Spring 2008
Practicing What You Teach
By Leslie Wright
It sounds like the start of a joke. Five professors: a geologist, a biologist, a chemist, a geographer and an economist got together and instead of walking into a bar, they invented a college major. They decided to call it environmental studies, even though the environmental movement didn't exist and no colleges offered anything similar.
The professors taught at Middlebury College, and the year was 1965. The infamous Cuyahoga River fire was four years in the future. The first Earth Day wouldn't happen for five years. Chemical companies were busy painting Rachel Carson, whose book "Silent Spring" questioned pesticides, as a wacko housewife.
These five professors, who saw the value in educating young people about human impact on the planet, turned out to be intellectual pioneers. They planted the seed that created a culture of environmental awareness at Middlebury that's thoroughly modern. Today Middlebury's green ethos — from locally sourced food in the cafeteria, to plans to become carbon neutral by 2016 — has other colleges scrambling to catch up and, frankly, green with envy. That's no joke.
"More and more, schools are trying to brand themselves as green. Certainly there are some that walk the walk after talking the talk and others are not as green as they would lead you to believe they are," says Mark Orlowski, executive director of the Sustainable Endowments Institute. "I feel comfortable in saying Middlebury is a leader in this area and one of a handful of schools that has gotten it in terms of sustainability."
Green with envy
Last fall, the Sustainable Endowments Institute, based in Cambridge, Mass., included Middlebury in an elite group of six colleges that lead the country on sustainability (see sidebar). The Sierra Club also joined the chorus last fall, making Middlebury one of the "10 That Get It" colleges when it comes to the environment. Those are just two examples of a myriad of groups and organizations that have recognized the college's environmental studies program, the oldest in the country.
What makes the college's program so noteworthy is the way in which classroom philosophy has spilled over into the lives of the 2,350 students on campus. From their dorm rooms, where thermostats were turned down two degrees at the behest of students, to their cafeterias, where the college spends about $1 million a year on foods from more than 40 local producers, the students at Middlebury can't help but be touched by the concept of sustainability. Many of the initiatives come from the students themselves. They led the push toward carbon neutrality, which includes building an $11 million, wood-fired heating and cooling plant. Wood is considered carbon neutral because the CO2 released by burning wood is countered by the CO2 removed from the air while the trees grow.
Dumpster diving legacy
The culture of student-led initiatives has its roots in a course taught in the late 1980s that has become part of institutional lore at Middlebury.
Biology professor Steve Trombulak had recently arrived in Vermont and found himself at the helm of a flagging program that had lost its luster as the dynamic personalities that started it retired. Plus, on campuses in the '80s, environmentalism wasn't the hot button issue that, say, South African apartheid was. There were only four environmental studies majors on campus, Trombulak recalls. The untenured professor, fresh from environmentally forward Seattle, decided to shake things up. He sent his students Dumpster diving.
He wanted the students to get an up-close look at the college's waste stream so they could determine if a recycling program could work for the college. He wanted them to devise a business plan and policy to present to the college administration. His motive was to give the students a chance to employ the broad spectrum of skills they'd honed over their college careers from analysis to policy making to communication. The project was a stretch. Recycling was barely on the radar at that point. The now ubiquitous blue recycling bin, in which all types of recyclables are tossed together, didn't exist and trash haulers didn't do recycling. Sourcing haulers for various recyclables was no small feat.
"The class was a big crapshoot," Trombulak says. "I didn't know if the students were up to the challenge."
The crapshoot paid off. The students' work ultimately spurred the college to start a recycling program. Today recycling keeps 60 percent of the college's waste out of the landfill annually. Trombulak's students also launched a tradition of student-driven environmental initiatives. And the practicum revitalized the major. By the late '90s there were more than 60 majors in a class. That has leveled off to between 35 and 55 majors each year, says program director Chris McGrory Klyza, but environmental studies is often one of the top five majors on campus. Trombulak is bashful about taking credit for reviving the program. Many factors came to bear, he says. There was the class, but there were also students coming to the college with an increased green awareness and an administration poised to act on environmental programs.
No-brainer
The environmental studies program itself has proven to be sustainable, surviving an array of environmental issues du jour from flaming rivers in the late '60s through acid rain, opening ozone layers and closing landfills in the '80s and sprawl and wilderness land management in the '90s. McGrory Klyza, who is a political science professor in addition to environmental studies director, cites the scope of the program: It encompasses a majority of departments on campus, including everything from geology to psychology to religion, and includes 54 faculty.
Middlebury's success lies in the fact that the program isn't about solving any one environmental problem. It's about giving students the tools to be leaders, whatever's at stake.
"Fifteen years ago no one had heard of climate change. No one had heard about biodiversity. We've tried to focus on ways of thinking, policy and economics. The issues might change but the frameworks of thinking about the issues remain the same," says McGrory Klyza.
Daniela Salaverry, a 2003 grad, certainly put that theory to work. The environmental studies major also studied Chinese while she was at Middlebury. At first, her two interests seemed divergent, but as China's industrial might grew, environmental concerns reached critical mass. Salaverry had the perfect skill set to get involved in the burgeoning Chinese environmental movement, which is just what she did. Salaverry heads up Chinese progams for Pacific Environment, a California-based nonprofit that assists environmental groups in the Pacific Rim.
"When I was studying this five or six years ago at Middlebury it was really hard to make the connection between my interest in China and the environment," Salaverry says. "Today, it's a no-brainer."
Making the Grade
Vermont schools among elite in sustainability report
Two Vermont institutions, Middlebury College and the University of Vermont, have earned the highest grade awarded on the College Sustainability Report Card for 2008, landing among an elite group of only six schools nationwide.
Issued last fall by the Sustainable Endowments Institute, a nonprofit based in Cambridge, Mass., the report examined 200 public and private institutions with the largest endowments and graded them on everything from recycling to local food purchasing and green building practices.
Among the factors that made the grade for Middlebury: the college's commitment to becoming carbon neutral by 2016, buying food from over 40 local farms, orchards and manufacturers, and applying green building standards to the last five major campus construction projects.
UVM's biodiesel and natural-gas-fueled buses caught the institute's eye as did the university's ongoing efforts to track carbon emissions and the fact that 5.2 tons of waste a week is composted at a nearby farm that supplies produce to the university.
The four others anointed College Sustainability Leaders were: Harvard University, Dartmouth College, the University of Washington and Carleton College. To see how others stacked up go to: www.endowmentinstitute.org – Leslie Wright
Mucking about
Senior looks at algae as potential biofuel
Middlebury College senior Bobby Levine spends an awful lot of time looking at the world though a microscope. What he sees on a microscopic level he hopes will solve problems on a global scale.
Levine is a molecular biology and biochemistry major with a minor in environmental studies. Just as Middlebury students led the effort to start a recycling program in the ‘80s and did the research that resulted in a commitment to make the college carbon neutral by 2016, Levine hopes his research will one day contribute to environmental change for the better.
Levine is studying algae — that soupy substance that chokes ponds in the summer — as a potential biofuel. His experiment starts locally, with a plentiful and noisome substance found literally in the college's backyard — cow manure.
Levine is working with Robert Foster of Foster Brothers Farm in Middlebury and Marie Audet at Blue Spruce Farm in Bridport, to create an environmental "two-fer" using algae to clean up manure and in the process making biodiesel.
Algae could potentially be put to work on municipal sewage, too. Levine sees algae as a better option for quenching the world's thirst for fuel than corn or soy, the crops most commonly used for biofuel production in the U.S. Consider that an acre of corn yields about 300 gallons of ethanol, and an acre of soy produces about 50 gallons of biodiesel. Algae has the potential to produce from 1,000 to 5,000 gallons an acre, doesn't compete as a human or animal food, and does not require man-made fertilizers, Levine notes.
"The use of biofuels as we are doing it today is not sustainable," Levine says. "Biofuels are dead in the water unless they have a feed stock like algae that can be produced in the quantities that are needed."
Levine would really like to see algae's benefits spread far and wide.
"I'm really interested in looking at it in developing countries as a way to improve rural sustainable development," Levine says. "It has a lot of potential helping our society transition away from fossil fuels."