The Princeton Review's Green Ratings have been unveiled

And we got a 92 out of 99. Cool! Here's the methodology behind the rating and here's the list of schools who scored a 99.

Blog: Tiny Choices

Tiny Choices is a great blog run by Karina Tipton and Jenn Sturiale. It's just what the name implies: a blog about the small choices we make in our daily lives and how those choices can be made with the environment in mind. They have a sweet weekly roundup for those of us who need our information in small portions (uh, hi) as well as other regular features like the Easy Peasy Tip and the Tiny Choices Survey (filled out by readers). The blog is very readable and the posts are relatively concise (does anyone else find themselves tuning out halfway through a long article or blog post? What's happening to my attention span?! Perhaps part of the answer lies here). Anyway, the blog is full of interesting tidbits. Maybe I'm weird, but I'd never heard of a shampoo bar before...I may have to try that out.

Wesleyan Magazine writes us up

Just a heads up that Wesleyan Magazine (a publication my parents thoroughly enjoy) has an article about us (well, sustainability in general) in the most recent issue (which you can't access online just yet). My personal favorite quotes are

1) "The EON membership has been remarkably effective in..using research and information as their tools to co-opt the administration." (what now)
and
2) "There's still the search for an alternative path, though the talk now is of 'non-hierarchical' structures rather than non-patriarchical ones and of 'environmental bonding' (doing it in the dark)." (hahaha...clearly someone has been reading the blog, since both of those phrases are straight from the description.)

On the topic of doing it in the dark, someone told me last year that Tufts gives out glow-in-the-dark condoms as part of their "Do it in the Dark" energy competition. Um, we should definitely steal that idea, yes?

Oberlin builds green

(Photo by Barney Taxel via the AJLC website)

Earlier this month, Inhabitat posted about Oberlin's Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies. Not just a place to learn in, the building is meant to be a place to learn from. One of the great elements of the building is the Living Machine, a water and waste purification system modelled on wetland ecosystems. According to David W. Orr (Professor and Director of Oberlin's Environmental Studies Program),

"We intended to create not just a place for classes but rather a building that would help to redefine the relationship between humankind and the environment."

Speaking of "green" campus constructions, work on the MLSB (to be designed to LEED Silver Standards) seems to be more or less humming along. Check out some plans that are to be presented in mid-August (of particular interest are the Site Plan and Lawn Avenue Concept). It looks like the new building will be placed flush against Exley, with several senior woodframes sacrificed to make room for it and a terraced lawn. Documents relating to the project can be found on your Blackboard.

Links:
List of William McDonough + Partners other academic projects
AJLC Website
Payette Website (architects doing Wesleyan's MLSB Building. We made it onto the College and University Clients PDF list..)

Freeganism

Jean over at CollegeOTR (who also dreamed up Waste Not!) recently posted on a movement called "freeganism," which is a lifestyle that "employ[s] alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources." (from here). It seems to me like an impossibility to live completely out of our economic system, but it's an interesting idea and I'm a fan of the dumpster diving/recycling of usable items/saving things part (you know that first hand if you're lucky enough to belong to the EON listserv). Anyway, the website is full of info, and some of it is useful (even if you're not interested in going to the most extreme end of the freeganism spectrum).

Green Universities compete for rankings

There's an interesting NYT article about the recent rush to green university campuses and to become "the greenest" school. I think the article echos concerns we've had as we've pushed for Wesleyan to become more sustainable over the past year: we want to make sure that we're making real change and not settling for "low-hanging fruit."

“It’s important that we focus on the significant rather than the symbolic, or at least recognize the symbolic for what it is,” says Sarah Hammond Creighton, the sustainability coordinator at Tufts. “I think the commitments are generally real, but I worry that the translation into the depth of the challenge hasn’t hit people.”

Along these lines, I think it's important that we recognize that this is a big project we're taking on. Though it's easy to become overwhelmed with all that still needs to be done, we should applaud ourselves for the progress we have made, however slow or small it seems. We're heading in the right direction. Still, we have to make sure that Wesleyan as an institution is not

...focused on where [it] stand[s] rather than on making substantial changes that will reduce [its] carbon footprint. “They can lose sight of the fact that it’s more important to think about where we need to go and what it’s going to take to get us there than about what our peer school is doing,” she says [Jennifer Andres of Clean Air-Cool Planet].

Anyway, I guess I'm trying to say that we've got our work cut out for us, but I think things are going well and that we're on the path to meaningful change. Virtual pat on the back for us. If you haven't checked it out yet, please do take a look at the Green Report. That's where we've been; the big task for this coming year is to plan where we're going.

Powervote!

Hey all,
Hope you are all having great summers and enjoying the sunshine outdoors. If, however, you somehow find yourself indoors and by a computer (like right now! unless you're outside on a laptop), I have a suggestion.

There is a group called the Energy Action Coalition (Youth United for Clean and Just Energy) that has set up an online pledge to urge the government to create green jobs and stop relying on dirty energy. The movement is supposed to be youth driven, but at the moment the number of signatories on the pledge is, well, sad.

Being (arguably) youth, and being (ostensibly) concerned with the environment, Let's make this plegde less sad, aka more awesome, aka take like two minutes to sign an online document espousing some really cool ideas.

The pledge is here:
http://www.powervote.org/

The main webpage is here:
http://energyactioncoalition.org/


Yea! Wind energy n' stuff!!!
Ok that's all.

Trackable Bananas

(check out the animation featuring the above banana)

So the other day I was eating a banana (my mom's on an all veggies/fruit/beans diet so suddenly I'm faced with a bounty of healthy things to eat) and I was surprised to discover that I had the option of virtually visiting the farm on which it was produced. Each banana has a sticker with the number of its farm of origin, and you can go online to view a webpage full of info including the farm's organic certifications. There's also an option to view the farm on Google Earth (perhaps slightly creepy, but also kindof cool). My banana was from Hacienda Pérez Quiñonez, located the province of El Oro in Ecuador. (see link)

Anyway, I know that's way more than you probably ever wanted to know about my eating habits, but I thought it was really cool. Usually, finding out where your food comes from requires extensive investigation, and it was nice to be handed that information with the food for a change. At first I was a little skeptical (given the dirty history of big fruit companies and that I'm generally suspicious from reading No Logo) but then I realized that I was confusing United Fruit (now Chiquita) with Standard Fruit (now Dole). Maybe I'm wrong, but I think Standard Fruit has a less violent history than United Fruit's history (which includes a banana massacre). Anyway, this Wikipedia article was pretty informative and brought back hazy memories of the Foreign Policy class I took in high school, so that was fun.

Some things:
-Dole Organics Website
-Banana Wars (you can read portions on google books...)