May is a busy time for the Sweet Briar Community Garden. We always kick it off with our Cinco de Mayo celebration — so named because the first year it happened to fall on the fifth of May. We start off collecting dues, then eat all the wonderful food people have prepared, followed by Tim’s announcement of the annual garden awards, a bonfire, and sometimes music and a hotly contested game of horseshoes. The college supplies us with tables and chairs for the occasion, and we keep it green with reusable dishes and utensils.

For those of us who started planting in March, it’s time to start harvesting lettuce, radishes, and broccoli. Our community asparagus is also at its best, and the strawberries...

Given all the recent discussion on this blog about agriculture, horticulture, and sustainability, it seems fitting to recommend a little film that is touring the country right now: Fresh, a movie about sustainable agriculture. The movie stars people like Joel Salatin, who has become something of a farmer-celebrity since his appearance in The Omnivore’s Dilemma; Will Allen, an urban farmer from Milwaukee who recently won a MacArthur Foundation fellowship; and John E. Ikerd, a professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri...

Ann K. Newman, who was April’s Buildings & Grounds guest blogger, is head of the planning group at Shepley Bulfinch Richardson & Abbott. She is a psychologist by training.

Over the past four years I have visited or worked at several dozen colleges and universities across the country. I can’t think of any one of them, public or private, large or small, brand-name or obscure, that does not have deferred maintenance (and most times, a lot of it). There are dorms that haven’t been updated in 40 to 50 years; classrooms that are crowded, too hot or cold, and noisy; and teaching labs that are dangerously outdated.

Even before the current economic crisis, there wasn’t enough...

This blog noted on Wednesday that Washington State University would accept an offer from a donor to bring Michael Pollan to the campus to talk about his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The book had been dropped as the university’s common-reading selection — for either economic or political reasons, according to different points of view. The university, which has a prominent agriculture college, is weathering a $54-million cut in state money.

Now the university has announced that the book will be reinstated as the common-reading choice. Bill Marler, a personal-injury lawyer who specializes in food-safety issues, has vowed to cover the $40,000 it might cost to...

In the recent case of Washington State University’s dropping Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma as its “common reading” selection for the year, two rationales emerged: University officials said the reasons had to do with the institution’s dire budget outlook — there was just no money to bring in a big-name author like Mr. Pollan, they said. Meanwhile, some faculty members and others said the book was dropped because it attacks one of the university’s bases, Big Agriculture.

Well, Bill Marler, a Seattle-based personal-injury lawyer who specializes in food-poisoning cases and who has become something of a food-safety advocate, is throwing down the gauntlet. “Hey, Michael Pollan, I’ll pay your way to Pullman,” Mr. Marler, a Washington State...

Grim state-budget outlooks continue to disrupt colleges’ building plans from coast to coast. An article in The Arizona Republic is the latest to detail the unraveling of campus-construction projects.

“Everything is on hold,” said the University of Arizona’s senior vice president for business affairs, Joel Valdez, about the seeming demise of what was called the Stimulus Plan for Economic and Education Development, or Speed. The plan, created last summer in the State Legislature, was to have given Mr. Valdez’s institution and the state’s two other public universities — Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University — access to $1-billion in state lottery money to use in an in-state...

When it was his turn to address graduates and their families at commencement on Saturday, the University of New Hampshire’s president took advantage of the moment to make a claim you don’t often hear at a graduation — that the entire ceremony was powered by landfill gas.

The university earlier this month completed a $49-million system that uses a network of 300 extraction wells to collect methane generated at a landfill in Rochester, N.H. The gas is then purified and transported 12.7 miles in a pipeline to the university’s cogeneration plant, which burns the gas to generate electricity and heat campus buildings. The landfill gas replaces commercial natural gas in the cogeneration facility, and the university will sell renewable-energy credits to pay for the project.

The...

The Heavener Football Complex is Florida’s first LEED-platinum building. (U. of Florida image)

A $28-million addition to the University of Florida’s football stadium has been awarded a platinum-level certification in the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, the university announced this week.

The new facility, the Heavener Football Complex, houses offices, conference rooms, a 25,000-square-foot weight-training area, a 4,000-square-foot recruiting space called the Gator Room, and a two-story atrium intended to display trophies and other memorabilia.

Among the facility’s sustainable features are sensors that...

The Associated Press recently carried a story about a project at the University of Oregon to retrofit exercise equipment to generate electricity.

The story says that the amount of energy produced is “small,” but it seems significant for what is otherwise little more than a bunch of gerbil-wheel machines for people. “The university estimates that 3,000 people a day on 20 machines would generate 6,000 kilowatt hours a year, enough to power one small energy-efficient house in the Northwest.” The university consumes more than 2,000 times that amount, the story says.

Oregon State University has already hooked its own exercise machines. During a football game this fall, the two schools will compete to generate the most power. (The University of...

Today’s Chronicle features a story about a controversy at Washington State University that should interest followers of sustainability and agriculture issues:

When a committee at Washington State University picked The Omnivore’s Dilemma as this year’s “common reading” selection for all incoming freshmen, faculty members effusively praised the award-winning book and hoped that people at the land-grant university were ready to have a serious debate about the practice of agriculture in America….

But it seems that discussion will not happen—at least not over The Omnivore’s Dilemma as a common-reading selection. Michael Pollan’s hard-hitting examination of industrial agriculture and the American diet has been dropped as the program’s text.

An explanation on the...