Is Sustainability a Virtue? How About Saving Money?

Ashley Thorne, of the National Association of Scholars, wrote me recently to say that she had quoted one of my recent articles in her latest salvo against sustainability in higher education. Her piece—as I read it, anyway—tries to dissect the role of ethics in sustainability: Is higher education engaging sustainability because it’s an inherently virtuous thing to do, or because it’s in our best interest, or what?

I’ll leave it to others to grapple with her arguments about the social component of sustainability and the motivations behind sustainability programs. But I should correct her misinterpretation—or misrepresentation—of my article.

Ms. Thorne bemoans the notion that (in her view) people pursue sustainability for amorphous “virtuous” reasons, and not for more-measurable reasons, like saving money on electric bills. Then she alludes to a blog item I wrote about a roundtable discussion at the recent annual meeting for the Society for College and University Planners, where a group of designers and college-sustainability advocates discussed sustainability in frank terms. She writes:

Still, in many cases, the virtue argument seems to be working. For instance, in a Chronicle of Higher Ed article on green architecture, the author writes of one architect’s difficulty convincing administrators to build eco-friendly campus buildings: “While he succeeded in persuading them that building green was the right thing to do, he said, ‘There is a lot of resistance.’” Notice that “resistance” succumbed to the persuasion that this was “the right thing to do.” The administrators admitted that “green” building was the right thing to do and allowed it to happen, but they still weren’t excited about doing it.

Conversely, some people take action to protect the environment, but only to save money, not because it’s “the right thing to do.”

Normally I ignore people who mangle my articles, but this raises some issues I was planning to bring up on this blog anyway.

For starters, the architect wasn’t talking about persuading administrators to build green because it’s virtuous. As anyone who observes these issues closely would know, many college building programs focus too much on minimizing up-front costs, even though spending a little more initially might save bundles in energy and maintenance costs down the road. A growing number of consultants in design and engineering, along with counterparts in college administration, recognize that the trouble often starts with an artificial division between capital and operations budgets. And they recognize the trouble that such a division can make for a sustainable-building program.

That’s what the architect meant when he talked about the “right thing to do.” He wanted the college to think long-term about the building’s operational costs, and about how much it might shell out over the decades if it didn’t think about including energy-saving designs as the building was laid out. You hear this over and over again when talking with architects and campus administrators: A trustee or a president thinks at first that building green is going to cost much more than building conventionally, then is pleasantly surprised to find that it didn’t cost any more—and that the savings will accumulate over the decades the building is up and running.

Also, I love the assumption at the end of Ms. Thorne’s paragraph: “The administrators admitted that ‘green’ building was the right thing to do and allowed it to happen, but they still weren’t excited about doing it.” How would she know? I didn’t name the architect, nor did I name the institution he talked about. As I recall, he said that administrators there were ultimately glad that they had pursued a green-building program.

One more thing: When quoting my article, Ms. Thorne starts by citing a study in which fliers left at people’s homes asked them to save energy, with four rationales distributed among the group: to save the environment, to preserve energy resources for future generations, to save money, or because most neighbors were doing it. The people who were pitched on the basis of the fourth rationale—the peer-pressure group—eventually had the lowest energy usage, according to Ms. Thorne. “In this case, neither the nature-centered, nor the human-centered, nor the capitalistic motive won people over enough to cause them to change their behavior,” she writes. “It was the peer-pressure factor that got results—the same reason colleges and universities are getting on the sustainability bandwagon today.”

That is muddled. I don’t think you can draw a line from a study of households to institutional attitudes, or from merely saving energy to pursuing broader sustainability. But I’ll forgive that for the sake of addressing her point that colleges pursue sustainability for reasons of peer pressure.

Yes, some colleges have. Stories circulate about institutions that joined the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment without thinking it through.

But when it comes to saving energy—the example Ms. Thorne cites—peer pressure is not as significant a factor as saving money. At both SCUP and the recent annual APPA conference for facilities managers, people talked extensively about using sustainability to help push long-term planning and to force discussions about life-cycle costs. One of the bubbling sustainability topics is about metering individual buildings on the campus, so colleges can start charging or rewarding departments based on energy use. I don’t see a big concern for ethics and virtue in that discussion.

Certainly, sustainability programs and climate-neutrality plans will at some point have either long-term paybacks or no paybacks at all—and then Ms. Thorne can have a robust discussion with advocates about the virtues of sustainability. For now, however, there is still low-hanging fruit—short-term paybacks—left to be picked.