Katz repeatedly touts the nutritional benefits of fermented food. Many foods become more digestible when fermented, and sometimes nutrients become available that are otherwise inaccessible. The living microorganisms in raw fermented foods like yogurt or miso take up residence in the intestines and promote a healthy immune system.

More importantly though, fermentation is fun. The process of fermenting something, particularly when one is not using cultivated microbes (a “wild” fermentation) is exciting and unpredictable, somewhere at the intersection of cooking, alchemy, and pet ownership. Through fermentation, basic foods gain amazing and idiosyncratic textures, flavors, and properties. Many of the most interesting fermented foods tend to be delicacies to one culture and noxious or rotten to another, whether the product in question is foul-smelling mold-riddled cheese, mucilaginous cultured soybeans, or corn liquor made with human saliva.
For thousands of years, fermented foods have been a major part of every agricultural and many non-agricultural societies. In pre-refrigeration days, their ability to keep for long periods of time made them invaluable both in hot moist climates where things rot quickly and in temperate climates where nothing could be grown for much of the year. Wild microorganisms like the ones that were used in the first fermentations are omnipresent and extremely diverse, and the makeup of the microbiological community differs vastly from place to place. This enormous diversity of life gave rise to a corresponding diversity of foods, the 256 cheeses of France being one example. (One of them, an egg-sized, rind-encrusted nugget, smells so awful that even the French call it “la crotte du diable”—“the devil’s turd.”) It is an unfortunate instance of cultural poverty that regionally specific, living food is largely absent (with a few notable exceptions) from modern American culture. Hopefully, with the growing popularity of local foods, regional cuisines will start cropping up in the United States.

My first foray into the world of fermentation (apart from baking bread) was to make yogurt. I was stunned to find how incredibly easy it was, how much cheaper, and how much more delicious. Previously I would buy yogurt to eat with granola. After I started making my own, I tended to just eat the yogurt plain, straight out of the container.

HOME-MADE YOGURT

Equipment:
- A pot big enough to hold as much milk as you want to turn into yogurt (one quart of milk makes one quart of yogurt).
- A non-metal container (preferably with a lid) for storing the yogurt.
- Some sort of insulation device. I use a Styrofoam medicine cooler that a co-worker gave me, and I fill it with a couple inches of warm water. Any sort of cooler will work, as well as an oven with a basin of hot water, a laundry hamper filled with clothes, a box filled with packing peanuts, anything that will keep the yogurt warm overnight.

Ingredients:
- Milk. Whole milk tastes best. Pasteurized milk is fine, but ultrapasteurized milk apparently doesn’t work because of the way the proteins are denatured in the pasteurization process.
- One tablespoon of yogurt per quart of milk. Make sure to use yogurt that is labeled as containing “active cultures.” This spoonful of yogurt contains a plethora of microbes bred for their ability to turn milk into delicious yogurt, similar to the way commercial bread yeasts are bred to produce lots of CO2. After you’ve made one batch of yogurt you can (if you’re good at planning) use a spoonful of the old yogurt to start the next batch. Every successive generation will taste progressively stronger and more unique, though, as the mix of organisms begins to incorporate wild strains along with the domestic ones.

Instructions:
- In the pot, heat the milk to nearly boiling (stop heating when little bubbles begin to appear). Stir often to prevent it from burning. This step is optional, but supposedly makes the yogurt thicker.
- Let cool until it is at about 110°F. You don’t need a thermometer. Just dip your (clean!) finger in the pot; if the milk is hot but not so hot that you can’t keep your finger in it for a couple seconds, then it’s probably about the right temperature.
- Mix in the tablespoon of live yogurt.
- Cover and put in your insulator.
- Let sit 8-12 hours. If you make the yogurt in the evening it should be done by morning. Try to move it as little as possible; yogurt doesn’t like to be jostled while it is forming.

Eating The Yogurt:
You can eat it now, although warm yogurt is a little bit bizarre, at least for breakfast. Anyway, when it has solidified (“yoged”) to your satisfaction, place it in the refrigerator. This does not kill the culture, only slows it down. The yogurt will slowly continue to get sourer as the days go by, as lactose is converted to lactic acid. It probably won’t truly go bad, in the sense of growing mold or becoming potentially harmful for a very long time—that’s why it was invented in the first place—but it’ll start tasting stronger than might be desired after maybe a week.

Published in 2005, Collapse is really a textbook—a survey of an entire field of study; only a couple chapters are based on Diamond’s own work and experience. The rest is drawn from the findings of many scientists and historians about civilization collapses from the Rwandan Genocide to the collapse of Norse Greenland and the disappearance of the Maya and the Anasazi. Collapse is long and detailed and focuses on surveying existing work to examine how collapses are caused and by what kinds of environmental destruction, with an eye toward drawing general lessons with future applications. Nothing is more relevant to the world today than a textbook for societies on how not to die off.

Any good textbook introduction includes a vivid example of why the textbook contains information relevant to the reader; Collapse is no exception. To introduce the book, Diamond tells “a tale of two farms.” He discusses two highly successful dairy farms of about 200 cows, each with the largest, most state-of-the-art barn in their respective regions, and discusses how each uses irrigation to support a late-summer hay harvest which will feed the cows through the winter. He further explains how both men were dedicated farmers, religious men and community leaders, and yet sometimes find their farms hostage to outside forces. Their farms are in high-latitude regions not quite as well suited for dairy as some competitors, and suffer disproportionately when conditions or prices for dairy turn sour.

Then he drops the bombshell–one of these farms is a successful, growing establishment in modern day Montana, while the other was suddenly abandoned by the Greenland Norse (or its residents killed or starved) over 500 years ago. The Greenland farm and the society in which it thrived collapsed until every resident had been killed, starved, or emigrated. Moreover, like most collapses in history, there was no period of gradual decline… the society grew without end for centuries and then collapsed dramatically, in a matter of decades.

Most textbooks conclude the first chapter exhorting the relevance and importance of their subject and in subsequent chapters stick to chapter summaries and problem sets. Collapse never strays from the relevance theme, but then it is pretty difficult to think of global societal collapse, anarchy, and possible extinction as irrelevant. Chapter two offers expansive detail about how Easter Islanders deforested their culture out of existence. Every chapter is laced with careful conclusions about how a certain culture and its environmental policies resemble or contrast our own. And unlike a biology textbook which might or might not have a single page inset interview about one global environmental problem like the ozone-hole, Collapse dedicates its final three chapters exclusively to extracting practical lessons from study of collapses.

The first of these last chapters is a single posed question, “How did so many societies make such bad mistakes?” and Diamond’s efforts to both discuss and answer that question. Diamond admits that many scholars, such as the much-cited Joseph Tainter, have found the “failures of group decision-making on the part of whole societies or other groups” to be so inexplicable a phenomenon that they altogether rule out environmental destruction as a cause of collapse. After all, what was the Easter Islander thinking when he cut down the very last of the largest palm trees in the world, and the last tree of any kind on the island!?

Diamond’s response is, like his book, cautious and detailed; he patiently explains how societies often fail to anticipate problems, notice problems, or even try to solve noticeable problems, until it becomes too late to avoid collapse.

Diamond notes that societies have difficulty remembering lessons from the past. Obviously societies without writing have little means of remembering disasters and remaining prepared for future disasters, but even very literate societies sometimes forget. Diamond points out that, “For a year or two after the gas shortages of the 1973 Gulf oil crisis, we Americans shied away from gas-guzzling cars, but then we forgot…and are now embracing gas SUVs, despite volumes of print spilled over the 1973 events.” Diamond notes that many problems are virtually undetectable, such as soil nutrient depletion or ozone destruction. Since some of the societies whose collapse Diamond studied clearly collapsed because of imperceptible problems like these; it isn’t surprising that they did not band together to solve problems they didn’t know they had .

Diamond also discusses which political structures are most likely to avert the tragedy of the commons. He compares the political environments of Easter Island, Japan and Tikopia–three islands which faced overpopulation and deforestation, only two of which averted disaster. The Tikopians lived on an island so small that every islander knew the entire island and every other person on it, and so community bonds made each of them a policy-maker and a policy-enforcer. Diamond calls that the “bottom-up” approach to environmental carefulness. Japan is a much, much larger island which was politically unified; when deforestation began to threaten the state, an order from a single man directed an entire government ready to harshly enforce careful forest protection laws.

Easter Island, however, was large enough for no person to know the island well, but was loosely ruled by religious chiefs who earned the allegiance of the people beneath them by building ever bigger monuments. If these leaders stopped making ever bigger monuments and using increasing amounts of timber, then some other chief who was making monuments would take over; an obvious problem went unsolved. The relevance of this chapter is hard to miss: there is an obvious correlation between Easter Islanders’ non-response to deforestation and the modern world’s global warming problem.

Diamond’s next chapter deals with the exclusively modern phenomena “the corporation” and how corporations can have negative or positive roles in environmental caution.

Diamond tells of two different oil wells in tropical regions in the South Pacific. One (owned by Pertamina) was a crisscross of 100 yard clear-cuts for roads, pillars of burning natural gas, “numerous oil spills,” and a wildlife decimated by environment destruction, environmental contamination, and the hunting carried out by the oil-well workers. The other (a Chevron field) had ten-yard unpaved roads, sealed borders, Israel-Airport-level inspection of all incoming worker’s and visitor’s luggage for alien species, rigid safety protocols with no oil spills during all four Diamond’s month-long visits. In Diamond’s words the second oil field was, “in effect…the largest and most rigorously controlled national park in Papua New Guinea.” But if Chevron or Pertamina were acting radically out of line with their profit motive, then their shareholders could and would sue them. Something was different about the settings in which the two companies operated–so the same profit motive could create such radically different behavior.

Diamond explains that Pertamina is a national company run in a military dictatorship far from the area where the political leaders lived and Chevron is an international company run in a decentralized democracy where local displeasure could close down all operations. International consumers with higher environmental concerns prefer Chevron because it has a good environmental record. Diamond goes on to discuss many other types of corporations–but the point is already made. We do not have to trade corporations for the environment (and survival). Corporations are powerful forces which can work for the environment rather than against it.

In the final chapter, Diamond compares the world to a Dutch polder, which is an area of land below sealevel kept dry by pumps and dikes. One-fifth of the Netherlands are below sea-level–the rich and poor alike are protected by the same wall (much like the New Orleans levees). Diamond lists twelve environmental problems we face, and groups them into four categories: resource destruction, resource ceiling consumption, the creation of or relocation of harmful substances, and population problems. In no uncertain terms he spells out that any one of the twelve problems will cause dramatic collapse if unsolved, and everyone in the polder will be sunk.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, is similar to Diamond’s earlier, well-renowned, Pulitzer-winning work Guns, Germs and Steel. Both books are geography books–geography textbooks if one considers their length, perspicacity, and dryness. Guns, Germs, and Steel nailed shut the coffin of a long-dead racist argument; Collapse, however, comes at a time when our society is beginning to wonder quite seriously about questions of global sustainability.

Collapse is deeply relevant to our society’s survival, and that relevance unquestionably deserves the attention of literate world-citizens everywhere, not to mention world leaders.

But what does it mean to be an environmentalist? Environmental movements have been around for a long time; but there’s an easy way to split them into two categories. There’s environmentalism prior to photos from outer space, and there’s environmentalism afterward. If there were a single person whose writing best conveys the environmentalism before that first overhead shot, perhaps it would be Aldo Leopold, whose book the Sand County Almanac, brimming with the majesty and beauty of the natural world, has become something of a bible to environmentalists, and land-lovers of all stripes.
But since that first photo, environmentalism is only half about loving the land. (Land does not mean dirt. The living land, which includes everything living that dwells in it.) Now, it’s also a recognition that we are all prisoners onboard a spaceship bound for nowhere—and so we’d better not screw it up.

Leopold is sometimes quoted as saying “The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.” For environmentalists nowadays, that has taken on new meaning, now that Humanity is a geological force. Our impact on the planet Earth is outmatched only by the plant precursors that oxygenated the atmosphere. We ape-ascendants look up at sunrise and sunset, day after day, from the bottom of our smallish gravity well, and as our technology increasingly and visibly gives us the power to alter and even design everything trapped in that well, our minds are changing. One by one it is dawning on us that we are all going to have to get together and figure out how this whole thing is going to work—which parts of the land we value, and which parts we’ll pave.

Tucked almost invisibly—but hardly innocuously—throughout Dartmouth campus and the world are clusters of people who’ve realized; people who know that environmentalism is the future of politics. Among them are the crunchy environmentalists; the people consciously exploring design options for how we’re all going to live at peace with each other, and with the ecosystems we depend on, inside the thin envelope of air between earth and space.

That’s what the Dartmouth Organic Farm, and the coming Dartmouth Sustainable Living Center are: groups of people working with a patch of land to find ways not to spoil it. They are looking for ways to do what must soon be expected of us all—to not have a despoiling existence.

Ultimately, environmentalism isn’t simply about rejecting material goods—I’m no stoic—it’s about seeing the value and interconnectedness of the life around us. Aldo Leopold put it this way, “The problem is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness.”

There is no doubt in my mind that we do not yet have a solution to the problem of reminding people that they are connected to the land. I don’t even know if the problem isn’t steadily worsening—do you think any tribal person ever felt the need to “raise awareness” among his fellows about the land? Global climate change caused by CO2 is the best publicized of the myriad ways that homo sapiens sapiens are wounding the vitality of the world, and yet we allow CO2 emissions to climb higher. The simplest measure of humanity’s effect is the extinction rate, and at the moment we’re causing extinction at a faster rate than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. We don’t even seem upset by it. One of the hardest things about being an environmentalist is the recognition that our way of life is killing our planet, ourselves. Sometimes it’s easier not to think about it.

And the more you think about it, the more pervasive our problem is. As Aldo Leopold put it, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”

A lot of people are fond of sharing doom and gloom stories about environmental collapse, and I share their concern. However, some days I can’t help but think that the best thing for the human race would be for something terrible to happen, to remind us all that we’re all stuck here together, and are going to have to learn to love—and respect—the land to which we belong. We’re all going to have to develop some goodwill for each other, and a willingness to be happy with what we have, not what we can get. Assuming we learn the lesson—and we must—it actually sounds like we could be headed for a wonderful future.

I’ll close with a favorite quote of mine, also by Aldo Leopold, about geese in North America.

“Every March since the Pleistocene, the geese have honked unity from Currituck to Labrador, Matamuskeet to Ungava, Horseshoe Lake to Hudson’s Bay, Avery Island to Baffin Land, Panhandle to Mackenzie, Sacramento to Yukon. By this international commerce of geese, the waste corn of Illinois is carried through the clouds to the Arctic tundras, there to combine with the waste sunlight of a nightless June to grow goslings for all the lands between. And in this annual barter of food for light, and winter warmth for summer solitude, the whole continent receives as net profit a wild poem dropped from the murky skies upon the muds of March.”

One might wonder how I got there, how I came to spend my days waking up at 8 am and going to sleep at 10:30 pm, reading books, getting cooking lessons, and learning about the political history of Chile. Not long after graduating, I found myself adapted to the Tasmanian lifestyle—and sometimes in Lalla I talked to the cows…. and the chickens.

You see, I graduated from Dartmouth with a summer job at the Moosilauke Ravine Lodge, stayed in Hanover for the fall, and then set off for Australia with my sister and her Australian-American boyfriend in search of a little organic farming. After three weeks in the vicinity of the not-so-exciting or populated Australian capital of Canberra, my companions flew back to the USA. I left the mainland for Tasmania, the “Apple Isle” off the Australia’s southwest coast.

Tasmania’s weather is like California’s—the central valley is dry, hot, and grows much of the food. The island is also beautiful—vineyards are common, large areas of wilderness are preserved, and there are mountains that get snow year-round.

Tasmania is also like New Hampshire and Vermont, in that the people can generally be classified by their relationship to the environment. The “logger-types” harvest trees for their livelihood, supplying much of Australia and the world. The “greenies,” on the other hand, love to protect the wilderness areas from over-logging and over-recreating and restore landscapes. Despite these opposing goals, both groups are doing very well. There are many tree farms and ample logging opportunities, while 36% of the land area is reserved in some way for no or very little development.

I fell on the “greenies” side of things. I paid about $30 USD for a booklet containing descriptions and contact information for well over 3,000 farms in Australia that are organic or organic-minded (i.e. aiming not to use sprays and pesticides, use of  Permaculture methods, or just trying to live a more sustainable lifestyle). After choosing Strathewan for the variety of tasks and its Spanish-speaking hosts, I coordinated a starting date and potential length of stay. For four weeks, Suzanne and Alvaro hosted me through a program called Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF, pronounced like a dog’s “woof”).   The exchange is partially cultural and partially skill-based; the WWOOFer works 4-6 hours a day in exchange for room and board.

I stayed in a one-room cottage about 100 yards away from the main farmhouse where we ate breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner together. Our foods were all local, and all tasty. Yogurt came from the neighbor’s cows, oatmeal came from oat grains we rolled (flattened) in a mill, and our homemade breads involved lots of random but healthy seeds. We ate Tahini made from unhulled sesame seeds (without their shells removed), which tasted the same, but retained the shells’ many nutrients.

And celery. Did you know celery can actually have a flavor? And that almost the whole stalk is supposed to be green? We ate real celery, not the bland blanched stuff with negative calories that necessitates peanut butter or ranch dip.

I spent many of my afternoons churning compost and other nutrient rich, naturally-found ingredients into the soil. I did my fair share of weeding. I used the shredder, which made yard waste and banana peels into items that compost more quickly. I used a hoe to dig up thistles and ragwort (the latter is apparently deadly to cows). I helped fix the electric fence and move the cows from paddock to paddock. I harvested carrots, artichokes, raspberries, gem squash, cucumber, tomatoes, strawberries, green peppers, and more! And in the most fascinating of all these experiences and revelations, I learned to put my water to many uses. Since all water came from rain, and it rained only once during my stay, I collected water in the shower before it got hot and used it to pre-fill the laundry machine. The plants were watered with non-freshwater.

I was also lucky enough to learn some great nutrition tricks from my hosts. For example, a grain plus a legume (bean) makes a complete protein: rice and beans! And since your body takes a couple days to process animal protein, alternating meat protein days with non-meat protein days helps the digestive system. I learned that sweet potato and kale both contain an absurdly large number of nutrients and are great for the body.

For those looking to experience different ways of living more sustainably, WWOOFing with multiple hosts is a great way to learn a variety of theories and practical skills about better farming, eating, and living habits. The more accessible and mainstream we can make sustainable living habits, the more people will catch on, and the better off we will all be for it

For those interested in pursuing a similar experience, other awesome cultural exchange networks include SERVAS International and CouchSurfing.com.

The climate debate is no longer centered on the question, “Is it happening?” but rather “What are the specific effects going to be?,” “Are we seeing some of these effects already?,” and “At what rate do we have to curb our greenhouse gas emissions to stabilize the climate for future generations?” James Hansen, Bush’s top climate modeler and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York offered the following insight earlier this year:

“How long have we got? We have to stabilize emissions of carbon dioxide within a decade, or temperatures will warm by more than one degree. That will be warmer than it has been for half a million years, and many things could become unstoppable. If we are to stop that, we cannot wait for new technologies like capturing emissions from burning coal. We have to act with what we have. This decade, that means focusing on energy efficiency and renewable sources of energy that do not burn carbon. We don’t have much time left.”

The urgency of Hansen’s claim is based on the relatively recent development of more sophisticated methods of modeling the breakup of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. These new models recognize that ice sheets are dynamic systems, not big ice cubes that simply melt from the outside in. Specifically, they account for the observation that ice sheet breakup is due, in part, to the creation of large crevasses by pools of water tunneling down to the bedrock or ocean below.

Some of the consequences these models predict are very scary, and, if Hansen has the timeframe right, it is clear that the 2008 elections will be of critical importance for climate stability. It is on this premise that Eban Goodstein, Hunter Lovins, David Orr, and others have started Focus the Nation, a grassroots initiative to foster general awareness of climate issues and to bring energy policy to the forefront of upcoming elections (visit www.focusthenation.org).

The goal of Focus the Nation is to create a day of national climate awareness, akin to Earth Day, on January 31, 2008. On this day, which is purposefully situated between the New Hampshire and Super Tuesday primaries, a huge symposium will be held at Lewis and Clark University, and ideally several satellite symposia at other institutions, at which students and faculty will ask political hopefuls and current officials questions about energy policy and plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Also, the Focus the Nation website will post an online questionnaire regarding people’s general policy priorities. The hope is that it will attract mass participation and that the results will demonstrate nationwide concern about climate issues.

Participating campuses are encouraged not only to host symposia or hold events of their own, but also to start organizing a series of discussions leading up to January 31 that involve students and faculty across departments. These discussions hope to enrich people’s understanding of climate issues and enable them to pose more sophisticated questions to politicians.

Focus the Nation is now building a support base by having a series of kickoff conferences around the country. The first was held at Middlebury back in September 2006. There were approximately 100 people there, including Denis Rydjeski and Betsy Eldredge, good friends of Sustainable Dartmouth and leaders in the local chapter of the Sierra Club. The conference was informal; people were sitting in groups of four to five at small tables, and alternated between listening to speakers give presentations and brainstorming in small groups.

For example, Eban Goodstein delivered an Al Gore style lecture on the science of climate change. He started with an explanation of the Earth’s energy balance and the greenhouse effect. Then he discussed the significance and implications of historical temperature data. Finally, he demonstrated the potential impacts of global warming pollution, covering everything from the breakup of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets and the collapse of the Gulf Stream to the global migration of species and impacts on agriculture. The presentation is available on the Focus the Nation website in video, audio, and Powerpoint.

Surprisingly, since the project is primarily directed towards institutions of higher learning, there was a very large contingent of teachers from secondary schools at the conference. They were unquestionably one of the most outspoken and enthusiastic sub-groups present. Most of their questions and comments concerned what they could do at their respective schools to promote sustainable practices. In the final brainstorming session, they split off as a unit and appeared to have a fruitful discussion. Though their audiences by-and-large cannot vote, these teachers can play a huge role in reducing the environmental impact of their schools and fostering awareness in today’s youth.

Overall, from a college student’s perspective, the conference generated a lot of excitement, but did not create many concrete take-back-to-campus ideas. One could have guessed that this would be the case—after all, each campus is a little different, so the potential success of any given approach is likely not universal. However, a big part of the discussion, and rightly so, was concerned with how students can effectively facilitate inter-campus communication. To this end, Chris Klabes made a connection with Will Duggan of the Better Days Alliance (http://betterdaysalliance.org), and they will be collaborating on developing and publicizing a blog that will facilitate communication between campuses. Hopefully, this blog will indeed be established, and student interest will ensure it makes it off the ground. It is all too common for students to only be intermittently enthusiastic and proactive about maintaining inter-collegiate lines of communication. That is not to understate the potential of successful multi-campus collaboration. Indeed, students can learn from what has worked and what has failed at other campuses so they won’t have to continually reinvent the wheel.

One immediate criticism of the project in general is that it is terminal. It builds up to a single day, to one big event, and then…ends. Sure, if we can convince political candidates that enough people care about climate change, they’ll probably incorporate progressive energy initiatives into their campaign platforms. However, these promises will be meaningless unless continual pressure is placed on the politicians once they are in office. This criticism is valid, but its validity does not mean that the project is entirely ill-conceived or that it won’t be worthwhile. Creating awareness and garnering interest are always important, and certainly the students running Focus the Nation events will try to channel the momentum generated by the event, be it by facilitating involvement in the primaries or by putting pressure on their own college administrations to adapt to climate change realities.

So what should we do at Dartmouth to support Focus the Nation? Organizing periodic discussions leading up to January 2008 would be a waste of time and energy. It’s not something students would be terribly excited about, and professors would probably spend half the time discussing the merits and pitfalls of the project itself. Furthermore, the amount of new, useful insight that would be gained through such an exercise would be minimal. Instead, we should focus our efforts on making as many students as we can aware of the importance and growing salience of climate issues and on encouraging students to fill out the questionnaire on Focus the Nation’s website. Our specific projects should include doing each of the following:

1. Host an event on January 31, 2008. It doesn’t have to be huge—it could be a panel discussion with political candidates and faculty, or if that doesn’t pan out, one with just faculty. Not only would it be interesting in its own right, but it would put Focus the Nation on the map at Dartmouth.

2. Publicize the symposium at Lewis and Clark. This symposium is going to be podcasted, and, while I doubt too many students will actually take the time to listen to it, we can at least draw attention to the fact that campuses nationwide are dedicating the day to addressing the importance of climate issues.

3. Table with computers on January 31 to get people to fill out the questionnaire.
www.focusthenation.org

We have taken great strides in recent years toward making Dartmouth more sustainable. Elections are not too far around the corner; now we need to focus some of our efforts on trying to change policy at the state and national levels.

Since leaving Dartmouth, I have been lucky enough to find regular nine-to-five jobs that pay me to help save the planet.

Granted, I don’t get paid that much, and I actually do a lot of the same things at work that those working for the Man and his money do––working with Outlook express calendars, making project budgets in Excel, updating websites, and filling out timesheets. Non-profit do-gooding in action is usually not any more fun day-to-day than any other office job, and when I get wrapped up in those details it can also be just as unsatisfying as any other job. But there is one simple thing that makes a huge difference: when I think about the larger implications of my work, I’m contributing to solutions, not perpetuating problems. And that is satisfying. In fact, for me, it is non-negotiable.

But I didn’t always feel this way. And, as is the case with most Dartmouth alums, my experience in Hanover played a huge part in shaping my life and values.

I’m an ’05, and during my years at Dartmouth, I learned the art of eco-activism on campus. I was an environmental studies major, anthropology minor, worked on the organic farm, and ran the Green Magazine for a number of years. I pushed to get a sustainability coordinator at Dartmouth (dreams DO come true, although Merkel has since departed… sigh), co-founded the Big Green Bus, did a lot of local food project work, and didn’t eat meat (unless it was local and sustainably produced––I liked to call myself a localtarian). I was a Panarchist, played ultimate, and wore the “farm” t-shirt with pride. I took eco-mugs and forks to dining halls, and when I really felt like touting my crunchiness, I wore corduroy pants with patches down the side while playing the spoons barefoot handing out samples of local yellow watermelons on frat row. You get the idea.

Now I live in Oakland, California in a small co-op where we have house meetings, buy local (and mostly organic) food in bulk, and share food and chores. I wash my clothes in cold water, use compact fluorescents, get many of my favorite clothes from free-piles, and meditate regularly. I bike to work most every day and work for Global Footprint Network, an organization dedicated to advancing the Ecological Footprint and making ecological limits central to decision making everywhere (see www.footprintnetwork.org for more information, it’s a great organization for those of you who like to see cool models for saving the planet).

Most of the time I can laugh at this picture of myself that seems absurd to so many people in our country, my family and many friends from Dartmouth included, and can understand that in many ways the stereotypes about people like me are true. But I must admit that I often feel a bit of sadness when people label me as something extreme and leftist and other, because I see these “out there” life choices to be much more sane and healthy than the “norm” in our consumer culture.

I see my way of life not as radical or crunchy or leftist, but as healthy, meaningful, and deeply satisfying in a way that my Midwestern suburban upbringing was not. And that’s my personal anecdotal evidence that keeps me moving further in this direction. What feels satisfying, what feels meaningful, what brings me joy, what feels true––these are my compasses. And when I think about all the unhealthy systems, cultures, and institutions that define our society––our neoclassical growth-based economy, our reactive and non-preventative health care system, the obesity epidemic and corn-based food economy, our fossil energy addiction, our consumer throw-away culture, our education system that teaches children to pass tests without teaching them how to learn––when I think about these broken systems that guide our choices (and our lack of choices), that are throwing our minds, bodies, and planet so wildly out of balance, I feel a very deep sadness. And so I’m drawn to understanding and healing these systems that so profoundly shape our lives.

But as I said, it turns out that I didn’t always feel this way. Recently a friend of mine from high school, one of the few other do-gooders from my class, moved into my co-op. We were talking about activism of some sort in our kitchen one day and he reminded me that in high school I didn’t care about the environment at all.

I was borderline flabbergasted. Memory, as anyone who has taken a psychology class knows, has quite a bit of artistic license with how we recollect, or recreate, our past. But I was convinced that, surely, I had really cared about the state of the world in high school. I watched the Discovery Channel! No, my friend reminded me, I thought that we’d find technologies to fix everything when we needed to and it wasn’t worth wasting our time trying to save the planet.

This was fascinating news to me. It turns out that I am not a native do-gooder, but a convert, a born-again tree-hugger. In many ways, it makes sense––I have painted myself thus far as a classic eco-freak, but I also grew up in suburban St. Louis in a big house, with lots of meat (none of it local), shopped at J-Crew, was a debutante, ran the literary magazine, and never once did anything with the storm-drain stencils. Sometimes I look back on that life and feel like I escaped from something that just never felt right. But how? And how did I become a case study of successful environmental evangelism?

A great deal of thought on this question brought me to realize that most of the important eco-insights and influences I’ve had in my life unfolded in my time at Dartmouth.

I remember the day in my freshman-year Native American religion class when Professor Chris Jocks talked about the influence of time spent in nature as a young child, and I realized the profound importance of my dad taking me out fishing. Another day in that same class I realized that religion didn’t have to be about guilt and commandments (I went to Catholic school), but that it could be about gratitude and respect for the life-affirming.

The accumulation of these epiphanies led to a moment in that same Moore hall basement classroom, when I first felt a clear and simple purpose in my life: to give back to that which has given me life. (Unfortunately, given the current state of affairs and how seldom this is actually done, this is a full time job).

In the environmental studies library with Richard Howarth after his Ecological Economics class, playing with big picture thoughts and scheming ways to redefine “value” in our economy; learning about the Kula, a shell exchange system in Polynesia, in Kurt Endicott’s Oceania class and realizing that there are functional economies in the world that not growth-based; learning the value of caring teachers, I gained a greater sense of possibility.

Reading Ecologies of the Heart by E.N. Anderson, in a class on Humans and the Environment, and learning one man’s theory about why people like high-school me don’t care about the planet, I understood that education is the primary solution to such problems.

Studying the ecological collapse of Polynesian islands, I learned the ramifications of living beyond our ecological means. The three months I spent interning in Dublin, Ireland, living off a grant from Career Services, reading more than I ever did in a Dartmouth term, and learning about core ideas that are foundations of my life and work now—natural capitalism, systems theory, biomimicry, voluntary simplicity, I gained knowledge to act on this urgent sense of purpose.

The journey was not solely intellectual. Once, walking through the pines from the River dorms down to the river, I noticed a tree leaning so far over the road that it looked like it was going to fall, its balance and strength entirely in its roots. The tree became my personal symbol for balance throughout college, and I would go visit it and those pines whenever I needed to find mine again.

I can offer only a partial list of these formative and revelatory experiences: learning yoga in the incredibly cheap and wonderful classes offered by the college, and being blown away by my teacher when he spoke of the idea of an internal landscape, a profound way in which the environment is not a separate and external idea. Learning the smell of dirt at the farm; experiencing unbelievably powerful lessons of putting your hands in the dirt with intention, and watching life do its thing.

Listening to Scott Stokoe talk about alternative ways of living; discovering that there are options for how to live your life that aren’t covered by Career Services; that deep satisfaction comes from little things like real food and real community. Taking a crazy idea like buying a bus and converting it to run on waste vegetable oil, and doing it. Experiencing grassroots education and the power of leading-by-example first-hand. Living with people and learning to function as one organism.

This list could go on for days, and I think you’ve gotten a fair sense for how much Dartmouth helped me discover what matters to me, what excites my intellect and passions at the same time, what motivates my desire to learn and be engaged in my life and work. Learning about the complex problems of our world, learning how we can address them without perpetuating them, and learning that I could refuse to live and work in a way that doesn’t help move us towards what we most commonly call “sustainability” ––these were the invaluable lessons that I got for a steal at $40,000 a year.

I tell you my story not because I am some example of how to live (though as I said, I do think we could all use a little more community and bicycling and local produce in our lives). Rather, I tell you my story as a tale of the power of freedom and access to real education in creating positive change in ourselves and in the world.

To be that nostalgic alum for a moment, there are so many amazing people, classes, resources, and opportunities that Dartmouth has given me and all of you as well. Dartmouth gives us a chance to think big-picture, figure out where our passions lie, and find work that we love doing. It provides access to some invaluable outside-the-box education, and it creates opportunities for us to begin transforming ourselves into what we want to become.

The only truly sustainable solutions to our global environmental and social justice problems are much deeper than carbon credits and recycling. In my admittedly youthful and perhaps Californicated opinion, while good technologies, integrated solutions, and even some band-aid fixes for climate change are needed, we also need to facilitate some major value shifts in our culture. We must redefine our economy to value growth in happiness and consciousness, not profit and consumption. We need to reclaim our time and create personal balance so we can address our planetary and social imbalances more effectively, and we need to find authentic ways to care about our planet, based in respect and gratitude, not in guilt and fear.

You have a chance in your time at Dartmouth to lay some important foundations for living a conscious and authentic life. And a world filled with more people sharing this foundation would not only be a happier world, but also a more sustainable world. So please, live it up in that small town in the woods, and let it get the best of you.

A little over a year ago, coinciding with the administration’s creation of the Sustainability Office, students, grad students, and some administration members from different environmentally concerned campus groups decided to create an inter-organizational forum for sustainable action, called Sustainable Dartmouth. The origins of SD, or Sustainable Dartmouth, remain steeped in ancient folklore while its not-so-terrifying form is comprised of the head of the Sustainability Office, tail of the Environmental Studies Division of the DOC, thorax of The Farm, and appendages from ECO, DAWG (Dartmouth Animal Welfare Group), and the Green Magazine. Seen to portend a greener Big Green, Sustainable Dartmouth was unleashed upon the Dartmouth administration and campus.

In the following year, many smaller green initiatives regarding policy changes have fallen under SD’s large, hemp-fiber belt. Notable student endeavors included last year’s “Carry Your Trash Around for a Week” week (or as I preferred to call it—notwithstanding the derisive satisfaction of my friends—the “There is No Away” campaign) and the Sustainable Move-Out in the Spring and the Sustainable Move-In Sale this past Fall.

Aided in great part by twenty different student volunteers, widespread campus support from individual to organizational donations, and ten volunteers from the local Sierra Club chapter, the Move-Out succeeded beyond expectations. It kept many re-usable items out of the end-of-term waste-stream and provided students with an alternative to shopping Wal-Mart and having to buy at much higher costs newly manufactured furniture, appliances, electronics, and papier mâché Star Wars figurines, which they would probably throw “away” anyway after graduating. Though many other college campuses have similar waste reduction programs, by and large they contract out to professionals and local organizations to run their programs; we preferred doing the dirty work ourselves, keeping this Move-Out student run. Believing in the sheer practicality of recycling perfectly reusable items on campus and reducing unnecessary, costly waste, SD and volunteers adopted this yearlong project. Three giant 8’ x 40’ x 10’ storage trailers filled to capacity with the donations suppling the items for sale. Over 90 percent of the items were sold, raking in enough money to cover the costs of the sale with nearly $7,000 remaining in profit. The sale also provided hundreds of bags of clothing to local charities.

Working out the logistics with the Office of Residential Life, Facilities, Operations, & Management, the Outdoor Programs Office, L&M Construction, the Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO), the Environmental Studies Division of the Dartmouth Outing Club, the Sustainability Office, the Office of Community Development, and community volunteers through the Upper Valley Chapter of the Sierra Club and COVER, SD ran drop off points in the common rooms of every dormitory on campus. Affinity and Greek houses also participated, both by donating and by volunteering as groups to help organize the flow of donated items. During the spring collection process we managed to salvage hundreds of books; nearly a hundred refrigerators; scores of couches, tables, chairs, and other furniture; and, of course, papier mâché Star Wars figurines.

Now there is the question of what to do with the money that was raised. Current ideas include establishing a revolving fund for student-initiated projects to make Dartmouth more sustainable and… what? If you have an idea or are interested in reusing waste at Dartmouth, changing the keg policy, carbon neutrality (getting the Administration to pledge to reduce and offset Dartmouth’s carbon output to achieve zero net carbon emissions), or just increasing awareness of environmental issues that are important to you, keep in mind that there really are no exclusively environmental issues anymore. The environment is never unrelated to social justice, healthcare, education, popular culture, or politics.

A significant theme of many of our initiatives has been to reduce waste. As college students, waste reduction is an issue very much within our control. Minor modifications to the way we eat in the dining halls and what we choose to buy and throw can all belie the “There Is No Alternative,” frenzied consumptive habits dominating American culture. Sustainable Dartmouth has not been laboring in solitude on this issue by any means. As you have probably noticed, two highly visible efforts have been carried out by the Sustainable Dining Committee under the auspices of the Sustainability Office. Food Court has been separating waste to increase the amount of food packaging that can be recycled and has begun composting, rather than discarding, uneaten food behind the scenes. At Homeplate, students have been doing most of the sorting. The compost goes to a large facility and is currently being applied in some of Dartmouth’s landscaping. The eventual hope for the compost is that it will be used as fertilizer for growing crops. However, at present the level of plastic contamination is too high, and so the compost is not yet ready for cultivation. Another active group is the Sustainable Dining Club, also organized by the Sustainability Office, which issued Tupperware and silverware. The current membership and activity in this sustainability program has been optimal; typically almost all of the large Tupperware containers are used at the end of each meal time.

SD’s plans for the future of the Move-Out are to integrate it fully into the year’s events and increase participation. With continued support, we look forward to the process only getting smoother and more efficient at reducing waste and raising money. And it would be good if the sale’s items get kitschier each passing year; no one can resist kitsch. Look for the collection this coming spring, and hold on to donation-worthy items instead of throwing them out. Many ideas for expanding the sale have been proposed so there’s plenty of opportunity to get involved with Sustainable Dartmouth. Just blitz ‘Sustain’ or come to meetings at Casque and Gauntlet at 8pm on Tuesdays.

The talk was based on a book, “Natural Capitalism,” which Amory Lovins wrote in collaboration with Paul Hawkin and Hunter Lovins back in 1999. The book looks through the lenses of economics and business at the possibilities for improving resource efficiency and quality of life. By combining these perspectives, “Natural Capitalism” encourages a radical shift from modern production to a new, “natural” capitalism. Normally, economics books and business books completely ignore good engineering or the environment, while environmental books idealistically, and foolishly, ignore economic realities; thus, the integrationist approach of natural capitalism is quite exceptional.

Best of all, the book is about how to increase the quality of life. Most economics books are dry, and most environmental books are depressing, but this book is at once forceful, optimistic, and practical. The idea: by changing outdated economic and engineering paradigms, we can substantially increase resource productivity, and reduce waste and inefficiency. The net result will be happier, longer, wealthier lives—and all with more sustainable industry.

“Natural Capitalism” begins by denouncing current financial systems as not truly capitalist: “Capitalism, as practiced, is a financially profitable, non-sustainable aberration in human development. What might be called ‘industrial capitalism’ does not fully conform to its own accounting principles. It liquidates its capital and calls it income. It neglects to assign any value to the largest stocks of capital it employs—the natural resources and living systems, as well as the social and cultural systems that are the basis of human capital.”

The book essentially accuses current capitalism of the biggest accounting fraud in history. “Several recent assessments have estimated that biological services flowing directly into society… are worth at least $36 trillion annually. That figure is close to the annual gross world product of approximately $39 trillion—a striking measure of the value of natural capital to the economy.” This is a glaring omission, and one that pervades every business and politician and economist’s world-view. And it is only half the actual accounting blunder, as the book lists two kinds of ignored capital: natural capital and human capital. The authors cite, “The World Bank’s 1995 Wealth Index,” “…found the sum value of human capital to be three times greater than all the financial and manufactured capital reflected on global balance sheets.” Oops. In the 2001 talk, Mr. Lovins pointed out that, “Simply because of scale, these numbers are very approximate. But the value of these services is not zero. It is much better to be approximately right than to be precisely wrong.”

Those numbers are sobering, but the book is optimistic. As the authors point out, this optimism is based on the fact that it is bad accounting which leads to inefficient resource allocation and tremendous waste. Fix the accounting system, and market forces will take care of the waste by themselves, leading to four, ten, or even one hundred times the resource efficiency—economist jargon for better lives. The wastefulness of the Western world’s accounting practices is a tragedy, a result of a century of soulless economists and the political and business attitudes resulting from their misconceptions; however, waste is also a measure of the potential for opportunity, of the room for improvement.

And boy is today’s capitalism wasteful. “In the United States, the materials used by the metabolism of industry amount to more than twenty times every citizen’s weight per day—more than one million pounds per American per year.” I don’t know about you, but I have trouble even conceptualizing one million pounds of waste made for me. Where did it go? Why was it needed? Obviously societies do not need to use one million pounds per person-year, so what accounts for this?

“Natural Capitalism” has the answer, “The present industrial system is, practically speaking, a couch potato: It eats too much junk food and gets insufficient exercise. In its late maturity, industrial society runs on life-support systems that require enormous heat and pressure, are petrochemically dependent and materials-intensive, and require large flows of toxic and hazardous chemicals.” Although comparing modern society to a fat lazy man eating cheesy poofs and reclining on a couch seems hokey, it also seems to fit. One example of the metaphor making sense is when the authors write, “…the U.S. economy remains astoundingly inefficient: It has been estimated that only 6 percent of its vast flows of materials actually end up in products… the ratio of waste to the durable products that constitute material wealth may be closer to one hundred to one.” That number measures waste, but it signifies pervasive sloth and apathy in industry. Although I’m becoming repetitive, it’s worth reiterating that sloth and apathy in industry result from the absence of market incentives caused by not accounting for human and natural capital.

The authors also point out that resulting industrial waste leads to destruction of the already undervalued capital. Because environments and people are not considered parts of the capitalist equation, “…industrial ‘empty calories’ end up as pollution, acid rain, and greenhouse gases, harming environmental, social, and financial systems.” The longer capitalism remains “industrial” capitalism, the greater the total destruction of the capital on which we all depend to survive.

The authors argue that the world is ripe for a whole new industrial revolution, “In the next century, as human population doubles and the resources available per person drop by one-half to three-fourths, a remarkable transformation of industry and commerce can occur.” They point out that the first industrial revolution resulted from the creation of market systems that efficiently created and reinvested in human-made capital, and ask what sort of revolution might occur if markets accounted for environment services and human capital. After all, the industrial revolution saw hundredfold efficiency improvements: “What took two hundred workers in 1770 could be done by a single spinner in the British textile industry by 1812.”

The authors are not simply being optimists; they have good reason to think that the world is on the verge of a second industrial revolution. Here’s their thought process: “At the beginning of the industrial revolution, labor was overworked and relatively scarce… while global stocks of natural capital were abundant and unexploited.” The scarcity of labor stimulated innovation and revolutionary progress. The authors point out that times have changed and a second revolution is overdue, “But today the situation has been reversed: After two centuries of rises in labor productivity, the liquidation of natural resources at their extraction cost rather than their replacement value, and the exploitation of living systems as if they were free, infinite, and in perpetual renewal, it is people who have become an abundant resource, while nature is becoming disturbingly scarce.” In several industries this reversal is already complete: “Today, our continuing progress is restricted not by the number of fishing boats but by the decreasing numbers of fish; not by the power of pumps but by the depletion of aquifers; not by the number of chainsaws but by the disappearance of primary forests.” Market forces, now more than ever, drive industry to continually innovate to increase resource efficiency.

The authors argue that these innovations are building on—and reinforcing—a new business paradigm that values all four types of capital (industrial, financial, human, and environmental). In their view the change in values is a result of four influential ideas: one, radical resource productivity gains are possible and often immediately attainable; two, imitation of biological systems can cheapen industrial systems and eliminate toxins; three, a service and flow economy is more efficient (and more lucrative) than a purchase and disposal economy; and four, reinvestment in natural capital, the most undervalued capital today, is both good for the planet and increasingly lucrative. After being explained, each of these ideas seems commonsensical and obvious, rather than radical or revolutionary, and the authors even take the extra time to offer multiple examples of each principle reshaping the world of business.

Resource productivity is obviously a good thing; it seems ridiculously redundant to argue that for businesses more resource productivity is good. Surely everyone knows more is better. Who wouldn’t like more juice per kilowatt hour? Or a little more building per board foot? But the point made in “Natural Capitalism” is not that efficiency is preferable, but that radical improvement in resource productivity is within reach—and is happening. The point is that businesses which go looking for radical ways to reengineer themselves to cut waste and cost usually succeed.

But the increase in resource productivity does not simply mean more stuff for less environmental damage. As the authors point out, “Using resources more effectively has three significant benefits: It slows resource depletion at one end of the value chain, lowers pollution at the other end, and provides a basis to increase worldwide employment with meaningful jobs.” That is, every time physical stuff is used more efficiently, the demand for human capital—i.e. the number of available jobs—goes up.

A $500,000 physical example of dramatic gains in resource productivity was built between 1982 and 1984 on the Front Range in Colorado. Called the Rocky Mountain Institute, it conserves ninety-nine percent of heating energy, ninety percent of electricity, and more than half its water consumption. These energy savings also mean cost reductions: the design saves about $19/day. The savings paid for all the extra energy-related building and design costs within ten months. The authors do not, however, dwell on the technical fixes that made this possible. Instead, their focus is on the engineering and business perspectives that make it possible; that’s where the other three principles come in.

Each of the other principles is a specific change in business paradigms which results in better engineering, efficiency, and sustainability. The imitation of biological systems—biomimicry—contains tremendous potential. Spiders make silk with strength properties comparable to steel (which is made in high temperature, high pressure, toxin-producing processes). Crustaceans make shells as strong as our best ceramics—and they do it from seawater. Many of our systems have no biological equivalents, but many do, and there are gains possible in those areas by taking a leaf from nature’s book.

The idea to service and flow economies is that when the focus shifts from ownership of a material good to the consistent provision of a service, industries become more competitive, successful, and environmental all at once. For example, an air conditioning company has begun to rent a service called “coolth,” rather than selling air-conditioners. Now consumers do not need to wade through endless statistics on energy efficiency and environmental impact in order to pick the most efficient air conditioning machine. Since the industry now has to cover all energy expenses and material and disposal costs, including toxic disposals costs, these externalities are all reflected in a simple rental price (dollars per coolth per month) and the company faces a continual incentive to innovate toward more efficient, long-lasting models, while the most environmental machine becomes the one the consumer prefers.

From this review it may be easy to suspect this book of being over-optimistic, of having too much cheer based on too little fact, but that is because this review quotes only the first chapter in a fifteen-chapter book. It was not possible, however, to summarize the whole book; it is truly encyclopedic in scope and depth. For every thesis in the intro there are entire chapters dedicated to supporting case-studies.

This book is not a flash in a pan; it and its authors are and will remain central to a large and growing effort to become efficient and sustainable. Even at Dartmouth, these authors have been making regular appearances for years. As noted, Amory Lovins gave a very well-attended presentation last fall; he was also here to give a talk back in 2001, and will surely be back again soon. Hunter Lovins actually taught classes here way back in 1982, though now she teaches sustainability at the first business school to have an accredited sustainability MBA program.

In the words of Edward Woodward, the chairman of DuPont, “Corporations that take such opportunities seriously will do very well… while those that don’t won’t be a problem, because ultimately they won’t be around.”

Carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels are the primary contributor to global warming, and the United States alone is responsible for over 25 percent of total carbon emissions worldwide. According to President Bush’s climate modeler, James Hansen, who is also the lead climate scientist and director of the NASA Goddard institute for Space Science, we as a society have a ten-year window to curb carbon emissions before we hit a global warming “tipping point,” after which it will become impossible to ever prevent any of the consequences listed above. Fortunately, many immediate solutions already exist in addressing this challenge. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the United States can cut global warming-causing pollution by at least 60 percent by 2050 through four main strategies: boosting energy efficiency, building more fuel-efficient cars, switching to renewable energy and biofuels, and scrubbing carbon from the industrial production and processing of carbon. The NRDC reports that boosting energy efficiency could account for 41 percent of that target reduction; building and choosing to purchase better cars could account for 24 percent; switching to renewable energy sources and biofuels could account for 19 percent; and scrubbing carbon from fossil fuels could account for 16 percent. Unfortunately, a critical element is missing from this action plan: political will.

This lack of political will often stems from a misunderstanding of the issue due to a lack of awareness in conjunction with apathy. Politicians will not take action unless their constituents frame the issue in their interests and demand immediate action. Students are a strong constituent body and have great political influence. They have been taking the lead in the global warming challenge through educating others, putting grassroots pressure on local and national politicians, and promoting recycling, energy efficiency, and “green” (energy efficient) construction on campuses. For example, after students agreed to a voluntary increase in tuition, the Board of Trustees of Whitman College committed to purchasing twenty percent of the school’s energy from renewable sources. In 1999, Tufts University became the first institution of higher education to nationally commit to reduction goals for carbon emissions. According to the Yale Daily, “Yale has pledged to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to 10% below 1990 levels by the year 2020. It also struck a deal with the residential colleges one year ago, pledging to purchase energy from environmentally-friendly sources if students could reduce their power usage by 15% over the following 3 years.” The University of Washington, Evergreen State College, and Western Washington University all receive 100 percent of their energy from clean, renewable sources. While each of these initiatives have been successful on their own, each and every campus could benefit from increased communication with one another, hopefully fostering multi-campus environmental projects around collective goals.

In an effort to unite this creativity and activism among campuses across the United States, the Energy Action Coalition—a coalition of nearly two dozen national and international environmental groups, including the Sierra Student Coalition (SSC)—recently launched a project entitled the Campus Climate Challenge. Their goal is to obtain a commitment from one thousand colleges to collectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions from their campuses by 80 percent by the year 2050. This level was originally called for in the Youth Declaration, a document created by students during the United Nations Conference of the Parties on the Kyoto Protocol in 2005. Once a college or university has signed on to the Campus Climate Challenge, it is the students’ responsibility to develop a goal and action plan specific to their campus and its needs and abilities.

Last year, Sustainable Dartmouth, the umbrella group for student environmental groups on campus, took its first step in helping to build the largest student environmental movement in the United States and Canada by signing Dartmouth College onto the Campus Climate Challenge. What this entails is the work of a group of devoted students to the creation of a campaign with specific long-term, intermediate, and short-term goals that could range anywhere from bringing the College into compliance with the Kyoto Protocol (a 7 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels) to buying a certain percentage of Dartmouth’s energy needs from clean, renewable sources and improving energy efficiency. Once goals have been established, the collective work of the Dartmouth student body, faculty, administration, and community will develop an action plan involving four main strategies: energy efficiency and conservation, clean energy use, green building, and campus transportation improvements. Once goals and means to achieve them are agreed upon and put in place, it is crucial to take Dartmouth’s message to stop global warming and promote a clean energy future beyond the campus to build coalitions with other colleges and universities and to educate local and national political leaders.

Two weeks ago, several Sustainable Dartmouth members participated in an all-day workshop led by Maura Cowley (Northeast Representative for the SSC) that took the students through step-by-step campaign strategies to help facilitate the brainstorming and development of long-term, intermediate, and short-term energy goals for the College. Besides discussing the Campus Climate Challenge, Maura covered basic leadership skills such as how to identify potential allies and challengers and how to recruit and maintain participants in a long-term project. Workshop feedback was positive and several follow-up meetings have taken place to work out how to best approach global warming from both an educational and action-oriented angle. A member of Sustainable Dartmouth is now responsible for maintaining contact with Maura as the goals and action plan take shape.

While the Campus Climate Challenge is a student-led and student-run project, Sustainable Dartmouth is working with Dartmouth’s Sustainability Office and Sustainability Coordinator, Jim Merkel, to help develop specific strategies to achieve the outlined goals.

Dartmouth’s participation in the Campus Climate Challenge demonstrates its recognition that global warming is an immediate problem with dire consequences that transcend geographical, ethnic, political, and socio-economic boundaries, and that through a united, grassroots effort, students can make a difference and shape an energy future based on clean, renewable sources of energy, efficiency, and sustainability. The Energy Action Coalition has stated, “Our efforts will educate students and administrators about the dangers of climate change and the importance of taking action to quickly transition off of fossil fuels. And they’ll prove that we can make clean energy a reality, as some of the largest institutions in society take steps that our government and politicians aren’t yet taking.”

Students that are interested in learning more or getting involved in the Campus Climate Challenge can visit their website: www.ClimateChallenge.org or blitz Sustain@dartmouth.edu.

“How long have we got? We have to stabilize emissions of carbon dioxide within a decade, or temperatures will warm by more than one degree.That will be warmer than it has been for half a million years, and many things could become unstoppable. If we are to stop that, we cannot wait for new technologies like capturing emissions from burning coal.We have to act with what we have. This decade, that means focusing on energy efficiency and renewable sources of energy that do not burn carbon. We don’t have much time left.”

The urgency of Hansen’s claim is based on the relatively recent development of more sophisticated methods of modeling the breakup of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. These new models recognize the ice sheets as dynamic systems as opposed to big ice cubes that just simply melt from the outside in. Specifically, they account for the observation that ice sheet breakup is due, in part, to the creation of large crevasses by pools of water tunneling down to the bedrock or ocean below.

Some of the possibilities these models predict are very scary, and, if Hansen has the time frame right, it is clear that the 2008 elections will be of critical importance for climate stability. It is on this premise that Eban Goodstein, professor of economics at Lewis and Clark University, Hunter Lovins (see page 4 for a review of one of her books), David Orr, and others have started Focus the Nation, a grassroots initiative to foster general awareness of climate issues and to bring energy policy to the forefront of upcoming elections (see www.focusthenation.org).

The goal of Focus the Nation is to create a day of national climate awareness, akin to Earth Day, on January 31, 2008. On this day, which is purposefully situated between the New Hampshire and Super Tuesday primaries, a huge symposium will be held at Lewis and Clark, and ideally several satellite symposia at other institutions, at which students and faculty will ask political hopefuls and existing officials questions about energy policy and plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Also, the Focus the Nation website will make available on that day an online questionnaire regarding people’s general policy priorities. The hope is that it will attract mass participation and that the results will demonstrate nationwide concern about climate issues.

Participating campuses are encouraged not only to host symposia or hold events of their own, but also to start organizing a series of discussions leading up to Jan 31 that involve students and faculty across departments. The theory is that these discussions will enrich people’s understanding of climate issues and enable them to pose more sophisticated questions to politicians.

Focus the Nation is now building a support base by having a series of kickoff conferences around the country. The first was held at Middlebury College on Saturday, September 30. There were about 100-120 people there, including Denis Rydjeski and Betsy Eldredge, good friends of Sustainable Dartmouth and leaders in the local chapter of the Sierra Club. The conference was informal; people were sitting in groups of four to five at small tables, and alternated between listening to speakers give presentations and brainstorming in small groups.

For example, Eban Goodstein delivered an Al Gore-like lecture on the science of climate change. He started with an explanation of the Earth’s energy balance and the greenhouse effect. Then he discussed the significance and implications of historical temperature data. Finally, he demonstrated the potential impacts of global warming pollution, covering everything from the breakup of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets and the collapse of the Gulf Stream, to the global migration of species and impacts on agriculture. The presentation is available on the Focus the Nation website in video, audio, and powerpoint.

Surprisingly, since the project is primarily directed towards institutions of higher learning, there was a very large contingent of teachers from secondary schools at the conference. They were unquestionably one of the most outspoken and enthusiastic sub-groups present. Most of their questions and comments concerned what they could do at their respective schools to promote sustainable practices. In the final brainstorming session, they split off as a unit and appeared to have a fruitful discussion. Though their audiences by and large cannot vote, these teachers can play a huge role in reducing the environmental impact of their schools and fostering awareness in today’s youth.

All in all, from a college student’s perspective, the conference generated a lot of excitement, but did not create many concrete, take back to campus ideas. One could have guessed that this would be the case – after all, each campus is a little different, so the potential success of any given approach is likely not universal. However, a big part of the discussion, and rightly so, was how students can effectively facilitate inter-campus communication. To this end, Chris Klabes made a connection with Will Duggan of the Better Days Alliance (http://betterdaysalliance.org), and they will be collaborating on developing and publicizing a blog to be used specifically to provide for communication between campuses. Hopefully, this blog will be established, and student interest will ensure it makes it off the ground. It is all too common for students to only be intermittently enthusiastic and proactive about maintaining inter-collegiate lines of communication. That is not to understate the potential of successful multi-campus collaboration. Indeed, students can learn from what has worked and what has failed at other campuses so they won’t have to continually reinvent the wheel.

One immediate criticism of the project in general is that it is terminal. It builds up to a single day, to one big event, and then…ends. Sure, if we can convince political candidates that enough people care about climate change, they’ll probably incorporate progressive energy initiatives into their campaign platforms. However, these promises will be meaningless unless continual pressure is placed on the politicians once they are in office. This criticism is valid, but its validity does not mean that the project is entirely ill-conceived or that it won’t be worthwhile. Creating awareness and garnering interest are always important, and certainly the students running Focus the Nation events will try to channel the momentum generated by the event, be it by facilitating involvement in the primaries or by putting pressure on their own college administrations to adapt to climate change realities.

So what should we do at Dartmouth to support Focus the Nation? Organizing periodic discussions leading up to January 2008 would be a waste of time and energy. It’s not something students would be terribly excited about, and professors would probably spend half the time discussing the merits and pitfalls of the project itself. Furthermore, the amount of new, useful insight that would be gained through such an exercise would be minimal. Instead, we should focus our efforts on making as many students as we can aware of the importance and growing salience of climate issues and on encouraging students to fill out the questionnaire on Focus the Nation’s website. Our specific projects should include doing each of the following:

1. Host an event on Jan 31, 2008. It doesn’t have to be huge – it could be a panel discussion with political candidates and faculty, or if that doesn’t pan out, one with just faculty. Not only would it be interesting in its own right, but it would put Focus the Nation on the map at Dartmouth.

2. Publicize the symposium at Lewis and Clark. This symposium is going to be podcasted, and, while I doubt too many students will actually take the time to listen to it, we can at least draw attention to the fact that campuses nationwide are dedicating the day to addressing the importance of climate issues.

3. Table with computers on January 31 to get people to fill out the questionnaire.

Focus the Nation aside, we should get more politically involved in general. Elections are always not too far around the corner, and the Sierra Club has literature regarding the environmental track records of New Hampshire candidates that they would be more than willing to give us for distribution. We have taken great strides in recent years towards making Dartmouth more sustainable. Now we need to focus some of our efforts on trying to change policy at the state and national levels.

What is aquaculture? As defined by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), aquaculture is the “farming of aquatic organisms including fish, mollusks, crustaceans and aquatic plants. Farming implies some sort of intervention in the rearing process of organisms to enhance production, which includes stocking, feeding, protection from predators, etc. Farming also implies individual or corporate ownership of the stock being cultivated.” Aquaculture, the agriculture of oceans, lakes and rivers, is the most diverse of all animal food production sectors. This diversity arises from different methods employed in the farming of aquatic organisms. Aquaculture can be practiced in a wide range of salinities, such as freshwater, brackish, and marine, as well as temperatures, such as cold, temperate, and warm. Aquaculture can also be grouped according to production venue and intensity. Essentially that means the type of facility (ponds, cage culture, raceways, water re-circulating systems) used for farming, and the scale of production from small-scale, rural facilities to large-scale, industrial facilities.

Understanding aquaculture matters because aquaculture has the potential to become a practice that can supplement capture fisheries and contribute to feeding the world’s growing population. In 1970, only about 4 percent of the world’s seafood came from fish farms. Today 30 percent does. By 2030, according to United Nations estimate, less than half of the fish humans consume will come from wild stocks. While farming fish provides an alternative to the depletion of natural resources of fish, there is growing concern about certain practices of fish farming that introduce additional environmental pressures to natural systems. There are four central concerns: disease due to crowding, escape of farmed fish into natural systems, fish waste, and fish meal fed fish. This last concern is the biggest concern: high-value species that consume fish meal for feed. It takes about three pounds of fish oil and fish meal from herring, anchovies and sardines caught in the ocean, for example, to produce one pound of farmed salmon. Intuitively, farming fish should take the pressure off wildlife fisheries; however, in the current realm of intensified industrial aquaculture production, rather than providing the solution, farming fish actually exacerbates the problem.

Growing concern over the sustainability of aquaculture operations has created a paradigm shift, and now new alternative methods of production are being proposed. These alternative ways can help aquaculture move forward to fulfill its promise of supplementing capture fisheries. These alternative methods strive to avoid these problems by raising different species of fish together, by treating fish waste with biological mechanisms and then using it as fertilizer in farm fields, and by transitioning to the use of closed systems with water recirculation. A further hope is to use successful aquaculture projects, by diversifying the traditional farmers’ source of income, to provide long term social and economic benefits to communities.

Aquaculture at Dartmouth

In the summer of 2005, Scott Stokoe, the manager of the Dartmouth Organic Farm, sent out a blitz to recruit an “aquaculture” intern. All I knew about aquaculture at the time was that it was something to do with farming in water. Scott Stokoe saw in it the potential to become and define the Farm’s future. I responded to Scott Stokoe with the motivation to combine two things I really enjoyed: farming and fish. Soon after that Scott and I were meeting to brainstorm ideas and develop projects. It was not until last spring however, due to the necessity of forming a plan, fundraising, and doing research, that I had the opportunity to conduct an independent study aquaculture project to look at methods and practices of aquaculture around the world and gain some hands-on knowledge about the topic.

The aquaculture initiative that we got started last spring at the Farm deals directly with these issues of environmental concern over aquaculture production. The idea to our project is to set up a solar pond system inside the new greenhouse that will absorb solar energy during the day for the growth of aquatic organisms in the water and will release energy at night to heat up the greenhouse. With this model, we can grow fish inside solar ponds for consumption, and store heat in these ponds to work as furnaces; substituting solar energy for oil to heat the greenhouse. The organisms growing inside the solar ponds are the main source of feed for the fish. Therefore solar energy takes care of the two high-cost inputs. Furthermore, the fish waste that accumulates inside the ponds can be treated to serve as fertilizers for the plants grown inside the greenhouse, linking two systems of food production to achieve a system mimicking natural systems. Biological filtration of wastes takes care of the problem of dealing with the outputs from the aquaculture system giving rise to an innovative and sustainable method of aquaculture in the context of our new greenhouse.

This is a really exciting time at the Farm as we get ready to move ahead into a new future with the newly acquired farmhouse and the greenhouse. The Farm needs people to bring these ideas to life. Last spring, through my independent study we acquired two fiber glass tanks (solar ponds), but we need more tanks (more money) to get the system working. Most importantly, we need you. We need people who are willing to take the opportunities that our elite, liberal arts college provides to come up with real solutions to real world problems, and we have a real life laboratory (aka the Farm) to test the knowledge that we gain in the classroom in a real life system. Come out to the Farm, play with some fish and get your hands wet!

]]> http://www.dartmouth.edu/~tgm/2006/10/29/aquaculture-in-the-world-and-at-the-dartmouth-organic-farm/feed/ http://www.dartmouth.edu/~tgm/2006/05/26/the-back-door-to-service-2/ http://www.dartmouth.edu/~tgm/2006/05/26/the-back-door-to-service-2/#comments Fri, 26 May 2006 06:08:38 +0000 tgm Features TGM/DFP Issue http://www.dartmouth.edu/~tgm/2006/05/26/the-back-door-to-service-2/ [Note: For didactic, polemical, and provocative purposes, in this piece I imply a questionable/dubious opposition between (1) explicitly service-oriented, perhaps professional or semi-professional policy-types and (2) those who “actually get out there a lot.” One should not be so naive as to believe that a single individual may not embody both ideals. But do check around for yourself and see if there is any truth in what follows.]

The “porpoise of the soul is service”––such was the revelatory dream-image pun reported by environmental activist and author Terry Tempest Williams, Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth last winter.

For the environmentally-conscientious person this inspiring exhortation raises obvious, “What should I do?” questions such as, “What is the best route to service?” or “How does service manifest itself most effectively?” And, in particular for many outdoor-enthusiasts, “What if I admire and revere the idea of service but my self-satisfying outdoor-activity-obsession trumps ‘service’ every time? I want to be OUT THERE all the time doing either outdoor sports or contemplative and exploratory ramblings. Not going to meetings. Not organizing events or letter-writing campaigns. Not raising money. Not working towards a career in sustainability sciences. Not working in an office for an enviro group.”

Take heart if the above describes you, for it’s possible that your approach can be just as an effective––and in fact sometimes a more effective––route to service as the more orthodox “front-door” route. Your seemingly “non-service” way of life can in fact equip you beautifully for highly effective service in terms of ability, knowledge, and motivation.

Ability

If you’re usually in the company of fellow Dartmouth outdoor-obsessives, you may be surprised to discover that the level of outdoor skill and fitness you’ve acquired (even unwittingly and incidentally) is probably vastly higher than you realize, especially in comparison with the average American. Decisions about land-use have to be based on intimate knowledge of the land––not just knowledge of abstract policy. But, sadly, very few people are adept at bushwhacking through forests or navigating smoothly and extensively over rough and trail-less terrain. Thus you may have unwittingly become a tremendous asset to the wider community since you can (and will, due to your passion) get out and see with your own eyes what desperately needs to be seen first-hand.

For example, unscrupulous exploiters-of-the-land often rely on the citizenry’s poor physical fitness; they trust that people won’t actually venture very far on foot to see the destructive mischief they have planned. Cunning developers often present rosy scenarios in planning board meetings––their slick and hypocritical rhetoric full of high-minded, co-opting references to “preservation,” “deferring to the land,” and “honoring nature”––when all too often they don’t care about the destruction they are about to wreak on some gorgeous, rugged, boulder-and-wetland-filled valley.

Shocking as this may seem, their bought-off wetlands specialists may actually lie outright: they’ll purr reassuringly (and falsely) that, for example, no streams exist in a given targeted area, and when they guide an official site-visit they will steer the often-sedentary and/or pressed-for-time planning officials away from sensitive areas. But, dear outdoor enthusiast, that land which is forbidding and daunting to others is, to you, inviting, comfortable––almost heaven. You can and will roam all over that dense hinterland and see with your own eyes what the developer did not want the citizenry to see. Then you can report back and raise the alarm. And why will you roam? Not because it’s a job, a service-duty, a chore, but because you want to. It’s beautiful, and you simply love being out there.

Knowledge

Your exploratory passion and unprecedented intimacy with natural areas will give you a supremely valuable, detailed, and specific knowledge of the land. You’ll come to see firsthand the poverty of maps in the most literal way. A faint waver of topo-lines on the map turns out to be a stunning subsidiary ridgeline paralleling a main ridge, and the lines of sight from, up, down, and over this completely unknown mini-ridge turn out to be sublime.

Maybe no one else knew this––or the knowledge had been lost. Your more explicitly service-oriented sisters and brothers will no doubt be armed with abundant environmental-science and policy-options knowledge as well as specific knowledge about a given type of landscape or area of terrain. But even this latter knowledge is still one level more abstract than is optimal or necessary, and such people may still have only the haziest idea of what specific marvels a given several-square-mile tract actually contains. Since you have come to know it intimately, however, the experts may (to your surprise) come to you asking to hear what’s out there.

Further, you begin to understand the visual, auditory, and other aesthetic linkages between parts of the landscape that can be known only by moving around within the landscape often and by approaching from a number of different directions. Definition merely by acreage, degree-of-slope, soil-type, plant- and wildlife-inventory, and so on leaves out the entire aesthetic dimension. You come to love certain intermittent streams, hidden valleys and obscure upland wetlands that don’t exist on the map. You revere the wild assemblages of glacial erratic boulders––veritable Zen-gardens of ancient perfection which fall between the topo-lines’ scale. And you come to know all of these not just as classes of objects (as abstractions) but with the greatest degree of specificity. One by one they become your intimate friends (for climbers, the boulders and outcrops are veritable yogic mentors). These things all become sacred to you (or, in a less-Cartesian formulation, their sacredness is revealed to you).

Motivation

This intensification of intimacy and love (which can quite naturally segue into a vivid awareness of the sacred) creates a massively powerful motivation to actively protect these places––a passionate motivation which may eclipse the sincere, well-meaning, but by contrast relatively tepid preservationist sentiments of those for whom saving these particular places may merely be a kind of generalized example of sound environmental practice. A powerfully visceral reaction to threats may be what it takes to save the day: when you feel like literally vomiting at the thought of the despoliation of your particular sacred places; when you’re overcome, almost trembling, with despair, disbelief, astonishment, and rage at the folly, stupidity, greed, and blindness which would destroy what you know is so unique and perfect.

If a prime motivation in your life tends to derive from, to revolve around, “my duty, my identity as an environmentalist,” be cautious. There is a subtle trap therein––not inevitably compromising, but it exists. When you go to work as, say, a legislative expert for an environmental group in D.C., be aware that the kind of “abstraction” discussed above––the fact of being one step removed from “the facts on the ground”––may undermine your effectiveness.

I saw firsthand a case where a trained environmental lobbyist with high ideals and absolutely the best of intentions lacked a crucial one percent of knowledge of a certain public-lands policy issue; her failure to fully comprehend one tiny, subtle––but crucial––point which threatened to undercut an important environmental initiative in Congress, that those of us “in the field” had been working on for years. The nation obviously needs full-time professionals who are adept at shepherding worthy environmental regulations through the complex maze of the federal legislative process. But if, for you, such work becomes “just a job,” albeit a noble and important one, if it’s not matched by accurate and full “on the ground” knowledge of an issue backed by passionate motivation, then beware. Some people are, in fact, quite well-suited to professional environmental work––full-time lobbying and the like. But if you can’t abide the office and the paperwork (your outdoor passions taking you always out), on those occasional instances when you do happen to find yourself in the thick of an enviro battle, you will speak with authority. You will be convincing and effective. Your eloquence might even surprise you!

Let’s return full-circle to Terry Tempest Williams. Perhaps you heard her speech and long to be part of a good fight like her battle to save Castle Valley, Utah from unscrupulous developers. Look no further, for precisely the same kind of battles are raging right here, right now, in Hanover, Lebanon, and Norwich. The cultural attractions of Dartmouth together with the natural beauty of the area and a thriving world-class research and esoteric-engineering economy have made the immediate Upper Valley a hot commodity. Real estate developers are swarming, and local planning and zoning boards, composed of entirely of part-time volunteers, are struggling to keep abreast of the action. Even with the help of the towns’ tiny professional planning staffs, staying ahead of the planning curve is proving tremendously difficult. Not only are the issues and problems complex and their resolution sometimes inobvious (for example, anticipating the unintended consequences of subtle changes in obscure zoning regulation language), but the scale of proposed development has been gargantuan; and developers have been sometimes disingenuous and dishonest in their dealings with the towns, ever-ready to threaten litigation if their moneymaking ambitions are thwarted. Out-of-state developers in particular seem to possess a particularly stunning blind spot when it comes to choosing where to build. Some of the area’s last remaining serene, beautiful wild areas are, incredibly, blithely marked for destruction.

Dartmouth students should be aware that some of your very own professors are currently waging gallant battle versus these big-money interests, their lying wetlands scientists, and cash-hungry absentee landowners for whom, appallingly though predictably, maximizing profit trumps all other values. Years of scholarly debate and truth-seeking have honed these academics’ powers of reasoning, acute and thorough observation, and verbal persuasion in a way that no time spent laboring in continuously-compromising bureaucratic situations likely could have produced. Inquire around among the environmentally-conscientious professoriat and you’ll immediately discover many fabulous opportunities to engage in various aspects of our local equivalent of Williams’s Castle Valley battle. You will learn a huge amount from this (and you might even garner, merely coincidentally, some great interviews and fabulous thesis material!).

Most of all, stay fit, stay inspired––and get out there and wander in alert amazement “between the topo-lines.” You’ll like what you find!

Full disclosure: I hate the concept of the Ecological Footprint. It’s overly simplistic, vague, and too often mistaken for a legitimate metric of sustainability. That said, it’s one more test that Dartmouth students score pretty well on, and for that reason alone it’s worth looking at.

The Ecological Footprint is a rough measure of how much biologically productive land that any given person uses to support his or her lifestyle. The total amount of productive land, divided by the total population of the planet, works out to about 4.6 acres per person, assuming that all land is being utilized and nothing is left over for other species.

The average American has a footprint of 25.4 acres. Needless to say, that’s a lot. Assuming a steady population level (which there isn’t), we’d need the equivalent of five planet Earths to support everyone at an American standard of living.

Where does Dartmouth come in? Last year, an ’05 conducted a survey calculating the average Dartmouth student’s Ecological Footprint. The result, derived from a sample consisting of more than 200 responses, was 16.2 acres per student. It’s not exactly the 4.6-acre target, but it’s a step in the right direction. To put it bluntly, if all Americans lived like us, we’d be far less dependent on foreign oil, the rate of climate change would slow, and the polar bear wouldn’t be working quite so diligently on its last will and testament.

So should we pat ourselves on the back? Crack open an ice-cold organic beer and bask in the glory of our morally superior crunchiness? Probably not.

When you get right down to it, there are two main factors that make us so eco-friendly: none of us commute and many of us live in relatively efficient dormitories. In both cases, these facts are completely passive and incidental. Students don’t view them in environmental terms and thus aren’t likely to repeat this sort of behavior when they get out of the Dartmouth bubble. For most students, when they go out into the rest of the world, get jobs, buy 4000 square foot houses and gas-guzzling SUVs, this period of relative eco-responsibility during their college years will seem like a distant memory—a nice little karmic check-plus—but it is ultimately insignificant.

For that reason, a student’s individual Footprint is only tangentially relevant. The real measure of campus sustainability is how much students are learning about the consequences of their lifestyles, and how much of that knowledge is applicable to the rest of their lives.

Let me give you an example: If students were being fed locally-grown organic food, they might learn the ecological and community benefits of responsible agriculture, experience its generally superior quality, and maybe even meet some of the farmers that they were buying from. Then they’d take that lesson with them beyond Hanover and perhaps feel compelled to buy local and organic whenever they could. I haven’t seen any studies on the subject, but I’m willing to bet that if there were a metric of environmental awareness, Dartmouth students would rank closer to the national average than our “Footprint” might suggest.

Student Activism

Environmentalism first entered the Dartmouth consciousness in a meaningful way in’69, around the same time that it was becoming a national issue. A group of outing club members started the Environmental Studies Division of the DOC (ESD). Their early efforts included organizing Earth Day programming, introducing recycling initiatives to the College, and leading educational trips.

Their most lasting legacy on the campus was undoubtedly their contribution to the foundation of the Environmental Studies academic department. In the early ’70s, they rallied support and petitioned the college for an academic program that would address the increasingly pressing economic, scientific, and political interactions between the natural world and human society.

The department started off small, but grew through the ’70s, and eventually gained recognition as a full major program. To date, it’s the oldest Environmental Studies major program in the country, all due to a particularly vocal student demand.

Since that time, student environmentalism has waxed and waned along with the national tides of concern. Groups have come and gone over the last 37 years. Some, like the Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO) have stuck around and worked their way into the fabric of student life. Others, like the Dartmouth Vegetarian Alliance and Sense of Place, a predecessor to The Green Magazine, have fallen by the wayside.

ESD, an endowed student organization that many alumni recognize, is still active, at least on paper. Its last major campus accomplishment was to convince the administration to create the Sustainability Coordinator position.

Today, there are at least half a dozen campus groups whose primary mission is fostering sustainability at Dartmouth. Some, like The Green Magazine, the Organic Farm, and the Big Green Bus, have self-explanatory goals. The roles of others like ESD and ECO are more nebulous, focusing mostly on everyday actions students can take to reduce their ecological impact.

As you can probably guess, campus environmentalism has run into many of the same walls as other Dartmouth activist efforts: continuity, the D-plan, and student commitment. It’s just a difficult reality that the long-term programs required for environmental reform are near-impossible to establish when students are constantly taking off-terms and the most experienced quarter of the talent pool disappears each year. Add to that the reality of college that students just don’t always have enough time or energy, and the capacity to commit to bureaucratic reform and spread awareness is highly constrained.

Which is Where the Administration Comes in…

The administration and staff have tried to make Dartmouth a greener place…really, they have. There have been almost as many College-sponsored sustainability initiatives as there have been from student groups. Armed with full-time employees and guaranteed annual budgets, some of theirs have even worked.

Many of the highest school officials have pledged their commitment to managing Dartmouth in an environmentally responsible manner. According to a January 2001 article in The Dartmouth, Dean of Residential Life Martin Redman said that for any new construction projects “the focus [would] be on energy efficiency and environmentally sound construction materials.”

Some pursue environmental work in their professional careers. Carol Folt for example, the newly-appointed Dean of Faculty, is a prominent natural scientist whose current research group is engaged in the study of toxic pollution in aquatic ecosystems and their effects on human health.

Even President Wright is on record as stating that we “must continue to make environmental concerns a significant priority in our decision making, to lead in the implementation of environmentally sustainable practices, and to place Dartmouth at the forefront in the exploration of issues related to the preservation of a healthy biosphere.”

Over the years, there have been dozens of individual programs out of different College departments. Remember those disgusting caterpillars that have invaded the campus the past few years? FO&M now employs a system known as Integrated Pest Management (IPM) to control them and any other harmful pests. IPM involves thoroughly analyzing a pest situation and carefully choosing the most appropriate and least ecologically harmful countermeasure.

DDS makes some effort to purchase locally grown organic food. While their switch to cage-free eggs from a local organic farm has gotten a lot of publicity lately, they regularly purchase a certain amount of locally-grown fruits and vegetables. These are sold mostly in Collis and Homeplate, but Courtyard Café regulars may remember the boxes of organic apples in the Hop last year.

And of course, there are the new construction projects. The school has employed a number of outside architects and consultants to create and execute the green design of the McLaughlin Residential Cluster, the Kemeny Hall-Haldeman Center building, and especially the new Tuck Mall Residence Hall. According to one such consultant, Marc Rosenbaum of Energysmiths, the new buildings will have “more efficient, healthful, comfortable, and maintainable mechanical systems [and] very high quality building enclosures [to improve] insulation, airtightness, glazing systems, and durability.” There are also the more exotic measures like the 1500 foot geothermal well underneath the Tuck Mall dorm and the commitment to purchase more sustainable electricity from the national electricity grid.

Again, just like the individual Footprints, this all sounds great on paper. Indeed, there a