In steps large and small, Saint Michael’s is exploring smart ways to go green
By Mark Tarnacki
Classrooms at Saint Michael’s are a few degrees cooler now in winter and slightly warmer in summer. Fewer lights are being switched on and energy-saving light bulbs are replacing less efficient ones. Colorful recycling bins are becoming fixtures in buildings across campus. Collection sites for organic compost near Alliot’s dining hall and down by the Winooski River help fertilize campus flower beds. A community vegetable garden is being established this spring. The shuttle bus to North Campus runs on bio-diesel. More class syllabi appear either on double-sided copies or electronically to save paper. A new alumni building will be an energy-efficient design.
In hundreds of small but collectively significant ways like these, facilities experts, administrators and student/faculty activists are cooperating to instill a greener mindset at Saint Michael’s. An environmental revolution that is sweeping U.S. campuses in response to concern about global climate change and sustainability is subtly but persistently changing daily life at Saint Michael’s.
Expanded sensitivity to environmental issues is showing up in curriculum. A primary example is a new first-year seminar taught by Biology Chair Valerie Banschbach and Business Chair Robert Letovsky. They wanted new students to think hard and practically about the complex ways that academically distinct disciplines merge on the world stage, so they designed and now co-teach an interdisciplinary seminar called “Solving Environmental Problems.”
Built around case studies, science labs, computer work and field trips, the seminar allows students to simulate roles as power-brokers in reality-based scenarios: a Cleveland airport expanding into wetlands; the cleanup of a polluted Chinese river; a race by automobile manufacturers to build the most viable “green”car and negotiation of international trade protocols. In each case, students examine how whole ecosystems can change based on the outcomes that unfold. Big money usually changes hands, and the success or failure of governments and businesses can hinge on the choices made.
“We’re trying to get them to focus on small steps that can be taken to address big problems” said Letovsky, who wrote many of the cases for his own business classes.
Greening Up
Environmental stewardship has been evident at the college for some time. Newer campus activists say it’s been a good education for them to learn all that the facilities team has quietly done for years to reduce the institution’s “carbon footprint” (an environmentalist term to describe the impact human activities have on the atmosphere in terms of greenhouse gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide).
Yet many of the faculty and students who this year created an ad hoc Environmental Council think there’s still more to be done. While existing measures put Saint Michael’s ahead of many institutions on the environmental front, it lags behind some others, they say. In agreement that more can be done, officials have been implementing eco-friendly initiatives at an accelerated pace.
The process of shrinking the campus’s carbon footprint started to gear up at Saint Michael’s last summer through student activism that peaked during Earth Week in Spring 2007. That led to discussions with Associate Director of Environmental/Energy/Recycling Rick Battistoni and Physical Plant Director Dave Cutler, who responded with the introduction of a new Sustainability Program. They vowed to join students and others in “accelerating efforts to address the concepts of sustainability and carbon footprint at Saint Michael’s,” according to a campus-wide memo that Cutler circulated
last June.
Explained Battistoni, “We were doing the things that were easy and we could do, and now that we’ve raised the awareness just a little bit more, we’re to a point where we’re going to try to do some policies and practices and a program and go about it in a more structured way,
more formally than informally, more purposefully.”
In his memo, Cutler said he had asked Battistoni to take leadership coordinating a broad area of issues, working to connect with faculty, staff, students, campus visitors and government agencies “to help the college become an environmentally responsible institution by reducing our consumption of natural resources.”
The college always has been a proponent of purchasing consistently energy-efficient products, Cutler said. “However, statistical data indicate that human actions often have the greatest impact on consumption. The Sustainability Program will be concentrating on educational actions as data and program information is gathered over the next year or two. In the meantime we will initiate contests, awareness programs and ask for Community participation and input,” the memo stated.
It noted other environmentally conscious policies already in place at the college, such as the use of “green” products in the custodial and paint departments and 30-percent recycled paper in a print shop fueled by bio-diesel. Other earth-friendly areas being discussed include hybrid fleet cars, standardized refrigerators and energy limits in dorm rooms, greater use of alternative energy sources, and more documentation, promotion and awareness of energy-saving behavior changes among students and staff. A Sustainability Coordinator will soon be hired.
“We’ve done what we can do with the resources we’ve had. Now, with student involvement and the support of the administration, we hope to ramp it up,” said Battistoni, describing a measure that other campuses with sustainability coordinators have tried called “zero-trash days” where nothing goes into the trash, but rather is composted or cleaned and reused.
Well-versed in sustainability, English professor Greg Delanty, a poet and longtime activist for progressive causes, said his inspiration for helping to start the campus Environmental Council was activist/author Bill McKibben’s movement called “Step it Up.”
That activism soon motivated him to organize chapters of the group at Saint Michael’s and in Burlington. Delanty believes change has to come from the local level, so an umbrella group like the Environmental Council bringing students together with administrators and employees seemed the way to go. After informally gauging interest, he discovered “a lot of people eager to be part of it.” The student group Green Up and faculty-staff volunteers “came to each other and began meeting together.”
“It’s very important to know that this involves students, faculty and staff all playing a part in the local world we’re living in,” Delanty said.
While there are some savings for the college to be found in green initiatives, all the activists and facilities experts said steps toward sustainability on the whole represent a financial commitment, but one that is an ethical imperative.
Declan McCabe, professor of biology, has been active from the start on the council. He acknowledged challenges the group has faced trying to change the community’s mindset, noting, “Getting compliance from 2,000 people on things like recycling is challenging. Facilities employees have perfect compliance with composting, but we’re still trying to extend that to students.”
“The devil is in the details,” McCabe said. He described an unanticipated challenge over the winter when compost in collection bins froze, making it difficult to haul away. “So that’s why the Environmental Council is good. We’re sitting down in a room and talking. Any one group in isolation doesn’t have the whole picture.”
As an example of the practical considerations that get aired at the council’s regular meetings, he cited how the college can’t afford to pull out boilers when they have 20 years of life left just because they are inefficient, even though efficient boilers are a good thing, in and of themselves.
McCabe and Joanna Wildnauer ’08, one of the student environmental movement’s most active members, said they are learning as they go in their activism. For instance, she looked into a campus “yellow bike” program but learned that the idea failed dismally at UVM and Middlebury.
“She’s researched that and rejected it,” said McCabe. “On the other hand, a bio-diesel bus proved to be very doable, and now we have a bio-diesel bus.” Bio-diesel wouldn’t work for Fire and Rescue vehicles, however, because of concerns over reliability for starting an emergency vehicle.
“Some things work, some don’t, so you have to find out what you can do and what you can’t do,” McCabe said.
That’s what the students in Banschbach and Letovsky’s environmental problems seminar are trying to come to terms with on a global scale.
Banschbach brings to the course valuable scientific expertise and an enduring interest in environmental biology. As part of the seminar, she supervised students in a lab as they tried fermenting ethanol from both corn and sugar to better understand the manufacturing challenges of alternative fuels. Trips to a hydroelectric plant, wind farm and cow-power farm (power produced from the methane captured from cow manure) added to their understanding of that topic.
Working in groups of three or four, students also had the task of devising policies or projects that might be feasible in a country of the group’s choosing, offering a concrete step toward addressing a larger environmental issue. The assignment demanded thoughtful research and analysis of demographics, history and culture. At semester’s end, groups presented poster sessions about their proposals to the entire college community.
Their projects included improved eco-tourism guidelines for India, creating markets for animal parts in South Africa; recycling and garbage collection in El Salvador, developing alternative fuels for China’s textile industry, promoting awareness of nuclear waste disposal issues in France, and low-cost cattle fences in Mongolia to stop erosion.
She knew Letovsky had experimented with similar interdisciplinary seminars under the title “Sustainable Development” in past years, collaborating with economist Reza Ramazani one year and biologist Doug Facey another.
Given those earlier good experiences, Letovsky liked Banschbach’s idea of the revised seminar when she raised it. But he had planned to be in Afghanistan all fall semester for another project. When that plan changed enough to give him more time in Vermont, Letovsky was able to run some case studies even during the fall while Banschbach taught the course for the first time. Then for spring semester, each professor directed a section of about 15 students at the same midday time, mixing them together when it made sense.
“Sometimes we work separately, and sometimes we trade students,” Banschbach said. “His folks work with me on science labs and mine work with him on some kind of case study or computer simulation, and sometimes we put both groups together. We also do lots of different activities and field trips together.”
In the Data Mine
One Friday in late March, both sections met together in a recently upgraded Jeanmarie computer lab/lecture hall to conduct a “data-mining” session for the group poster-presentation projects that had been assigned at the semester’s start.
The professors directed groups to the CIA World Fact Book and Population Reference Bureau web sites for demographic data and charts that would help them better understand the countries they had chosen. The professors then circulated to answer specific questions. Colorful graphs on the computer screens told important stories to eyes training to think about how birth and death rates and other statistics reflect and impact natural environments. Handouts led them through data that would be most useful to their projects, with hints on how to best process, understand and present it.
To aid their understanding, Banschbach prompted students through ways they might determine the population of Saint Michael’s based on smaller samplings. She drew mathematical graphs on the white board to illustrate her points. Then Letovsky, with his rapid-fire and humor-accented style of Socratic give-and-take, discussed problems with sampling and door-to-door census-taking such as counting the homeless or accounting for immigrants, citing recent examples from the news.
After logging their data, the two sections split to smaller seminar rooms in St. Edmunds with their individual instructors. To start they briefly processed how their newly found data might link to their projects. Then it was on to the day’s small-group discussion topic: water resources. A power-point presentation and video covered everything from toilet technology to a breakdown of the water needed directly or indirectly to produce different types of food (meat takes a whole lot more when you figure in grain to feed animals and the water it takes to grow that grain).
Later in the semester, guest speaker James O’Brien ’87 shared his experience as a highly successful entrepreneur and consultant on environmental remediation all over the world with his Boston-based company Vertex, which he founded. O’Brien majored in biology and environmental science while at Saint Michael’s.
Banschbach also thinks it’s a good way to offer lab science in a format that students find extremely relevant. “One thing students have commented on are all the things we’re dealing with that are in the news constantly,” she said.
Letovsky agrees and adds that the notion of marrying business, public policy and science in a single college course is becoming much more common. “The whole issue of sustainable development and managing for sustainability is becoming a big item in many business schools, which are forced to bring science into the discussion,” he said.
“I think they’ve gotten a lot out of it. It becomes really clear to them how scientists work, and how that’s different from how other folks work and reach decisions like politicians or economists or businesspeople,” she said.
Despite the efforts being made on campus, however, Rick Battistoni said that a “widespread culture of entitlement” in modern American society needs to change before meaningful initiatives can have their fullest effect. “It needs to be a cultural thing. It’s not technology that will get us where we’re going, it’s behavior, and we’re not there yet,” he said.
