Green Labor Journal - Working for a Substainable Future

GREENING The Campus

The sustainability movement in higher education looks for critical mass

Print this article

Four more years. That’s how long James Hansen says we have to turn our fossil fuel dependency around before the path to doom is irreversible.

Hansen is the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and an adjunct professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University. He is known for his research on global warming and climate change—and for speaking out about science censorship during the Bush administration years.

In January, he sent a letter to President-elect Barack Obama saying that carbon emissions and the melting of the polar ice caps threaten to trigger global flooding, widespread species loss and major disruptions of weather patterns in the near future. “We cannot afford to put change off any longer,” Hansen explained in an interview with the London Guardian. “We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world.”

There is every indication that Obama gets the urgency. In his first week in office, he reversed a prior administration policy and directed the Environmental Protection Agency to consider California’s application to set its own rules on greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks. His campaign promise of good green jobs became a center point of his recovery package.

It has billions of dollars in tax cuts and spending targeted on green jobs and alternative-energy investments. Another group that sees green in the jobs of the future is community and technical colleges, which are uniquely adept at marshaling innovation and education facilities to produce workforce training programs that can deliver in months, not years.

Looking for critical mass
Beyond short-term concerns, however, is a growing commitment in higher education to sustainability, both in operations and curriculum. This commitment can often start small, with recycling and composting projects, then grow to widespread energy conservation practices, then broaden to green building construction, and eventually spawn sustainability committees that include faculty, staff and students. Before you know it, commitment to sustainability permeates the institution.

This is what Stephanie Kaza calls achieving critical mass: “You get a sense that everybody thinks it’s good to be green—from the president down to the janitorial staff.” Kaza is director of the Environmental Program at the University of Vermont, an institution that gets highest marks on the National Wildlife Federation’s National Report Card on Sustainability (see Green Resources sidebar, p. 10).

Kaza, who serves on the executive council of UVM United Academics/AFT/AAUP, suggests that unions are natural collaborators in the green movement: “Labor issues are often strongly linked to environmental issues, and today’s environmentalists work both fronts simultaneously. Partnerships are the way to work. Unions, as the most articulate voice for labor on campus, can model collaborative representation and planning.”

Another draw for unions in creating sustainable campuses is health and safety, adds Mona Field, a former AFT local president at Glendale Community College in California, who now serves on the board of trustees of the Los Angeles Community College District. In eight short years, the LACCD has gone from having “some of the most miserable old buildings—World War I vintage,” she says, to having the largest public sector sustainable building program in the United States.

“From the point of view of faculty and staff unions,” says Field, “the key is a healthier environment. That means building materials that are not toxic; offices with proper ventilation; lighting systems that use less energy; ergonomic, recyclable furniture. It all ties into the comfort and health of people working and studying in these buildings.”

From green jobs and buildings to healthier work environments to sustainability in practice and in the curriculum, AFT members are contributing to a movement that has exploded in the past few years. Their experiences show that the work of a few activists on a campus, compounded, can lead to a tipping point where the momentum for change is unstoppable.

A zero energy house in Washington
“Change happens because there is a nucleation site,” says Mike Nelson, an adjunct professor at Shoreline Community College in Washington state, who belongs to the SCC Federation of Teachers. A nucleation, he explains, is a place on a physical surface that is a source of spontaneous reactions.

A prime example is the Washington State University Northwest Solar Center, which he directs. The center is a zero energy home (ZEH) that began as a model produced by students from the Washington State University School of Architecture and Construction Management as an entry in the 2005 Solar Decathlon competition held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The students’ challenge was to design, build and transport a home, completely powered by the sun, with the modern conveniences of refrigeration, heating, cooling, running hot and cold water, lighting, clothes and dish washing, and the ability to charge an electric vehicle. The ZEH creates more energy than it consumes.

After the decathlon, the house found a permanent home at Shoreline, near Seattle, where it has become the anchor of an innovative new associate degree program: zero energy building design. To create the curriculum, Nelson worked with colleagues doing similar work with solar and renewable energy programs in other states, and with industry practitioners. In relatively short order, they designed a certificate program that is about to produce the first graduates ready to take green jobs.

Nelson has seen the future, and it is solar. “At the end of the century,” he explains, “we’ll be using four times as much energy as we use today. If we are to mitigate climate change, that energy has to come through renewables. By 2040, we will have exhausted all potential wind turbine sites. By 2040, we will have moved all the food production we can afford to out of food production and into biofuel. The growth industry of the 21st century is solar electricity.”

By the way, Nelson practices what he teaches. He “went off the grid” in 1976. He lives in a traditional Scandinavian-looking cottage on two-thirds of an acre, where all the electricity comes from solar and wind. “We’ve got to invent a whole new world,” he says, and that’s a challenge. “If inventing the future was easy, we’d already be living it.”

A greenprint for education in L.A.
For the Los Angeles Community College District, the impetus for radical change came in 2001 when the city passed a $2.2 billion bond measure to replace the dilapidated structures within the nine colleges of the LACCD.

At first, when the LACCD board began considering its options, says trustee Field, no one knew much about building green. Nor had they heard of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards, a then little-known rating system applied to environmentally sustainable buildings. But as they researched, and pulled together faculty and staff from the colleges to develop a plan, what unfolded was an opportunity to do something much more significant than replace buildings. They could infuse sustainability in programs and practices throughout the college.

Eight years later, some buildings are finally completed, and last year, Los Angeles passed another $3.5 billion bond. All new buildings in the system that have at least half of their funding through the bond programs must have a LEED rating. Also, the LACCD developed a renewable energy plan that includes producing enough on-site, alternative power through solar, wind, geothermal and hydrogen-generation methods to make the colleges energy-independent.

Now, the sustainability mission is infusing throughout the work of the colleges. Three years ago, the colleges began gearing up for greening their workforce training program. That work is coming to fruition at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College (LATTC), says Bill Ellerton, chair of the building trades department and a member of the Los Angeles College Faculty Guild/AFT. He and others have been meeting with industry advisors, then tweaking existing programs, such as those in carpentry, plumbing and heating/air conditioning, or creating new models from scratch, such as photovoltaic or solar models.

This is happening just in the nick of time, as the state economy goes bust and workers need to acquire new skills. In January, as the winter semester was about to begin, Ellerton was busy preparing the second class of a new two-semester sequence leading to the first certifications in solar renewable energy. “It’s picking up steam,” he said. “I did not anticipate the interest from the students.”

“Students understand that this is their future,” says Marcy Drummond, LATTC vice president for workforce education and economic development.

Plus, the practical word is getting out, says Carl Friedlander, president of the Los Angeles College Faculty Guild/AFT. “Some of our L.A. locals are very active in central labor councils and have relationships with other unions, so we’ve raised consciousness about the sustainability program within the labor movement and at the state level.”

Through committees, faculty are seeking to infuse sustainability into the curriculum, says David Beaulieu, chair of the LACCD’s district-wide faculty senate. A large committee has formed and has met regularly since the fall of 2007. “It’s not just about educating people to have job skills. We’re talking about scientific education as to the nature of the crisis” of climate change, he says.

Taking the incremental approach
At four-year universities, sustainability seems to follow a different path. Faculty activists describe a pattern of collaboration and incremental steps that lead to increased community awareness and buy-in.

Such was the case at Western Illinois University, when University Professionals of Illinois/AFT member Gordon Rands joined the management faculty in 1998. With prior exposure and commitment to the idea of campus sustainability, he found new opportunities to feed his passion by attending a Greening of the Campus conference (offered regularly by Ball State University) and meeting kindred spirits.

When a new university president expressed support for environmental concerns, that set off a process that led to making sustainability a part of its strategic plan. The campus held environmental summits and sent people to conferences. At WIU’s 2006 summit, the president agreed to sign on to the Talloires Declaration, an international action plan for sustainability (see Green Resources sidebar, p. 10).

In addition, the university joined the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), an organization founded in 2006 to bring together colleges and universities to promote sustainability.

“What we’ve had is a situation where one thing has led to and reinforced another,” says Rand.

Building success upon success
The University of Vermont is “a place where economizing and environmental concerns come together,” says David Shiman, president of United Academics of UVM/AFT/AAUP. It has a well-established recycling program, composts about 20 tons of waste each month, gets 60 percent of its energy from renewable sources and buys 35 percent of its food from local farmers.

Recently, sustainability concerns have focused on the socially responsible investment committee, which passed resolutions like the one calling upon the university to divest from Kimberly-Clarke because of its destructive clear-cutting policies.

“This is what happens when students arrive here and we’re already doing the recycling and the composting,” says Kaza, the environmental studies program director at UVM. “They move us on to other things.”

Yet, says Kaza, as with many green-conscious universities, “the operations side is way ahead of the academic side.” Sustainability could be better infused throughout the curriculum—a challenge identified by most faculty interviewed for this article.

Bringing students on board
At the University of Oregon, Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation/AFT executive board member Samantha Chirillo is a committed organizer. Her innate activism on behalf of sustainability has been nurtured within the union, which sent her to an AFL-CIO national meeting on environmental sustainability issues. This was “eye-opening,” says Chirillo.

When she returned, she proposed a resolution that the GTFF should make decisions based on environmental as well as social justice impact. She has seen her fellow graduate employees come around, now using recycled paper, making greater efforts to carpool and taking advantage of a bike loan program the union has helped set up. The GTFF has fought to retain recycling and composting programs when undergraduates appeared to be losing interest.

“In general, people in their individual lives are taking greater strides and that will make the changes we need” for a sustainable world, she says.

Sometimes getting students on board can be a challenge. This is a problem faculty have encountered at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, says David Barnhill, director of environmental studies and professor of English there, where he belongs to The Association of University of Wisconsin Professionals/AFT. UW has a campus sustainability committee. Faculty have been trained through AASHE programs, and there is good buy-in among the faculty and staff. Yet students have been slow to see themselves in the sustainability picture.

“Students say, ‘This isn’t going to save the world, so why should I bother?’ I tell them that we should do whatever we can as much as we can.”

Who knows? With vision and long-term commitment, we may yet reverse the planet’s decline.

The AFT supports green initiatives
AFT members have become increasingly vocal about sustainability and climate change issues. In the past few years, they have passed resolutions that advocate for new buildings that meet LEED or other green construction standards, fight global warming, and seek to affect education and policy on sustainability in our schools and colleges.

Look for the following resolutions at www.aft.org/about/resolutions:
-  Green Schools and Colleges (2008)
-  Education and Environmental Sustainability (2008)
-  Global Warming (2009)

In addition, the AFT has just released the second report in its “Building Minds, Minding Buildings” series, “Our Union’s Road Map to Green and Sustainable Schools.” The first report, “Turning Crumbling Schools into Environments for Learning,” was released in 2006. You can learn more at www.aft.org/topics/building-conditions/green-schools.htm.

 
Barbara McKenna is Managing Editor, AFT On Campus, Ph: 202/879-4419,  Please see http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/oc/index.cfm and www.facebook.com/AFTunion. This article appeared in the March/April 2009 issue of AFT On Campus.

Photos courtesy of Dan Geiger and Julian Catchen.