RMI’s whole-system approach has the
potential to transform the idea of campus greening from
single projects to integrative communities. This leap
could provide a model for the next generation of leaders.
College campuses have long been hotbeds of social
change. The Civil Rights Movement, the Free Speech
Movement, human rights causes, and numerous anti-
war and social justice movements can all trace their
roots—at least in part—to campuses across the United
States and abroad. And the persuasive power of
dedicated, idealistic young students can often be
harnessed to bring about the greatest social change.
Today, many college campuses are focusing on a
new kind of societal transformation by leading the
green movement and doing what they can to address
environmental problems. What used to be the
occasional recycling program or an inclination toward
organic food has become a full-fledged international
movement that many observers believe will revitalize
communities, introduce new areas of academic study,
alter traditional career choices, and revolutionize
education itself.
Even a casual scan of educational institutions’ green
activities shows there are thousands of efforts
underway in nearly every state involving schools of
every type and size.
The University of Monmouth in New Jersey, for
example, recently put in the largest solar installation
east of the Mississippi, saving the school $150,000 and
reducing electricity demand by almost 500,000
kilowatt-hours a year. The Richard Stockton College
of New Jersey installed one of the world’s largest closed-
loop geothermal heating and cooling systems, an
18-kilowatt solar photovoltaic array, and a 200-kilowatt
fuel cell. In 2005, students at U.C. Santa Barbara
started an educational program that ultimately led to
campus-wide lighting retrofits, the use of motion
sensors, and the installation of more efficient heating
and cooling systems, thereby reducing carbon dioxide
emissions by 8,100 tons. The list is long and varied,
but the green wave is rising.
RMI’s Work with Communities
Henry Ford once observed, “If everyone is moving
forward together, then success takes care of itself.”
Rocky Mountain Institute has worked on
sustainability as it relates to a variety of communities
since 1984, when Senior Consultant Michael Kinsley
cofounded a research and consulting practice based on
the notion that engaging large subsets of people can be
a powerful way to get energy and resource solutions
adopted and implemented.
And, not surprisingly, colleges and universities have
been prime candidates for the type of work RMI does.
In 2002, the Institute assessed ways that Oberlin
College could reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions. In
2005, Stanford enlisted RMI to help identify ways to
reduce emissions at its two-mile-long Linear Accelerator
Center. More recently, RMI has assisted the University
of Hawaii, the University of Vermont, and Duke
University with environmental sustainability and
stewardship goals.
“In the past we’ve done individual [campus and
community] projects oriented toward technical
analysis,” Kinsley says. “Typically they’ve been one-offs
of buildings or energy systems or something else;
excellent projects, but we weren’t doing any whole-
campus or whole-city jobs.”
Over the years, Kinsley has been pushing his practice
toward working with the larger subset of a “sustainable
human settlements.” His goal of larger community-
oriented issues was recently given a boost when a
foundation contacted RMI and enquired if the Institute
could delve into college- and university-wide climate
solutions, specifically in terms of campus operations,
taking RMI’s work, Kinsley says, “to a whole new level.”
Tackling a Vast Set of Challenges
“Accelerating Campus Climate-Change
Initiatives” sounds grandiose, but in reality,
RMI’s campus climate initiative is—from
the outside—rather straightforward. It’s
about information, a sort of fact-finding
and fact-sharing mission. Working with the
Association for the Advancement of
Sustainability in Higher Education, RMI
will build on foundational research that has
already been published by various
sustainability professionals at universities
and the National Wildlife Federation’s
growing Low-Carbon Campus Series.
Supported by a grant from an
anonymous funder, Kinsley and Sally
DeLeon, a Research Fellow on RMI’s Built
Environment Team, spent the summer
gathering stories from colleges and
universities across the country on how their
climate-change initiatives are unfolding
and what obstacles the campuses have
encountered. Throughout the fall and
winter, they will be in the process of
conducting deeper research with ten
selected campuses. Next spring, they will
publish their generalized findings as a web-
based framework for whole-system climate action in campus
operations. The stories include everything from wild successes
to instructive failures. “To make this project genuinely
informative, we need to understand failures as well as successes,”
Kinsley notes. After
visiting the selected
schools this fall, Kinsley
and DeLeon will conduct
an RMI workshop with
participants from all ten
campuses to tease out the
best ways to advance
their climate-change
initiatives.
The process may
sound simple, but the
two researchers say the
issues are anything but.
Colleges and universities
can have Byzantine
organizational structures
that are often much more
complex than corporate
entities. Financing,
split incentives, school
culture, stranded assets,
and faculty and staff buy-
in create unique challenges that
can be difficult for a school to
overcome.
“For example, often one
department is responsible for
capital investments, while
another runs operations and the
two don’t necessarily work
together,” Kinsley notes.
“There’s no incentive for the
capital budget manager to
invest in building retrofits
that’ll help the budget of the
operations people. It’s just a
dumb structural condition that
nobody meant to create that
becomes an institutional
barrier. Those are the kinds of
things we want to dig up.”
RMI Trustee and Oberlin
College professor David Orr is
quick to point out that one
enormous barrier to change is
the notion of changing
curricula, which can threaten
faculty jobs, budgets, and
fundamental school principles.
“The main architecture of the curricula is sacrosanct,” he
says. “Conversations still don’t easily cross back and forth
between disciplines. And anything that begins to threaten that
structure dies a pretty quick and painful death.”
Moving the project forward will also involve a workshop and
additional research, followed by the creation of “an overarching
framework for accelerating campus climate-change initiatives”
and offer it as a web-based report.
“This RMI project focuses mainly on operations,” notes
DeLeon. “But since all of these aspects have a lot of potential for
synergy and cross-over, we will also learn about connections
between operations and the other aspects and hopefully expose
creative, innovative ways to make these connections and create
solutions that address multiple aspects at once.”
What’s truly inspiring about this effort—all green campus
initiatives, really—is its vast potential, especially in terms of education.
A Complete (and Completely) Powerful Education
As a professor of many years, Orr has developed some
remarkable notions of just how far the green campus
movement could go. In fact, Orr says that if the green campus
movement is followed to its logical end, it would change
society entirely.
At present, he points out, students and faculty are thinking
of the green campus movement in terms of physical flows: for
example, how much waste a campus produces and how much
energy it needs.
“But that’s only a means to an end,” he says. “The real end is about
changing the way people think, not just about resource flows through the
places in which we purport to be thinking. I could imagine a university
having one subject: carbon. Just follow the carbon. And when you think
about it, that’s a big doorway. You get into the realm of carbon and it would
take you to English literature, it would take you to poetry, certainly to
chemistry, it would get you to economics, it would get you really quickly
to philosophy.”
Changing the way people think about educational topics might
“sound flaky as hell,” Orr says, but it also could turn education on its
head, which in turn could change society by changing what’s
important in society. The thinking is that by changing what people
learn in college (and other educational settings) you change what they
do in life and how they respond to the world around them.
Even if Orr thinks his ideas are slightly radical, all indications
suggest that they’re not far off at all. Sustainability-related efforts are
already turning curricula upside-down at many schools. Graduate
students at the University of Virginia’s business school are studying
ways to use waste rice husks to generate power in India. Vermont’s
Middlebury College recently established a grant program for
“sustainable study abroad.” And architecture schools across the country
are offering “green building” courses of every type. In 2007, Arizona
State University created the country’s first school of sustainability, and
now offers degrees in “sustainability” from the bachelor to Ph.D. level.
Many students are even pledging to take what they’ve learned out
into the real world, as a group of George Washington University
students did last May when they pinned green ribbons on their
graduation robes and caps and signed a commitment to bring
sustainability principles to their careers.
“My personal thought is that the biggest changes are yet to come,”
says Ken Bagstad, a Ph.D. candidate in ecological economics at the
University of Vermont. “As more and more students from all fields,
beyond the traditional environmental studies/science majors (e.g.,
engineering, business, etc.) become leaders in greening their campus,
they’ll have the opportunity to ‘green revolutionize’ their professional
fields. I envision that just as we’re now seeing incoming students use
‘greenness’ as a criteria to pick a college or university to attend, these
same students will become a major force in transforming their
professional worlds, using the skills and expectations they gained in
their years participating in the green campus movement.”
The Enormous, Unexpected Benefits of Green Campuses
Colleges and universities starting down green paths are already
finding huge advantages over their not-so-green competition. Some are
experiencing increases in student applications because of their
sustainability and climate initiatives.
“We have heard that students
make a decision on where to go
to school solely based on
sustainability,” Dave Weil,
University of California at San
Diego’s director of building
commissioning and sustainability
recently told Climate Wire, a
climate-change-oriented news
service.
But that draw isn’t limited to
big-name universities. In fact,
DeLeon points out, smaller and
lesser-known—even two-year—
colleges can be leaders in
sustainability-related fields.
Case in point: Butte College, a
two-year community college in
Northern California. That school
recently won the National
Wildlife Federation’s Chill-Out
Award, aimed at celebrating
campus-based initiatives, by
delving heavily into energy
efficiency. It is now on course to
be carbon neutral by 2015.
Butte College also recycles more
than 75 percent of its waste and
runs the largest community
college transportation system in
California. Community College
Times, the biweekly newspaper of the American Association of
Community Colleges, recently called the school “one of the
national leaders in sustainability, and one that can serve as a
model for community colleges.”
Still others are pulling in more funding from donors, and
others are winning funding from government programs that
support renewable energy. Some are attracting more
promising students, and many are drawing top-level faculty
members.
“If I were to give a list of the benefits that came about
because of the Lewis Center now, most of them were things
I couldn’t have fully anticipated at all when we started the
project in 1995,” says Orr of the Adam Lewis Environmental
Center at Oberlin. “I would never have anticipated, for
example, that a lot of money would’ve come in long after we
had the thing paid for. I wouldn’t have anticipated the bump
in enrollments, which continues to this day. We have
students come here just because ecological design is part of
our curriculum. At the last U.S. Green Building Council
meeting we went to, we had 42 alums at that meeting, all of
whom were involved in the making of the Lewis Center. I
wouldn’t have anticipated any of this, but opportunities feed
on opportunities.”
Impacts Across the Board
As this issue of RMI Solutions Journal goes to press, 558
school presidents have signed the American College and
University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, which is a
voluntary agreement that their institutions will strive for carbon
neutrality. Some schools that haven’t signed are actively working
toward ambitious greenhouse-gas emissions reduction goals of
their own. As Orr is quick to note, there are roughly 3,700
colleges and universities in the country with a buying power of
around $20 billion a year.
“That’s a lot of clout,” he says. “If ecological design and carbon
neutrality become the norm, that changes a lot of resource flows
right away. And if colleges and universities begin to see themselves
as catalytic agents in developing re-localized, self-reliant, solar-
powered economies, if they become like the salt in the stew—agents
of much larger change—you begin to see the makings of a very
serious revolution. And I think that’s kind of where we’re headed,
it’s just not as fast nor is it as thorough as it needs to be.”
Drawing students and donations is one thing, but changing
the rules is something entirely different. RMI’s Built
Environment Team experienced the power of green campus work
in the early 2000s when the Institute helped design the University
of Denver College of Law’s Frank H. Ricketson, Jr. Building.
The design included waterless urinals and other water
conservation features. But when the state’s lead plumbing inspector
read about the urinals in the newspaper, “He basically got up in
arms and said ‘you’re not installing these on my watch,’” recalls
Cara Carmichael, a Senior Consultant on RMI’s Built
Environment Team. “He had never worked with them, he didn’t
trust them to hold up, and he had about a dozen other excuses.”
But the law school had connections with the governor. The
students rallied together and, with the help of several influential
professors, got the governor to pressure the plumbing inspector to
allow the urinals on a one-year trial basis to see how well they
worked and if they would be appropriate for general use.
“So they were installed and they worked great and still work
great,” Carmichael says. “Now, other buildings in Denver are using
them. They were pretty much granted because of that building.”
Huge environmental benefits, fantastic educational
opportunities, green campuses and communities—the benefits are
too significant to ignore. Yet the movement is still experiencing
fits and starts. Just like many companies, colleges and universities
need to understand the full range of benefits—including
important business benefits—that can be derived from reducing
their carbon footprint. And according to DeLeon, this is one way
that RMI’s involvement could spur fresh thinking about energy
and carbon in campus operations. “That’s why we’re taking this
on,” she says. “It’s similar to Amory Lovins’s old adage about the
business sector: schools will either have to follow suit or lose
competitive advantage.”
