Student Interest in Sustainability Rises, Despite Lack of Curricular Support

The National Wildlife Federation is releasing a report today that documents more than 160 student-led projects in sustainability and offers tips on how to start similar projects on campuses across the country.

Julian Keniry, director of the Campus Ecology program at the federation, said that the examples in the report document what many have observed about the current sustainability movement: There is unprecedented student interest in sustainability issues that has given rise to a diverse set of activities.

Ms. Keniry also said interest in sustainability cuts across some geographic and political demographics. “We have been impressed by the breadth of involvement,” she said. “They are schools small and large, state, public, and private.”

And although sustainability programs and projects are more easily found on, say, the coasts, the movement is “something that we are seeing across the country,” said Christina Erickson, the sustainability coordinator at Champlain College, who is one of the authors of the report.

“It’s a different kind of engagement,” she said. “It’s not the classic protests of the 1960s. It’s not this us-versus-them thing—students working against the administration. It’s more students and administrators working together collaboratively, and I think that’s a real shift from the past.” However, Ms. Erickson added, students’ and administrators’ motivations might be different: Students might be more altruistic, while administrators might see potential savings in energy-efficiency projects or a chance to recruit eco-savvy students.

In a news conference about the report on Wednesday, three students involved in sustainability projects—Ayodele Akinpelu from Wayne State University, Adam Yarnell from Brown University, and Jason Sanders from Texas State University—discussed how their projects had enriched their education.

They also listed some of the barriers they have encountered to making progress on projects. Their peers, they said, had bought into the idea of sustainability and were supportive, but even so sustainability advocates faced challenges in getting more students to participate in their projects. Those projects were as diverse as a food-composting project at Texas State and a thermostat-replacement program for low-income families near Brown.

The popularity of the sustainability movement might be due to broader awareness of environmental challenges. However, in a report last year, the National Wildlife Federation pointed out that while colleges’ operations have greened up, sustainability in the curriculum was in decline. The interest in sustainability “is not translating to the classroom,” Ms. Keniry said. “If we don’t get sustainability and clean energy right, we won’t get many other issues right—from the economy to social equity to public health and security.”

A Data Points item in today’s Chronicle said that according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States ranked behind 21 other nations in environmental sciences—at a time when the Obama administration is pushing clean, green technology and economic development. “If U.S. higher education doesn’t prepare our young people to lead on this issue, who will?” Ms. Keniry asked. “The good news is that students are clamoring for this kind of education.”