This year at Union College, students have sometimes studied in groups in the hallways, clustered around a common light. They've turned off their computers more. They've taken shorter showers and unplugged their laptops when they're not using them.
Students are trying harder to conserve energy, and it's not by accident.
The effort is the result of Do It In The Dark, a campuswide competition that challenges all living spaces – residence halls, apartments, fraternities and sororities – to reduce consumption of electricity, gas and water. The house that sees the biggest drop per capita will win the Ozone Cup, a trophy made of recycled materials.
“A lot of students are big into the campaign,” said Stephen Po-Chedley, 21, the Union College student who spearheaded the Do It In The Dark campaign. “People come up and tell me what they're doing to keep energy low. I've seen lights turned off in places where I've never seen it before.”
Union isn't the only local college talking about energy issues.
Grassroots environmental movements are springing up on campuses throughout the Capital Region. Many of these projects have percolated with little publicity, but that will begin to change on April 14, when schools throughout the country hold rallies urging the federal government to do more to combat global warming. At the rallies, protesters will call on Congress to cut carbon dioxide emissions – the leading cause of climate change – 80 percent by 2050.
The wave of protests is part of a project called Step It Up 2007 organized by a group of students at Middlebury College in Vermont and environmental author Bill McKibben, a scholar-in-residence at the school. Last month McKibben spoke at both Union College and The College of Saint Rose. Both schools are planning their own Step It Up events, as are other local schools, including Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Russell Sage College, which plan to hold a joint rally in Troy, and Siena College in Loudonville.
Some of the schools consider the rallies on April 14 the start of a larger environmental movement on campus.
“We're really just in the early stages,” said David Morrow, an assistant professor of English at The College of Saint Rose who helped bring McKibben to campus and is working on the school's Step It Up events – a group from St. Rose is likely to join a larger rally in Washington Park. “We're hoping to get as many people to go on the 14th and use it as a jumping off point for an ongoing environmental group.”
REPLACING BULBS
Many of the rallies will involve a march and demonstration: those who attend the RPI/Sage rally will pick up trash in the street and plant trees. Union students are creating a large, quilt-like banner that will contain pieces designed by different campus groups; the plan is to hold an organic barbecue and join forces with the Schenectady Coalition Against Global Warming. Siena will hold a campuswide mobilization effort on April 13 to get students to attend the rally the next day.
“We want to start a movement on campus,” said Riobart Breen, an assistant professor in political science and environmental studies. “We want students to take the lead.” Some students, he said, are already doing things. One student, for instance, noticed that all of the school's lightbulbs are incandescent, rather than the more energyefficient compact fluorescent, and has begun replacing the bulbs.
Even as skepticism about global warming persists – just last week critics peppered former Vice President Al Gore with questions when he testified on the issue before Congress – the debate on campuses is being replaced by consensus and a call to action.
At Union, interest in global warming is wide-ranging, with fraternities, sororities, religious groups and other clubs hosting speakers and getting involved, said Po-Chedley, whose leadership on environmental issues has made him a finalist for the Harry S. Truman Scholarship. “It's coming from all over,” he said. “People are seeing that it's not just an environmental issue, that it's kind of a common thread between everyone.” Even so, “there are definitely people on campus who still think there's a debate.”
“We're trying to train scholars,” said George Robinson, a co-leader of the University at Albany's Task Force on Environmental Sustainability, which was created in February 2006. “We're trying to train students to recognize what good evidence is and what bad evidence is. It's just a simple fact that we are generating more waste than at any time in history. There's never been this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
VISIT BY WRITER
“There's mounting evidence [for global warming], and it's getting harder to ignore,” Robinson said.
Po-Chedley agreed. “In the last couple years, the science has become pretty firm,” he said.
Earlier this year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a network of 2,000 scientists from throughout the world, presented the United Nations with a 166-page report on global warming. In the report, the group made its strongest statement yet that global warming is being caused largely by the accumulation of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, mostly from the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels.
This year the University at Albany selected “Field Notes From a Catastrophe,” a book about global warming by New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert, for their reading project, which calls on students to read the same book and talk about it. Students have attended discussion groups and lectures on global warming throughout the semester and also screened the Oscar-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” On Thursday, Kolbert will visit the campus.
Students and faculty said that student awareness is sometimes tough to gauge but, on the whole, steadily increasing.
Nathali Neal, 22, a member of Union's environmental club, said, “A lot of students accept that global warming is happening, but they don't realize the extent and that humans are contributing to it.”
“Awareness is pretty low, on average, but it's rising,” said Robinson, an associate professor of biological sciences. “They're certainly interested in the topic.”
Chris Bystroff, an associate professor of biology and computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, said he wasn't sure how many students to expect at the school's Step It Up rally. “Generally, RPI students are not political,” he said. “We're doing something that hasn't been done before.”
FOCUS ON SUSTAINABILITY
Bystroff organized a global warming awareness event in 1990, while doing his postdoctorate at the University of California, San Francisco. At the time, there was little interest or discussion of climate change, and many viewed the idea as far-fetched. “People just generally pooh-poohed it,” he recalled. “People did not believe.” He organized lectures, but they were not well-attended.
But that's changed.
Last week, a group of RPI professors held a public meeting to discuss sustainability. One of the organizers, Michael Jensen, a professor of mechanical engineering, said the idea was to bring together people who are interested in sustainability and talk about how to better coordinate the different projects that exist on campus, as well as assess what else needs to be done.
“We need a focus,” Jensen said. “We need a clearinghouse. The first step is to throw a party and see if anyone comes. … We need to break out of our disciplines and work with people in other fields.” He noted that the School of Engineering has formed a committee to address sustainability. “All these things are happening in isolation, it seems,” he said. “We need to do more.”
There are already a number of energy-related initiatives at RPI.
In 2006 the school implemented a campuswide energy reduction plan in response to the rising price of energy. Steps included setting the thermostat for occupied spaces at 68 degrees and for unoccupied spaces at 50 degrees. The school announced plans to study every building on campus to find ways to reduce energy consumption.
At Skidmore College, students and faculty are already beginning to plan activities for Jan. 31, 2008. This event will be part of another nationwide effort, called Face the Nation, that, like Step It Up 2007, is calling on schools – the goal is to recruit 2,000 to participate – to organize rallies on climate change. Karen Kellogg, director of the school's environmental studies program, said she'd like to see a day where students attend seminars on global warming rather than go to their regular classes.
Last year the University at Albany formed a Task Force on Environmental Sustainability that now has five committees: energy use, environmental landscape, solid and hazardous waste, green commerce and campus sustainability education committee. During his tenure, former President Kermit Hall, who died in August, signed the Talloires Declaration, which calls on colleges and universities to develop a plan for environmental sustainability.
CHANGING FOCUS
Robinson said Hall had two goals: to save money by reducing energy consumption on campus – the college spends about $7 million on electricity each year and over $15 million in utility costs – and to prepare students for a future where energy issues are front and center. “We had this strange party school image,” he said. “We wanted to have a student body that was invested in the world.”
One of UAlbany's projects is similar to Union's Do It In the Dark campaign: dormitories are tracking their energy use compared to last year, and the results are available online. On Friday, four dorms were posting modest decreases between 1 percent and 4 percent, while one dorm, Empire Commons, was up 6 percent.
Through the commerce committee, the school has started hosting a farmer's market and buying apples and produce for the dining halls from local farmers. The education committee is assessing how many courses the school offers with an environmental focus, and the school has joined a national program, RecycleMania, and is competing against other schools to see who can collect the largest amount of recyclables per capita.
“We're ramping up our recycling,” Robinson said. “We've always had recycling, but people didn't always recognize it. Once you throw a hamburger into the recycling bin, the whole thing goes to the landfill.”
Future projects include increasing bus service on campus, reconfiguring the main entryway on campus by removing some of the parking and planting trees. Robinson said that UAlbany's uptown campus has lost a lot of forest; about 50 percent of the school is “hard surface” such as parking lots, and the deforestation rate – the percentage of forest lost each year – hovers around 4 percent. “In the last 10 years we've cut down 30 acres of Pine Bush to build dorms,” Robinson noted. “We have a new nanotech facility. There's been no environmental planning.”
Robinson believes the work of the task force is in its early stages. The school has formed a search committee and is looking to hire someone to coordinate the group full time.
“We recognize we have a long way to go,” Robinson said. “Some things are easy to change. Others will take awhile.”