As many of you know, AASHE has been coordinating a process over the past two years to develop the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS) - a tool that will help schools measure their sustainability progress over time and allow them to earn a sustainability score. Like the USGBC's LEED rating system, STARS will include 4 or 5 levels of achievement. One of the questions we have yet to resolve is what to call these distinct rating levels.

A couple of ideas have been suggested. One popular suggestion is for each campus to earn a certain number of stars (generally 1 to 5) depending on its sustainability score. This has the benefit of fitting well with the STARS acronym and being easy to understand and communicate. A school could advertise that it went from being a 2-Star STARS Campus to a 3-Star STARS Campus and most folks would assume or understood that the change signals progress toward sustainability. The downside to this naming scheme is that earning 1 or 2 Stars - which actually entails reasonable institutional commitment to sustainability and sustainability achievements - doesn't seem like the positive accomplishment that it is. People may hesitate to stay in a 1-Star hotel or go to a movie that earned a 1-Star review; the first level of STARS ratings should be something positive and worth promoting and celebrating.

Another common idea is to follow LEED's lead and useRegistered,Silver,Gold, andPlatinum. They're all positive and the relative position among the levels is clear. At the same time, though, some folks have pointed out that using precious metals - materials with industrial mining practices that are often criticized for environmental and human rights abuses - isn't befitting a sustainability program like STARS.

There have been some clever suggestions to use celestial or extraterrestrial names. For example, we could useNorth Star,Little Dipper, andBig Dipper, orNebula,Galaxy, andUniverse. These solar system names would all be positive (as long as we don't useBlack Hole) and they sound pretty cool. To most audiences though, the meaning of being a "STARS Nebula" college would be [cough] a bit nebulous. My favorite contender (today, anyway) is to use a positive, celestial adjectives -Twinkling,Shining,Stellar,Out-of-this-World,Heavenly- to denote the different levels. I wonder if these descriptors may be better for a system designed for pre-schools than one for higher education though. Could a sustainability officer credibly present STARS to his or her president with the promise of being able to market their school as a "Twinkling STARS" institution?

So, AASHE blog readers, we're looking for your suggestions. Dust off your marketing caps, pull out your poet's pens, reach for your Astronomy textbooks, and let us know what you think. The campus sustainability community has been tremendously helpful in shaping STARS credits and we'd love your help with this question. Please leave suggestions in the Comments section or send them to the STARS team.