Category

Four-year and Graduate Institutions 1,000 - 7,500 Student FTE

Evergreen's Rural Setting Photographer: Property of The Evergreen State College

Contact

John Pumilio
Director of Sustainability
Office of the President
The Evergreen State College
Olympia, WA
(360) 867-6913
sustainabilitydirector@evergreen.edu

Governance & Administration

Sustainability is "woven into the very fabric of our identity and history as an institution," notes Evergreen President Les Purce.  Evergreen will "nurture values and practical skills that motivate a lifetime commitment to a sustainable...just way of living on a healthy planet." 

These words, adopted in 2008 by Evergreen's Board of Trustees, set the high bar for Evergreen's long-term campus master plan.  We will be a carbon neutral and zero waste college by 2020 as specified in our 2007 updated strategic plan and campus master plan.  We also have a new, faculty governing consortium, "Sustainability and Justice," with a focus on teaching sustainability across the liberal arts curriculum.

President Les Purce is a member of the Leadership Circle of the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment.  As part of this commitment, Evergreen completed its carbon inventory for the years 2004-07. At 5.1 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions per student, the college's footprint is less than half the national average for colleges and universities.

For several years now, sustainability has been a requirement in hiring senior officials such as our vice president for administration and our director of facilities.  In 2008, Evergreen hired a director of sustainability, as the newest member of the president's staff, to bring together academics and curriculum, operations and students in a broad cooperative effort.  Our Sustainability Council is diversified and fosters collaborative processes.  The Council's primary lens is social justice, clean energy systems, sustainable food practices, alternative transportation, waste reduction and green purchasing. 

Through governance structures, all members of the Evergreen community have the opportunity to actively participate in advancing our sustainable practices.  Collaborative governance efforts bridge academics and operations through the management of our campus land, building space, green building design, and purchasing policies including 100 percent recycled paper, Green Seal^TM cleaning products and Energy Star appliances. 

We have a new Student Affairs Sustainability Committee that incorporates sustainable practices and education into our residential and dining services.

Our groundbreaking new campus master plan, the result of a cross-campus collaborative effort, will feature such things as central composting, a student-approved and funded Campus Activities Building redesign that will meet LEED Gold requirements; a series of education centers on our 1,000-acre campus to engage students in studying campus environment and facilities impacts; a storm water monitoring center; a sustainable design resource center; an Organic Farm education center; a Terrascope interdisciplinary center to study the evolving tree canopy of second growth forest; an alternative energy education center, and a solid waste stream and renewable fuels education center. 

Beginning in fall 2008 every student will receive an orientation in sustainability and have the opportunity to take a sustainability pledge. 

Evergreen supports faculty and staff in ongoing, professional development workshops with a focus on sustainability and justice. Our governance extends beyond the campus border into the greater community. For example, Evergreen collaborates with the Governor's Interagency Sustainability Committee to place students and interns in local and state agencies to assist with agency carbon inventories and sustainability audits.

Operations

Evergreen integrates campus operations with our curriculum, offering students opportunities to apply whole systems thinking and interdisciplinary approaches to sustainability challenges. By integrating operations and curriculum, Evergreen community members learn transferable skills that allow them to make a lifelong contribution to a more sustainable world.

Our facilities department is funding an ecological agriculture faculty position and works with several academic programs to analyze and reduce our carbon impact. 

Evergreen is moving closer to our 2020 targets for sustainability.  Some recent accomplishments include:

• A self-imposed student tax that offsets 100 percent of Evergreen's electricity use through the purchase of green tags. This clean energy initiative created a fund that is managed by a Clean Energy Committee (comprised of students, faculty, and staff). The Committee awards grants to promote clean energy projects on campus. This year, the Clean Energy Committee funded fourteen projects including a biodiesel production facility for our Organic Farm, a 9-Kw photovoltaic array for our library building, solar-powered lighting for our covered bus shelters, and a new solar-powered weather station that will collect data and reduce campus water use by 6.5 acre-feet per year.
• We were recognized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2008 as one of the "Best Workplaces for Commuters." We provide transit passes to faculty, staff, and students, offer a guaranteed ride home program, provide commuter/bicyclist lockers, designate carpool spaces, and employ staff and students to encourage greener commuting options.
• Building on our reputation for the first publicly funded LEED certified Gold building in Washington State, students voted to renovate our Campus Activities Building to achieve LEED Gold status.
• We received the Governor's Award for Pollution Prevention and Sustainable Practices in 2007. We use only green chemicals for cleaning purposes.
• An impressive 28 percent of Evergreen's food is purchased from local and organic sources, up from 20 percent in 2006. Students will operate the "Flaming Eggplant Café" in 2008 which will focus on sustainable food service. We have a vigorous ecological agriculture program that works in conjunction with our Organic Farm and local farms throughout our region.
• Our energy savings plan will reduce carbon output by 500 tons and save $73,000 per year.
• We replaced five gasoline powered vehicles with electric-powered vehicles. Over the seven-year lifespan of each electric vehicle, we will save 5,950 gallons of gasoline and 60 tons of carbon dioxide pollutants.
• We implemented single stream recycling. In the year ending June 30, 2008, we reduced our landfill waste by 14 percent or 100,000 pounds.
• We are implementing a green, local purchasing plan. The purchasing manager is coordinating this effort to increase the use of recycled content products, bio-based products, energy and water efficient products, and alternatives to toxic products. This also helps us prioritize social justice aspects of sustainability.
• We are partnering with Wildfish Conservancy to install salmon friendly culverts and restore critical salmon runs to our watershed.
• Evergreen uses 100 percent locally produced, chlorine-free, recycled paper.

Curriculum & Research

An Evergreen education embodies sustainability principles and practices that encompass the environment, social justice, the economy and health.  Ours is a cross-generational, ecological and social justice ethic with a focus on learning to live in ways that benefit seven generations to come.  We have interdisciplinary undergraduate programs as well as Masters programs in Environmental Studies, Public Administration, Teaching and Education.

Faculty have aligned in a broad, interdisciplinary "Sustainability and Justice" cohort that spans the liberal arts.  This allows students to prepare for careers and lifestyles with a sustainability focus.

A sampling of sustainability related programs for 2008-09 include: Climate Change; Conceptualizing Native Place; Environmental Health: Science, Policy and Social Justice; Food, Place and Culture; Green Studio;; Living in the Sacred Garden; Mediaworks in Context: Sustainability and Justice; The Olympic Peninsula; Practice of Sustainable Agriculture; The Pacific Northwest: History, Culture and Environment; Toward a Sustainable Puget Sound: Place, People and Policy; Venezuela: Building Economic and Social Justice; Why Businesses Succeed: Designing a Sustainable Company, and Writing for Change.

Community is central to our academic programs.   "Whether we are focusing on agriculture, renewable energy or green buildings, it is the community that allows us to make this challenging transition to a post-fossil fuel economy," notes ecological agriculture faculty member Martha Rosemeyer.

"Our ecological conditions shape health," notes faculty member Lin Nelson.  With respect to sustainability, we are concerned with how people live it, breathe it and question it in their daily lives.

"From a tribal perspective, the strategy toward sustainability is a strategy of survival," notes Alan Parker, faculty member and director of the Northwest Indian Applied Research Institutes.  Many coastal areas throughout the world are ancestral territories threatened by climate change, Parker says.  He and faculty member Zoltan Grossman involved students in their work to develop a Treaty of Indigenous Nations--a compact on climate change among Pacific Rim Tribes.

Sustainability studies require respectful appreciation of cultures, adds faculty member Karen Gaul.  "There is a need to examine our sense of entitlement and privilege, which shuts the door to all we can learn from other cultures," says Gaul.  "What Evergreen offers is to educate students to . . . . consider ways in which we can make choices of restraint in a culture of consumption."

Whenever possible, we tie academics to larger societal goals and research.  One example is the Canopy Database project run by renowned scientist and faculty member Nalini Nadkarni and funded in part through the National Science Foundation.  This project addresses issues of data acquisition, management, analysis and exchange relating to forest canopy studies.

Frequently, we engage academic programs to highlight issues such as climate change on campus and in the community.  In 2008-09, academic programs are pooling resources for joint events, speakers and films with the theme of sustainability. 

We have also developed several internships and graduate fellowships to help us reach campus sustainability goals. Students and alumni are assisting local governments and state agencies in reaching sustainability goals.

Campus Culture

To move toward a truly sustainable community, we are working to create one fabric of campus culture, curriculum and operations.  Particularly for students, we want these elements to be cohesive so that students learn about sustainability as an ethical way of life, as well as in theory and application.

This year, our students will have the opportunity to take a sustainability pledge as fall quarter begins.  President Les Purce begins convocation with a sustainability challenge to all members of our community.  

President Purce has also made commitment to sustainability a high priority in the hiring of many senior staff positions and uses sustainability related achievements as criteria for evaluating senior staff.  Hiring panels of faculty, students and staff engage in selection processes that help to re-enforce our community commitment.

In fall 2008, we will have a new Sustainable Living Program that will incorporate a sustainability themed dorm house with academic and cultural support toward sustainable lives and livelihoods.  This new program stems from the work of student interns in collaboration with our director of sustainability and faculty members.

In 2008, our new director of sustainability began working with students, faculty and staff to implement green and carbon neutral events.  Whenever possible, Catering Services strives to feature locally grown organic food from pesticide and herbicide free farms.  Buying local supports our economy, reduces carbon emissions and builds community partnerships.

SYNERGY, a regional sustainability conference hosted by Evergreen students with support from faculty and staff, is an annual opportunity for Evergreen to share its culture of sustainability.  Students gain leadership and management skills while bringing together resources to guide individuals, communities, businesses and non-profit organizations.

Students often host themed events that help us to focus on sustainability as a community.  One particularly vexing problem throughout the United States is the heavy use of bottled water.  In 2008, students initiated a campus wide Ban the Bottle campaign.  Students built a chicken-wire cage to collect and display the large numbers of plastic bottles used on campus.  For our Super Saturday community celebration, an event that draws some 15,000 people from nearby communities, the students featured this display with cogent information about the waste produced by bottled water.  They also received a grant to distribute water canteens for this event.

We make free bus passes available to everyone, and work to make bicycling more safe and enjoyable.  In 2008, Evergreen began a regional conversation and planning effort with local governments, community colleges and Olympia's InterCity Transit to locate new park and ride lots and better coordinate bus routes and times.

Our participation in Focus the Nation is representative of the spirited and all encompassing culture of sustainability at Evergreen. We brought together many local campuses, along with local governments and businesses, for several campus and community events. We helped other campuses to stage their own events and united in an evening event at our downtown theatre to engage and educate the public on climate change.

Community Service and Outreach

On campus, undergraduate and graduate students alike have the opportunity to work on issues of sustainability from farm-to-fork to carbon neutrality.  

Throughout our curriculum and our teaching, we encourage students and community members to take sustainability from campus to community.

Through the Curriculum for the Bioregion, a major project of the Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education at Evergreen, director Jean MacGregor has worked tirelessly with colleges across our state to communicate sustainability curriculum and practices. 

The goal of the project is to prepare undergraduates, as well as ourselves, to live in a world where the complex issues of environmental quality, environmental justice and sustainability are paramount. To achieve such a goal, these concepts, practices and perspectives will appear in a variety of courses and disciplines so that they become a meaningful part of every undergraduate's academic experience.

In 2008, the project funded a summer institute for faculty and staff across the state to collaborate on projects that they could bring to their home campuses.  MacGregor has successfully gained major funding for this sustainability initiative through the Russell Foundation.

Our Center for Community-based Learning and Action is the core of community partnerships at Evergreen.  Here, we focus on maintaining partnerships with local government, business and non-profit entities that seek our help in becoming more sustainable.  The director of this program, Ellen Short-Sanchez helps faculty members to design community-based sustainability work into the context of academic programs. 

Community organizations can request assistance, and we coordinate a response that enhances the education of our students, as well as provides benefits to our community partners.  For example, in 2007, the city of Olympia asked us to create several projects related to sustainable and affordable community housing.  We convened a city-wide forum on the topic, designed and planted a fruit garden for the homeless, and designed a sustainability self-assessment tool for neighborhoods.

In 2008, our students began helping local governments to develop carbon assessments.  Also in 2008, Gov. Christine Gregoire asked Evergreen to assist state agencies to reduce carbon output and adopt other best sustainability practices.  We will work through both the Center for Community-based Learning and Action and our director of sustainability's office to staff these requests.

From 2006 through 2008, we also made use of academic programs, research and academic internships to help green the prisons in the state of Washington.  Student Dan Pacholke, a local state prison superintendent, worked with faculty members to develop an organic garden, rain catchment, recycling, storm water management and cultural/education opportunities for prison offenders.  Several classes participated in these initiatives.  Upon graduating in June 2008, Pacholke has been promoted to administrate this sustainability work throughout the state prison system. 

In summary, we see our job as offering practical liberal arts that will imbue students with theory and skills to live more sustainably. Our goal is to prepare graduates to solve complex problems and strengthen or create more sustainable communities, workplaces and ecosystems.