Frustration with college rankings

If any of you follow the college rankings by U.S. News and World Report and Princeton Review you might also know that environmental report cards are out there now too. But not everyone is happy about them, how they are tabulated, and what the publicity could mean when the methods behind them are unclear, not to mention time consuming for people who have to fill them out.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a piece in its current issue about it:

Colleges have been subjected to all sorts of ratings, rankings, and grades on their green sensibilities in recent years—and not all of them have been welcome. Sustainability directors increasingly find themselves filling out surveys from organizations like the Sustainable Endowments Institute, Sierra magazine, and the Princeton Review Inc., each with its own twist on questions about energy use, mass transit, water conservation, and so on. The data collection is becoming a real burden, they say.

Now, in a recent letter to colleges, the Sustainable Endowments Institute has floated a proposal: How would you like to pay $700 for the pleasure of filling out a survey? That money would help the institute render a grade—it could be an A-minus, or maybe a D-plus—for its highly publicized College Sustainability Report Card.

If you find yourself saying, "No, thanks," you're not alone, as the proposition may come at a bad time. Not only are many colleges watching every penny, but sustainability directors are also suffering from green-ratings fatigue. Just ask administrators at Ithaca College, who recently publicized a letter they wrote to the editors of Sierra magazine, explaining that they would not participate in the "Cool Schools" survey because they found the process too time-consuming, opaque, and of questionable value.

We are one of several "Green Teams"

Several weeks back we were asked to meet for an interview and perhaps some video. One other student showed up but didn't make the video - he had to leave. But we are one of many trying to reduce our impacts and, by extension, reduce our collective impact. See what we are saying:

Student Sustainability Statement from Penn State

PSU's first Student Sustainability Summit was held about two weeks ago and we came out with a powerful statement that you can sign here if you are a Penn State student.

1. "We, the students of Penn State, are committed to environmental stewardship and sustainability. We are dedicated to becoming environmentally responsible citizens capable of protecting our natural and human resources, thereby producing a quality of life for future generations that is equal to or better than our own.

2. "Therefore, we call on the University to promote environmental initiatives, social responsibility, and sound economic stewardship in its operations, research, education, and services. We urge the University to identify opportunities for environmental sustainability in academic programs and to establish sustainability outreach programs to educate the college community. We ask that the University considers future generations in practice and policy through increased conservation and efficiency, supporting renewable energy, and reduction of greenhouse gases. Our ingenuity must be coupled with integrity, our research with respect, and our academics with action.

3. "And we call on our fellow students to be a part of the solution. We must work with all members of the Penn State community to reduce our environmental impact, support local and regional initiatives, and participate in the creation of a sustainable community. Our individual actions must reflect our broad commitment to a fair and just tomorrow.

4. "Finally, we call for the establishment of a Student Advisory Council to the Campus Sustainability Office that will encourage the adoption of policies that support the needs of all life, human and non-human. This advisory council will be an interdisciplinary group comprising students, faculty, staff, and administrators dedicated to the development of sound environmental, social, and economic decisions.

Let's get this garden growing!

Bottle stations on the local nightly news and a story in the paper all in one day

Wow. When it rains, it really really pours...from our bottle-filling stations. Check out this piece on local WTAJ TV...

UNIVERSITY PARK, CENTRE COUNTY - Last year, Penn state installed its first water bottle filling station in the HUB Student Union, this year the school has added three more at Chambers Building, the Intramural Building, and Willard Building at University Park.

The university sells $2.7 million worth of bottled water each year, and is one of the first in the nation to offer this high tech thirst quenching technology.

“One of the most needless forms of waste that we have comes from non-reusable disposable plastic water bottles,” Peter Buckland, a PhD candidate at Penn State who helped spearhead the initiative to get the filling stations on campus, said.

...and then this piece in the Centre Daily Times.

“We are using this to investigate water bottle filling stations,” said Lydia Vandenbergh, program coordinator at the campus sustainability office. “We did some testing by the environmental health and safety group to make sure the stations would not be a breeding ground for bacteria.”

A club called 3e-coe, composed of education majors and self-proclaimed Earth lovers, had urged the Office of Sustainability to stop purchasing bottled water to sell on campus.

“The club was great. They were kind of the ones that came to university and said let’s ban water bottles,” said Vandenbergh. “The university spends about $2 million on water bottles in their contract with Pepsi. ... The club came to us with a black-and-white proposal, but we were able to work with them to find what’s the best for Penn State.”

Check out the comments on the CDT page too. Some of those are real keepers.

For the record, I think that Lydia Vandenberg and I should form a band about water. Name ideas?

Have you done a Happy Thursday?

Happy Thursday everyone.

Climate change education workshop

Orion Magazine and Unity College in Maine are teaming up to teach us how to teach climate change. The following release explains it all:

Education in a Changing Climate Workshop
August 1 - 4, 2010

Climate change is not just for scientists to deal with. It’s a challenge for us all, and we need everybody’s skills and perspectives to confront it—now. But the scope and complexity of the issue can seem intimidating and frustrating, like trying to grasp hot air. How can we understand global and long-term problems when we live and work in the here and now? Do we need to be experts before we even mention climate change in public or add it to our teaching?

Join us at Unity College for a 4-day workshop that will give you powerful, practical ways to move past anxiety and educate yourself, your students, and the public.

We’ll offer a climate change primer on basic climate science, likely effects on ecosystems and people, some ethical, literary, and artistic responses, and a sampling of potential solutions that range from political to personal, technological to philosophical. In each case, we’ll show you where to find the best current information and teaching resources.

Through hands-on activities, we’ll explore how to combine place-based teaching with this global problem. We’ll explore outdoors with a Unity College naturalist, write, make art, and consider how to deal with the perspective-bending nature of climate change. In short, we’ll exercise our brains and imaginations in the service of practice.

Education in a Changing Climate is an annual event jointly sponsored by the Orion Magazine and Unity College. Orion is a bimonthly, advertising-free magazine that stakes out the territory of ecology, the arts, action, education, and social justice. Unity College is a learning environment where sustainability and environmental awareness are central to the school’s mission and vision and is intrinsic to all aspects of college life—ranging from the curricular focus on the environmental liberal arts, to the campus-wide emphasis on energy efficiency and local foods.

Wal-Mart and the locavores

Food, Inc. does a wonderful job of complicating Wal-Mart for everyone. On the one hand, it shows how its foray into organic milk and other organic groceries correlates with the influx of the mega-food companies like Kraft into organics. But on the other hand, its investment shows two other things: first, that we as dairy eaters want more humane and healthier (for human consumption and the land) dairy and second that its desires moved to a better end can reduce ecological impacts that we have on the environment. But is that the end of it? Apparently not.

In this article on MSNBC, "The great grocery smackdown," the Wal-Mart complicates itself further. What if it invests in local or regional agriculture? Not always organic, but local. Can it give Wegman's, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe's a run for their money? Well, in the world of money, Wal-Mart's business model is still unrivaled. [pic at right from MSNBC]

As everyone who sells to or buys from (or, notoriously, works for) Walmart knows, price is where every consideration begins and ends. Even if the price Walmart pays for local produce is slightly higher than what it would pay large growers, savings in transport and the ability to order smaller quantities at a time can make up the difference. Contracting directly with farmers, which Walmart intends to do in the future as much as possible, can help eliminate middlemen, who sometimes misrepresent prices. Heritage produce currently accounts for only 4 to 6 percent of Walmart’s produce sales, McCormick told me (already more than a chain might spend on produce in a year, as Fishman would point out), adding that he hopes the figure will get closer to 20 percent, so the program will “go from experimental to being really viable.”

What do you think? Can the Wal-Mart juggernaut be a force for good in this movement? Will it take over and turn local agriculture to its own interests? Where are its interests? I wonder if this is the corporatization and a new kind of shell game for powerful people's convenience that replaces the Department of Ag with Wal-Mart. The article's closing speaks to this indirectly:

In an ideal world, people would buy their food directly from the people who grew or caught it, or grow and catch it themselves. But most people can’t do that. If there were a Walmart closer to where I live, I would probably shop there.

But what do you think? Is this where we should be going with our food system? Is this where you want to go with your and your community's food system?

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Hat-tip to Mike for the article.

Sustainability Summit News

The Collegian did a small story on the Student Sustainability Summit in today's paper.

The university already has a green building policy, uses renewable energy and has a composting facility, Foley said, but it wants to continue going green -- which is where the sustainability statement becomes important. Because of the number of groups at the summit, the statement will make an impact, he said.

"It's the students demanding a lot of the resources, so if the students demand green, then green is what we get -- in our labs, our residence halls, our parties and our classrooms," he said.

Ideas for the statement included using local food in dining commons, making campus more bike-friendly and requiring freshmen to take an environmental course.

But there was so much more to this than this reporter got. We presented and exchanged so many ideas and ways of being from the "Green Economy" to a mural to our Manifesto to community gardening to climate legislation to the inheritance of our great-great-great-grandchildren. Let me say, as the emcee and a participant, I found it energizing to learn what others are doing and want to do.

When we get the Sustainability Manifesto, you will see it here.

Spanier notes us in the Board of Trustees speech

All. Check it out from President Spanier.

I'm proud to report another student accomplishment — this one on our University Park campus. Thanks to the work of a student ecology group from the College of Education, we're experimenting with new drinking water filling stations around campus. These sensor-activated filling stations accommodate reusable drinking cups and larger containers. The group collaborated with the Office of Physical Plant to install the new hydration stations as well as to upgrade some of the college's water fountains. The intention is to reduce the use of disposable plastic bottles, which will reduce our environmental footprint and keep our campus clean.

Now we're getting somewhere. Maybe we can go to a meeting sometime. That would be nice.

Greetings EDTHP 115

Hello all. I want to welcome you to join us for a journey. This journey is at once about who we are, what we do, why we do it, and how what we do individually and collectively matters.

As current and future teachers, you and I probably believe that we can positively impact the world by teaching children, with those less experienced than us, or those who have learned differently than we have. I think we also probably believe that we can learn a great deal from the children with whom we work, with their families, and with our whole communities.

But what about about the places - the natural environmental places where we live? What do they teach us? What do we give to them and they give to us? These are questions at the hear of who we, in 3E-COE ask?

We focus on three things in our club with the goal of fostering more environmentally and ecologically aware people.

• Our first pillar asks that we look at the natural environment and understand that it is a complex thing of which we are a part, a part that creates many side effects of which we can be both proud and ashamed. This leads to...
  
• Our second pillar, that we are part of a web of natural relationships that the science and practice of ecology shows us. That is, by systematically examining the world(s) around us - the political, economic, social, and natural worlds - we can come to ways of understanding how we look at the natural world and are a part of it. This naturally leads us to...
• Our third pillar, which is to bring our learning and doing into what John Dewey would call an "educative" mission that promotes "growth" toward a good end. In fact, many of our actions in 3E-COE create reflections on our experiences so that we can develop better practices as teachers and living people.

We focus on trying to integrate ecological thinking into the whole school system. Think about how many ways and at how many levels you could use a garden in any school.

Botany, biology, and organic and inorganic chemistry: Through the study of plants, fungus, animal, and microorganisms working in and through soil, air, water, and sunlight. We can learn about life cycles.

Meteorology and climatology: Think of the seasonality of the garden, its water and solar cycles.

English: Speaking of water. If you are a high school teacher interested in teaching Dune, you can incorporate its thoughts on water into the actual use of water where you live.

Math: From the simple arithmetic of the number of seeds you plant to fractions and proportions of how many mums we planted to how bloomed or differential equations of predator and prey relationships (that'd be a big garden and a pretty advanced class!) you can do it.

History, geography and anthropology: By growing sweet potatoes (if it's appropriate in your bioregion) you can investigate the natural evolutionary and cultural history of a kind of food used by the Incas and modern Africans.

Art and music: If you grow gourds, you can make musical instruments. Cooking. Poetry. The art of arranging the garden and its landscape.

Economics: If a garden works well, as it has at many schools from Vermont to northwest Washington state, children can sell the fruits and vegetables they grow and make a sustainable living.

Cooperative learning and team thinking: People work together and with something larger than themselves when they do this.

There is a reason that people remain lifetime gardeners. They always teach. They teach you about who and what you are in the place where you are.

This is only one petal on our "green school" flower. We have no shortage of media and natural sources to use for the development of formal and informal curriculum. From Edutopia's Climate Change Curricula to the Edible Schoolyard to the Center for Ecoliteracy to the Pennsylvania Center for Environmental Education, we have abundant resources.

As you can see, we are invested people. Our mission states, "We hope to create a way for students at Penn State to learn lessons about our natural environment, our ethical and ecological understanding of that environment, and how to create educational experiences that foster that understanding. Therefore, we strive for personal and communal sustainability defined as “the possibility that humans and other life will flourish on Earth forever.” Join us in this flourishing.

Please come to our meetings to learn and share more. First Thursday of every month at 7 pm in the Chambers PC Computer Lab. That means we have two more meetings this semester and then one more before Earth Day to shore things up for our plastic bottle greenhouse. More on that later.

April 1st @ 7 pm
April 15th @ 7 pm
Weekend of the 17-18th TBA

Please join us. Any questions or requests to be added to the mailing list, email Peter Buckland @ pdb118@psu.edu