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.