Christine Ervin has directed the Oregon Department of Energy, was the first President and CEO of the U.S. Green Building Council, and was appointed by President Clinton as the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Energy overseeing $1 billion in annual investments for clean energy.  Today, she is the President of the Christine Ervin/Company that focuses on accelerating sustainable market transformation.

During the opening keynote, Ms. Ervin focused on three main issues regarding the sustainability movement today:

Speed: is it fast enough?
Scope: is it systems-based?
Scale: is it big enough?

Speed - we've been talking about sustainability and climate change isseus for decades, but are we taking action quickly enough?  Ervin used the example of the 1997 issue ofTimemagazine that talked about the future of cimate change solutions.  The issues featured a six page ad on the new Toyota hybrid.  It's well over a decade later, and we haven't moved much further than the hybrid.  In regards to campus sustainability, Ervin used the example of green buildings on campus.  Several campuses have built or are in the process of buildings that contain several green features, but there are still very few that have made the commitment to a Green Building Policy.  (If you're interested in seeing the campuses that have committed to building green buildings on campus through a Green Building Policy, see the AASHE Resource Center page - Campus Building Guidelines and Green Policies. (AASHE members only))

Scope - we have created several systems-based sustainability measuring systems.  Ervin, not by surprise, mentioned how the LEED program has expanded from green buildings to green neighborhoods, and she mentioned AASHE's Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System (STARS).  STARS is a voluntary, self-reporting framework for gauging relative progress toward sustainability for colleges and universities.  We finished up the pilot version of the program in 2008, and we plan to launch version 1.0 towards the end of 2009. 

Ervin also mentioned the trend of creating Sustainability Task Forces on campus.  She says, and I agree, that it's certainly a step in the right direction, and she advocated for bringing interdisciplinary views to these task forces.  She mentioned the task force at Ball State University as a good example of this.  She really like that one mandate of the BSU's task force is for members to report back their discussions to  their constituencies.

Scale - are we taking large enough steps?    The biggest challenge here is cost, and a lot of the time, the difference in the cost of constructing a green building verses a non-green building is almost nothing.  We must work to change this misconception.  She gave this as a resource - www.DeepGreen.tv