By Marcus Renner, Environmental Center Coordinator, Fort Lewis College, Durango, CO

Fort Lewis College is a public liberal arts college of just under 4,000 students in Durango, Colorado. Our president, Brad Bartel, was a charter signatory of the ACUPCC, and his signature kicked off a two-year odyssey of climate and sustainability planning on our campus that still has a ways to go. Like many schools we’ve had to piece our plan together on a shoestring budget, really just enough to buy a lot of elbow grease, and pull together disparate and hard to find pieces of information.

Every planning effort needs coordination and in our case this has come from the Environmental Center, a student organization with one full-time staff member and 25-30 work-study students who work 5-10 hours a week during the school year. When I told the students that we were going to draft the campus’ Climate Action Plan, I don’t think they knew what were getting into. I did, and I took full advantage of their blind enthusiasm.

It all starts, of course, with a spreadsheet. The blank cells in ours were daunting, especially as the number of potential energy and transportation strategies multiplied. We began, however, to break things down into pieces, and as we reviewed the pioneering work by the students, staff, and faculty at institutions like Middlebury and Duke, the cells started to fill in with costs and carbon offsets, net present values and payback periods. Ultimately, we identified 77 potential strategies to reduce our carbon footprint.

Reports from other campuses were a huge help, but we often had to dig through text and tables to unearth the information we needed. Specifically, we wanted to get an estimate of the GHG reduction achieved at schools using a specific strategy. Understanding the assumptions and statistics behind these estimates was next. Here, getting information on factors such as building square footage, sources of electricity, and the number of students living on campus from the schools we were researching helped us to figure out how to apply their conclusions to our particular situation. Once we did this the next issue was determining cost. This sent us back to the phones, calling schools to get estimates of how much they paid for light bulbs or invested in their alternative transportation programs. We also contacted manufacturers to get estimates.

To keep all of this information, which often started out as scribbled notations on the back of scratch paper, straight in our heads, we developed a systematic appendix with our evaluation of a particular strategy, the experience of other schools with that strategy, the relevant data on GHG reductions and cost, our assumptions, and our sources. For this, Middlebury’s initial 2003 Climate Plan was a model. We found most climate reports only highlighted a select number of strategies and failed to discuss each one in detail. The Middlebury report, which has now been streamlined and updated, evaluated all the strategies they could think of using a standard format, whether they worked or not. This has been an invaluable reference.

A couple of things helped our planning. We had a deadline. We had to present our energy and transportation recommendations to the President’s Council at two consecutive monthly meetings. This made us frantic, but knowing there would be an end, albeit temporary, helped us push through the uncertainties. Second, we haven’t yet engaged in performance contracting for our school. This meant that we could cluster ten of the seventy-seven strategies together under a performance contract with a single estimate of GHG reductions and cost. This spared us from becoming experts on HVAC systems and boilers. Still, it was, in a word, gnarly. Calculating the various permutations of alternative vehicles and fuels we could use or the myriad of transportation demand management strategies to get commuters out of their cars was a mind-bending experience.

Because the help of other institutions was essential to create our plan, we wanted to share our story and to thank everyone who took our phone calls and answered our emails. We are still tying down loose ends, closing gaps, and revising our numbers, but if you’d like to see how one staff member and a cadre of students who didn’t know any better tackled carbon neutrality visit our website.