This session was a panel session put together by John Peterson to explore the opportunities to use the campus built environment as an educational tool.First Speaker: John Peterson, Oberlin College/Lucid Design GroupPeterson quoted a number of statistics that demonstrated that a huge amount of our energy and resource consumption is related to buildings (think constructing, operating and demolishing them). He and his partners in Lucid Design Group developed software to give building occupants real-time feedback on the building resource usage. They developed it at Oberlin College, where Peterson teaches. He went into great detail about the system, but I couldn't keep up. Which is just as well because it's better to look at the real-time display yourself. The most important thing is that Peterson's research has shown that providing real-time feedback with incentives (such as a dorm vs dorm competition) results in tremendous behavior change and reduced resource consumption. Dormitory residents used the data to reduce their energy use 56%! And, they reported in surveys that they continued the conservation behaviors after the end of the competition.Second Speaker: Cindy Shea, UNC-Chapel HillShea has found that producing a Campus Sustainability Report has been instrumental in getting the sustainability message into all corners of the university. It takes a huge amount of time to create the report, but the payoff is huge. It puts you in touch with people you wouldn't otherwise know. The press relations office and president's office can pull from it for publications and speeches. Best of all, Shea adds sections to the report on each update that highlight ways in which campus sustainability supports the university's most recent “priorities statement.” Shea showed a number of photos of programs and interpretive signage on the UNC campus. The idea is that students and the community are getting an education in sustainability while simply going about their business. Examples were interpretive signage in LEED buildings, air stations for bike tires, GPS on the buses (so that a display at bus stops tells passengers when the next bus will arrive), ZipCars and biodiesel decals on campus buses. Shea highlighted the Morris Dormitory which has just been completed with solar hotwater and a great deal of submetering. They are working with Lucid Design Group to install a real-time feedback system similar to the one at Oberlin.Third Speaker: Nathan Gauthier, Harvard Green Campus InitiativeGauthier started out with an overview of Harvard's growth trends which show that building space and energy use has been going up dramatically (GHG emissions up 40% since 1990). Harvard plans to continue growing, with a new campus in Boston. He then focused on one newly renovated building and their efforts to educate the occupants of the building about its "green" features. The Blackstone Office received a LEED Silver certification. Gauthier ran through many of the features in the building that reduced resource consumption and environmental impacts. Many of these features are evident to building occupants, but the challenge they wanted to address was how to bring to light the features that are hidden behind walls. They offered green tours to the occupants and later quizzed them in a survey to find out what they had retained. They found that not only had 74% of the survey respondents taken a tour, 28% of them had then given other people a tour of the green aspects of the building. The survey asked the occupants to list as many green features as they could. To Gauthier's surprise, the results showed that the occupants knew as much about the “hidden” features (e.g. low VOC paints, C&D waste diversion, etc”¦) as the exposed ones (e.g. dual-flush toilets, bioswales, etc”¦). The survey also asked the occupants what they thought a “green building” should be. They responded that it should be educational.Fourth Speaker: R. Umashankar (Uma), HGOR, IncA Master Plan is all about “growth.” How do you support expanding and changing programs with appropriate facilities? In general, a master plan gets updated every 5 to 10 years. So, where does “the environment” come into this? Ten years ago, Uma says he doesn't think the environment came into the planning much. Now, that's not true. Many schools are making the sustainability a part of their master plan. Uma walked the audience through the master planning process and gave some examples of sustainable features, such as preserving green space, using native plantings and managing the ecology of the watershed.