Category

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

Photographer: Matt Ryan

Contact

Mathias Bell
Educational Associate
Environment and Technological Studies
Carleton College
Northfield, MN
(507) 222-7893
mbell@carleton.edu

Governance & Administration

Sustainability is an intrinsic value at Carleton College. The significance is recognized across the college’s administration from the top-down and the bottom-up. The president of the college leads walks in the College’s arboretum and reads passages from A Sand County Almanac. The vice president speaks at Earth Day and even has a picture of John Muir on his office door. Students regularly meet and voice their opinions about sustainability and college administrators are eager to listen to their ideas.

Carleton does have a different administrative structure in regards to sustainability than its peers. There is not an office of sustainability, but the college has embraced a decentralized approach. Lead by the Environmental Advisory Committee (EAC) which includes the Director of Facilities, Director of Energy Management and Director of the Environment and Technological Studies program, the college has very open sustainability. The committee reports to every major body on campus, and meetings have always been open where more than 15 people voluntarily attend. We believe that this decentralized approach fosters better communication and increases more campus participation than an office featuring only one or two staff members. While we recognize that this arrangement would not work at every institution, at Carleton, where so many people are on board, we think this is the ideal structure for us at this time.

The college has had an environmental statement of principles and a carbon neutrality statement for several years now. Recently, the college has inserted language into the college’s mission statement and adopted the pledge of sustainability conduct, a document geared to further change culture and behavior at Carleton. The college is currently drafting a strategic plan for mitigating emissions in order to obtain carbon neutrality in compliance with the President’s Climate Commitment.

Operations

Sustainability is ingrained in Carleton’s operations. At this point in time, the college needs to conduct an inventory of all its initiatives because facilities has nearly lost track of them all. Due to the numerous initiatives, the college has learned a great deal and feels comfortable moving forward with even more ambitious projects. For instance, Carleton was the first college in the country to install an industrial-scale wind turbine and now with lessons learned from the first is actively pursuing additional wind projects.

    After years of research, Carleton began to administer a new waste and composting plan in the Fall of 2007. Carleton now composts all of its waste from the dining halls and is currently developing a program for its dorms. This initiative has not only offset a proportion of Carleton’s emissions but also saves thousands of gallons of water which had previously been used for food waste disposal. Additionally, the college began a single stream recycling program that recycles all products #1-7. More than 60% of Carleton’s waste is diverted from landfills and the college strives to improve this number.

    In the 2006-2007 academic year, Carleton created a new Director of Energy Management position to help the college address energy and sustainability issues. Currently, the college intends to pursue all energy efficiency opportunities and is implementing a energy-monitoring system so that it has data on every campus building. The Sustainable Revolving Fund, a student-driven initiative adopted by the college,  engages students to consider energy-saving projects that will reduce the college’s energy consumption and emissions. The college also plans to pursue new renewable energy projects in addition to the current industrial-scale wind turbine.

    For its new buildings, which the college is constructing one and developing another, the college adopted a plan that calls for at minimum LEED-Silver. With both new projects, the college is hoping to achieve LEED-Gold.

    For transportation, the college is acquiring fuel-efficient vehicles and encouraging car pooling. As part of its campus fleet, the college has purchased two Toyota Prius-sedans and intends to purchase two more in the next year. The college has created a campus ride share website which uses a program created in house to map where all faculty and staff live and to show who would be ideal carpool mates based on location. Carleton has designated parking spots for car pools and hybrid drivers.

    Additional initiatives include the campus using 80% Green-seal-certified cleaning products. Continual prairie restoration in the college’s 980-acre arboretum. Rain gardens and management of the Green Roof to minimize run-off. A new dining service which intends to increase purchases of local and organic food. Finally, plans to increase the college’s garden and provide the food to the campus’s new dining service.

Curriculum & Research

Carleton is blessed with talented faculty who have embraced the liberal arts. For a long time, the college has encouraged inter-disciplinary thinking and the curriculuar program teaches students to think differently. The college’s programs are esteemed, but they are well-regarded because of what the faculty does for the students rather than for what the faculty publishes.

    In a world so complex, it’s a duty for all colleges to teach its students how to take on the world’s problems. One cannot simply view it from the lens of one discipline. Instead, one must be able to use several different approaches. For sustainability issues, a science student must have some degree of knowledge of economics to understand policy and a landscape painter is best-equipped if they have some concept for the ethics, not just aesthetics, of nature. Carleton does its best to foster this environment and has been recently conducting a curricular review to further pursue inter-disciplinary training.

    To encourage this interdisciplinary thinking, the Environmental Studies program with help from the Mellon Foundation organized a climate change lecture series this year. The series consisted of several important scientist like Wally Broeker and Kerry Emanuel, policy makers like Gary Yohe, and even those pushing change in higher education like Tony Cortese. These lectures were arranged to encourage discussions beyond their academic discipline, and the lecturers who were brought to Carleton were asked to particpate with students and faculty outside of their presentations. Overall, we felt that the series was a resounding success and the college hopes to conduct another sustainability-themed series soon.

    For a long-time now too, the college has engaged the students in a world beyond the ivory tower through service-learning. These programs have been inherited by professors like Paul Wellstone who used to take his classes to labor rallies and poverty shelters so that his students would not just see policy but understand it. More recently, faculty members have embraced service-learning in topics as diverse as Geomorphology and German. Carleton’s wind turbine, in fact, came out of a service-learning project. However, the task to design a well-constructed service learning project is not simple, and in order to increase the learning opportunities and coordinate efforts in the community, the college has recently created a position for an outreach coordinator. We’re excited about all the potential opportunities for service learning in the next couple years.

A brand new exciting development at Carleton is a new GIS program. The Carleton environmental studies has embraced the technology as a tool to explore environmental issues from multiple disciplines. New research projects with the GIS program include an analysis of roadside ecology in nearby Dakota county, and potentially a project that analyzes the impacts of Carleton's wind turbine on bird and bat populations

Campus Culture

Carleton recognizes that changing how its facilities operate is only one component to making the college a sustainable community, and that campus culture is ultimately what is most important. To recognize the significance of campus culture, the EAC drafted a pledge of sustainable conduct that the college has since adopted. Carleton also has many other new programs intended to support a sustainable culture on campus.

    `A new program for the 2007-2008 academic year was our own version of the eco-rep program which we called the Sustainability Assistant program. The Sustainability Assistants (STA) served as a liaison between student life and campus operations. Each has a focus ranging from dining services to social sustainability. The STAs do programming and outreach efforts in the dorm, teaching students how to compost,  leading the charge in the energy-saving competition Dorm Wars, and lessons about environmental justice.

    Carleton has a deep commitment to social justice, and this has been a long-held value for the institution. More recently, questions concerning how environmentalism intersects social justice has been a topic of many discussions. As a joint program between the EAC and the Office of Intercultural Life, a discussion group at the multi-cultural interest house titled “Privilege and Environmentalism” began to discuss these intersections and attempt to understand different perspectives. There were several workshops during Focus the Nation at Carleton that addressed these issues as well.

    The college has had several sustainability-themed homes and is proud to welcome a new one into the fold this year. Farmhouse and Greenhouse have become institutions and the Wellstone house of activism, which will focus on the intersections of justice, will begin in the 2008-2009 academic year.

    To publicize Carleton’s sustainability initiatives both internally and to the public, the EAC has devoted significant resources to the campus sustainability website. The website has a successful blog, which has served as a forum of discussion between students, faculty, and alumni. The website also serves as a clearing house of information for other institutions that want to learn more about what Carleton has done.

Community Service and Outreach

Carleton’s community service is directed by the ACT (Acting in the Community Together) office. Community service initiatives pertaining to sustainability includind national programs like Adpot-a-Highway and Adopt-a-river. A Carleton-specific organization is Arbor, where volunteers work in the college arboretum on restoration and evasive species eradication. Perhaps the most successful program is Kids-for-Conservation, where Carleton students go to local schools to teach classes lessons about the environment.

    Carleton has created an outreach coordinator position in the 2007-2008 academic year to help coordinate and provide support to service learning projects. Carleton service learning projects have been vital in the campus’s sustainability efforts and many of the college’s sustainability initiatives were conceived in classrooms as part of a student class projects. For instance, an Agroecology class lobbied the campus administration hard for there to be a larger campus garden that would supply food to the dining service, and this classroom idea might become a reality.

    As part of New Student Week the past two years, the whole freshman class has worked in nature reserves helping eradicate evasive species. Furthermore, an art installation intended to raise awareness about one evasive species, Buckthorn, was created with the help of hundreds of volunteers.

    Carleton also sees its wind turbine as an important educational tool for the community about renewable energy. The turbine has literally opened eyes of many to pursuing additional renewable projects. Thus far, the college has lead nearly one hundred tours of the turbine to groups ranging from elementary schools to local environmental groups.