AASHE at Twenty: Heroes’ Arc of the Universe
By: Dave Newport, LEED AP
Sustainability is hard enough to define and even more difficult to measure, calculate a ROI, or work into party chit chat. The 1990’s very small roster of early campus sustainability professionals struggled with all of the above. Plus, finding someone to learn from was frustrating; there was little network of like minds, few courses to take, and climate comedy wasn’t even born yet.
In 2005, AASHE emerged to synergize the work of early sustainability groups and leaders and grow a comprehensive collegiate sustainability resource asset–with a social network!
A year later, the first AASHE conference burst open. All of a sudden, large Arizona State University rooms full of campus “sustainabilistas” stood up and applauded great leaders and thinkers who spoke to this moment in history.
Anchored by corporate CEO turned sustainability missionary Ray Anderson and groundbreaking author Tony Cortese et al, AASHE’s meek inherited the Earth–and all the challenges that came with it.
Turns out there were many people working in the disconnected parallel universes of campus sustainability. We came together and became a community of practice–and friends. We vented. We planned. The small but dedicated AASHE staff listened and worked hard on the grand challenge.
AASHE’s mission to reinforce campus sustainabilistas spawned millions of selfless acts by those “who have given their lives to something bigger than themselves,” the definition of “hero” from noted historian and mythologist Joseph Campbell. AASHE’s staff and volunteers are heroes all; just as the campus folks of the same calling: collectively giving of themselves for people they may never meet.
To execute this mission, sustainability’s knowledge base and toolkit needed to grow. Committed to sustainability as depicted by the traditional three-legged stool, AASHE’s early emphasis was significantly focused on finding analytics and relevant KPIs that evaluated progress in all three sectors, a task difficult to this day. But to be sure, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
Thus STARS was born.
Judy Walton and Julian Dautremont led the task of penciling out the first STARS framework. Those many meetings, phone calls, drafts and conversations are among my most treasured moments of AASHE’s early years.
Judy went on to become AASHE’s first director. Her many talents synthesized disparate views and found middle ground–thus she was well suited to leaven the robust perspectives on AASHE’s Board of Directors. We had a few hot mess moments to be sure. But Judy provided a solid, reliable base of support for us all.
Julian Dautremont was Judy’s student previously and then her colleague. His rigorous standards for excellence shepherded a STARS’ organizing system, analytical QC standards, a democratic governance process and pilot from which STARS grew. He provides AASHE that and much more to this day.
STARS growth fed demand for a manager with sustainability savvy and talent. Fortunately, the tenth employee of the US Green Building Council’s LEED Building Standard program answered the call. Meghan Fay Zahniser had helped grow and expand green building through LEED in its early days. She brought that experience and expertise to STARS’ evolution and it paid off.
Her ascension to Executive Director continued AASHE’s good fortune and responsible actions informed by ongoing stakeholder engagement and responsiveness.
Five years after birth, in 2010, AASHE reported that “of the 433 [sustainability coordinator] positions represented in this survey, only 49 had been created prior to 2004, indicating an exponential growth of campus sustainability in recent years.”
In the same period, the landmark ACUPCC (I didn’t name it…) carbon neutrality effort convinced some 700 or so college presidents to zero-out GHG emissions and increase climate literacy efforts. We were off and running, it seemed.
Yet that same AASHE survey floated up serious concerns too.
Of the 432 survey respondents, 92% were white. It begged the question: if sustainability is such a powerful and effective unifying theme that marries environmental, economic, and social priorities, where are all the people of color in the sustainability field?
In his book Just Sustainabilities, noted Tufts professor Julian Agyeman points out the failure of many mainstream environmental and sustainability groups that purport social justice missions, but whose actions are overwhelmingly eco-centric. Agyeman made a very compelling case for this conclusion as a keynote speaker at AASHE’s 2010 Denver annual conference.
In his talk, he gently but firmly quantified AASHE’s inadequate social justice impact. He cited “the AASHE 2009 Digest report, some 380 pages, offers over 1,250 stories and initiatives from nearly 600 institutions throughout 24 chapters… and the word ‘justice’ appears just 13 times.”
The campus sustainability community sat silently in the room.
Agyeman’s hypothesis was that if we are to fully integrate sustainability’s three legs, we need to begin by focusing on people, people at risk, people who bear the brunt of the environmental negatives. He asked us to “think about your institutional definition of sustainability. Broaden it to include social equity/justice and mean it.”
Agyeman’s presentation received a standing ovation. And AASHE heard and felt it all. The emergence of much stronger AASHE programming of social justice, inclusion and engagement grew over succeeding years.
But the next five years brought blow back to Agyemen, AASHE, DEI, etc.
In April 2015, conservative pundit George Will unleashed a diatribe lambasting campus sustainability so ridiculous that I just started cackling. He closed with a proposal I thought at the time was astonishingly preposterous–but today looks poignantly prescient:
“Hundreds of millions could be saved, with no cost to any institution’s core educational mission, by eliminating every position whose title contains the word ‘sustainability’—and, while we are at it, ‘diversity,’ ‘multicultural,’ or ‘inclusivity.’”
This summer, on August 4th, ten years later, just a few months short of its 20th anniversary, the Office of Sustainability at the University of Florida was canceled, staff fired, budget eliminated, website erased, and verboten words stricken from the State of Florida’s lexicon. The office I was hired to spawn at UF was executed without trial or public notice in the typical “Summer Surprise” gambit cowardly campus administrators use when students and faculty are not on campus.
If you are still reading this, you are very likely reflecting on the why and what’s next of it all.
Perspective might be gleaned from Joseph Campbell’s chronicles and mythological narratives that revealed a fundamental heroic structure. He calls the motif of the archetypal narrative, “the hero’s adventure” that describes the Arc of the Universe heroes tend to live in.
Throughout history, heroes “will embark on a road of trials, tested along the way, assisted by allies,” he wrote in his book and PBS series The Hero with a Thousand Faces. “As the heroes face ordeals, they encounter the greatest challenge of the journey. Upon rising to the challenge, the hero will receive a boon and then a metaphorical death and resurrection. The hero then faces more trials on the road back.”
And so here we and AASHE are, decades in the doing, successful but tested, courageously showing up for this conference, this movement, this time in history. We are on the road forward by being on the road back. We all must face and embrace the inevitable heroic tragedy Campbell portends: growth, death, resurrection, and more trials. And more victories. Such is heroism. Such is AASHE. Such is life.
I’ll see you in Minneapolis.
🙂
Coda: I mentioned some of AASHE’s forerunners, founders, volunteers and supporters by name but omitted many, many, many more. Indeed, there are so many that were I to remember, research and report my findings here, I would still miss many of you. Well, I do miss you; seeing you in person, seeing how you heroically work to right the wrongs and write the rights. If you are reading this, you are one of them. Thanks all.