Turning up the heat in Maryland: The Maryland Student Climate Coalition, which represents students from eight Maryland universities, has gathered 11,000 signatures of students in the University System of Maryland to urge the university to go climate neutral. The student group presented the petition at a Board of Regents meeting this morning. Students signing the petition hailed from the Universities of Maryland at College Park, of Maryland at Baltimore, and of Maryland-Baltimore County; Frostburg State, Salisbury, Towson, and Coppin State Universities, and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. Andrew Nazdin, a sophomore at the University of Maryland at College Park who helped organize the petition, told The Chronicle that the petition was an effort to pressure administrators to act quickly and seriously to deal with carbon emissions with realistic timetables and goals.

Out on a limb: An article in the San Jose Mercury News details the travails of the protest tradition of tree-sitting. Three months ago, masked tree-sitters at the University of California at Santa Cruz hoisted themselves into the campus redwoods in an attempt to stop the construction of a biomedical-sciences building. And they have been up there ever since, with an occasional changing of the guard in the dead of night. (In case you’re wondering, they use bottles and buckets for bodily wastes, then clean their hands with sanitizer.) The university, the article notes, plans to add almost four million square feet of space in the next 12 years, so protests might continue into the future. California has a tradition of tree-sitting; at the University of California at Berkeley, tree-sitters have stopped construction on a $125-million sports-training center. Students and professors at Santa Cruz who have supported the protesters — by, say, bringing them bowls of miso soup — have been reprimanded or sued by the university. Santa Cruz officials, who so far have tried waiting out the tree-sitters, are now considering going to court to have them forcibly yanked out of the trees.

Buying power: The Ithaca Journal reports that Cornell University, Ithaca College, and Tompkins Cortland Community College have formed an environmental buying consortium with the city of Ithaca, Tompkins County, the Tompkins County Chamber of Commerce, and the Tompkins-Seneca-Tioga Board of Cooperative Educational Services. The consortium will “use Cornell’s connections to manufacturers to bypass working with sales representatives” to buy environmentally friendly products like cleaning supplies and office products. The consortium will also focus on buying from local manufacturers, to help build a base of sustainable businesses in the region.

Campus gold: St. Louis Community College’s Wildwood Campus has been awarded a gold certification in the Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design program. The $18-million, 73,000-square-foot structure features a “green roof,” energy-efficiency features like overhead fans and light fixtures that respond to natural light, passive-solar design, big rainwater cisterns, and low-toxicity building materials. The building also features a plug-in station for electric cars, but the college doesn’t own an electric car. (Building owners often install a plug-in station as an easy way to get a LEED point.) It was designed by St. Louis-based Ittner Architects.

St. Louis Community College’s new campus is LEED Gold. (St. Louis Community College image)