This may in some cases be true, but it utterly fails to appreciate the global scope of the commission's larger argument. Somehow, as the nation's colleges and universities embraced the notion of sustainable development, what was once an international-scale political discourse narrowed itself to campus buildings and grounds.
Contemporary sustainability, given its green leanings, is powerfully influenced by environmental ideas. Perhaps the elusive beating heart of today's sustainability movement, its utopian vision, is that of self-sufficiency. The phrase "think globally, act locally" has served as a green mantra, but it is "act locally" that has engaged the popular imagination. Look at the locavore movement, or designs of gleaming city (sometimes rustic country) buildings that capture and store all needed energy. What suffuses these high- and low-tech varietals is the virtue of self-sufficiency.
A contrasting vision of sustainability is grounded in the reality of interdependence among the seeming islands that define our local communities. Interdependence is not a new idea: Economic and ecological interdependence were at the core of the Brundtland report, with its emphasis on necessary connections between the haves and the have-nots of the world. But the picture of interdependence in "Our Common Future" was achieved largely by looking at the world through the rose-colored glasses of global cooperation, and it may be as unreal as the utopia of self-sufficiency.
How, then, do we more rigorously ground sustainability in an ideal of interdependence? The most thorough recent scholarly exploration of interdependence, along ecological, economic, political, cultural, and other lines, is subsumed under the rubric of cosmopolitanism. As the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has suggested, it is the paradox of cosmos and hearth, of our embeddedness in the larger world set against an understandable urge to turn our backs on it all, that in large part defines the cosmopolitan moment.
So what would a more cosmopolitan college-sustainability movement, one mindful of interdependence, look like? It would certainly include many of the (mostly good green) practices it currently champions, but other elements would reach beyond campus boundaries, simply because the people, objects, and ideas that go into a college community cross those boundaries all the time. It would, in other words, comprise elements as varied as campus buildings-and-grounds policies and students' participation in international programs. Although common sustainability ratings and assessment rubrics have not yet embraced this larger circle, efforts such as the Global Reporting Initiative provide a model for institutions of higher education to express their commitment to sustainability in more-cosmopolitan ways.
As Lewis Mumford said, there are utopias of escape and there are utopias of reconstruction. Self-sufficiency and interdependence are both thoroughly utopian: The former imagines a sustainable campus, the latter a sustainable world. Let's choose our utopias wisely.
Comments
1. jwr12 - November 28, 2010 at 09:51 am
Obviously, the author has his heart in the right place, and indeed it is possible to critique locavore / local visions as being egocentric and myopic. It seems, however, that the author has himself lost sight of the big picture. We are just coming off of a period of neo-liberal dominance where we were all repetitively told to globalize; where our futures were imagined as being dependent parts of a large network; where local diversity was downplayed in favor of an "it's a small world" version of global systems thinking: the French will make cheese, the Americans, commercials, the Chinese, products! And what has that kind of efficient 'cosmopolitanism' brought us?: a new Gilded Age, with wealth and power radically centralized, and local communities across the land withered. Now I'm sure that the author (and here I do apologize if I am placing words in your mouth) would claim that his "interdependence" is not yesterday's "globalization." But here I will ask if he thinks he can sustain this nuance against the powers that made the last global age so devastating; and if, in turn, he wouldn't mind if the people in devastated local communities (e.g. not Portland, by the way: think small town, unhip USA, and the universities that often serve as their core) worked on being whole for a while. I agree that the most sustainable future would be one in which all of humanity was in harmony and worked together; not seeing that as immediately possible, and remembering the age we are only now fitfully emerging from, I'm willing to give the operating principle of trying to sustain local diversity and economy a longer run. Right now it's neo-liberalism 30 or so years; locavism, what, 2?
2. archman - November 28, 2010 at 02:39 pm
Interdependent human population control.
The End.
3. chronicleaashe - November 29, 2010 at 12:40 pm
I agree sustainability is certainly more than the environment. However, I would recommend taking a look at the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS) that is being organized by AASHE (https://stars.aashe.org/). STARS (while imperfect), does go beyond the physical campus boundaries looking at issues such as engagement with the broader community. For example, there is a specific credit/recognition for community sustainability partnerships and many that go beyond strict environmental issues.
Also, while there is indeed a leaf in the AASHE logo, it is actually a laurel leaf, intended to represent higher education, not the environment/nature strictly.
4. commentary - December 01, 2010 at 09:40 am
Imagine participating in an Environmental Science masters program to discover that the building sustainability courses required students to work only on group projects and only on university-owned buildings. Yeah. I live two hours from campus and all of the leg work I did for finding unusual buildings to upgrade was pointless.
5. jimzaffiro - December 01, 2010 at 03:50 pm
May I be so bold as to suggest that the concept of community may hold the key to "grounding sustainability in an ideal of interdependence?" Our college community came to embrace sustainability in our campus operations and in our adademic programs as a self-renewing process of specialized community-building. Community-based sustainability education and global sustainability education are two ways in which we endeavor to build, nurture, and connect sustainability to community.
The key connective tissue is an institution's own long-term vision, core mission, and values. A core sustainability value should be building, nurturing, and strengthening sustainable communities, locally, bioregionally, and globally.
Another commonly accepted sustainability value is intergenerational equity, the rights of future generations-- of people and other life forms-- to a livable, thrivable planet.
Interdependency within and across complex, overlapping communities-- a softer word than systems-- is a community-outreach endeavor. In natural communities, mutual interdependence, seamless cooperation, and complementarity form the basis for community balance, harmony and survival. Why should it be any different for academic-- or social, or global-- communities?
The "Wisconsin Idea" proclaims that 'the boundaries of the university shall be the boundaries of the state.' I belive that this notion could also be the focal point for community-based, global sustainability education. It suggests a new concept of curriculum that is not only transdisciplinary but also global in scope and reach. Campus sustainability, or greening, can be a legitimate, "credit-bearing" component, along with community-based learning, service, and study abroad.
Political sociologist Robert D. Putnam advises community builders to work at nurturing "networks that intersect and circles that overlap [to] reinforce a sense of reciprocal obligation and extend the boundaries of empathy...[for the purpose of] creating virtuous circles of human connectivity."
Sustainable communities are about connecting with others and forming deep bonds of respect and care. They are dynamic, welcoming environments, rich with different people contributing gifts of time, talent, experience, ideas, and resources which, when woven together, result in thrivability for all from realization of a shared mission.
Are we in higher education up to the challenge?
6. gplm2000 - December 02, 2010 at 12:54 pm
Malarkey! A lot of gobblygook about nothing. Sustainability is more about maintaining a high level of academic standards and producing graduates who actually are educated. It is not about being green, social justice, etc., all of which are elective programs that have little to do with educating people. Green and social justice is in the eye of the beholder and mostly political belief.
7. drstaylor - December 04, 2010 at 10:30 am
unfortunately your information is quite out of date. Masdar City has effectively been scaled down to almost nothing.
Masdar has announced that despite 3 hard years of trying, they could only find one single client to lease 1000 m2.
Apparently there simply is no demand for this “greened-up” property project with zillions of unoccupied office buildings in nearby Dubai.
I even saw a photo of German leader Merkel filling her car up with gas at the one gas station there in this so-called car-free, zero-carbon city.
Very funny indeed! Meanwhile, they had no problem building a gas-guzzling Formula 1 track and a huge Ferrari race track in only 2 years, while letting Masdar wither.
8. livingroutes - December 12, 2010 at 10:51 am
Thank you Jim for raising these important issues. I agree the "reality of interdependence" is often tragically missing from our thinking about sustainability. Everything is interdependent, from macro (global/cosmos) to micro (local/subatomic) levels. I believe a focus on interdependence within and (especially) between academic disciplines is a larger leverage point in creating sustainable universities than a focus on "greening the campus" (although the latter is clearly essential work).
I recently wrote a blog entry (link below) about how I was disappointed at an AASHE workshop when my suggestion to focus on interdependence was seen as my personal "value." AASHE is a great organization, but this was a wake-up call for me that even among those championing sustainability in higher education, I think we have a long way to go in recognizing that sustainability is about more than clean energy, LEEDS buildings, and recycling. It also includes community (as jimzaffiro shared) and, dare I say it, spirituality - not in a religious sense, but in the sense that we desperately need to create new worldviews and "stories" that recognize our fundamental "inter-being" with all life and matter.
I also completely agree that students need to step outside the Ivory Tower if they are to gain a truly deep understanding of these issues. You might be interested in checking out Living Routes (http://www.LivingRoutes.org), a nonprofit I founded in 1999 which partners with the University of Massachusetts to run study abroad programs based in "ecovillages" around the world. While far from utopian, these communities offer ideal "campuses" where students can learn about sustainability while actually striving to live it.
Maybe, someday, universities will become ecovillages in their own right, but until then, I think we need to expose students to integrative models of sustainable community development wherever they exist if we are to help educate leaders for a more sustainable future.
In community,
- Daniel Greenberg
http://blogs.livingroutes.org/sustainabilityeducation/2010/11/10/the-%E2%80%9Cwhat%E2%80%9D-vs-the-%E2%80%9Cwhy%E2%80%9D-of-sustainability/
9. greenhearted - December 12, 2010 at 08:51 pm
Research I've done shows that community is the "seat" of sustainable development's three-legged stool (environment, social equity, and economy). In other words, when people are learning the principles and processes of sustainable development, they can picture implementing them at the community level - and define community as their families, friends, neighbours, colleagues, favourite places and sacred spaces.
If my findings hold true in other situations/settings, then it makes sense that university students, especially those from elsewhere who live in dorms, would want to use their campus as laboratory for applying their learning about sustainable development. And learning to see the systems and interconnections on campus is just as valid as seeing them elsewhere, on a larger (or smaller) scale.
My concern is whether we're turning out graduates who are "practitioners" - people who will use the principles and processes of sustainable development that they've learned as discussion, planning and decision-making frameworks.
Also, are we modelling these principles and processes of SD on campuses, and are we teaching SD in a way that respects these principles and processes? If it's only about environmental sustainability, then no, we're not. If we're still teaching in academic silos, then no, we're not. If we're not encouraging students from different disciplines (for example, biology, commerce and nursing) to work together on projects, then no, we're not.
Sustainable development is a major paradigm shift - one that most institutions still have not adopted.
Julie Johnston
GreenHeart Education