Steve Klass on Middlebury

These are some quick excerpts from an email I received from Steve Klass when I asked him how the Middlebury trip went.

"I think their greatest achievement has been in institutionalizing the multidimensional principles of sustainability in a very complete and natural way, i.e., it's neither simply top-down (which isn't completely effective in higher ed anyway), nor is it simply a special interest/politically-charged issue...it's something that's a part of their daily lives, a part of every one's shared vocabulary, and a part of everyday decision-making, whether that's business decisions or simple daily behavior choices.

This, in a nutshell, is what I refer to when I talk about making sustainability a guiding principle of the institution. So, they are further down that road than we are and it's provided them with momentum to make decisions about co-generation, composting, engineering, etc. that require substantial resource commitments. When we're ready to make that kind of institutionalized commitment, I predict that we'll build similar momentum and other things will begin to fall into place for us over time.

The other area where they are ahead of us is in the maturity of their narrative. They've done a good job of pulling together all of the actions that they take along
these lines into a single, compelling story. I think that once we look at all the strands of activity that we have going on, we'll have a really nice initial story to tell as well. This makes me think that we're not light years behind them, and that we're positioned to be more successful over time."

Climate/environmental action on campus is as much about concerted effort as it is about presenting that effort in a prominent public way. Writing and talking about our actions is as important as doing them. (What happened to those pictures of the EARTH sculpture?!!)

Articles for today:
NYtimes Business: Why coal companies want us to take action to limit carbon
NYTimes Travel: Buying Carbon credits to offset travel impact