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The 2008 AASHE Digest came out last week. It's a compendium of short blurbs describing sustainability-related activities and achievements at AASHE members colleges and universities. As I mentioned when the 2007 book came out, it's a yearbook rather than an encyclopedia. As a result, it gives only a snapshot of a process which is constantly changing, but it's a pretty large snapshot. "Panorama" might be a better term.
I haven't had a chance to go through the whole thing (it's 357 pages long), but I took a look at the table of contents which divides the entries into categories (education and research, operations, administration and finance, stuff like that). Given that the length of each blurb is fairly standard, the number of pages in each section is a good first-order indicator of where the action is.
It's in operations. And, to a lesser degree, in administration; but a lot of the administrative activity is hiring of sustainability folks to concentrate on operations, so there you go.
Items about the way buildings are operated fill more pages than all the mentions of new curriculum, new research, or co-curricular activities. And that's just basic building operations, not including things like carbon accounting, climate planning, dining facilities, renewable energy, grounds maintenance, purchasing, waste management or transportation. Just keeping the lights on and the insides warm and dry.
Maybe it's the fact that building operations (think energy conservation) is where the low-hanging fruit mostly are. Or maybe (although I somehow doubt it) building managers are better at tooting their own horns than academics are. But I think that part of the problem is that schools haven't done a good enough job at helping teachers infuse sustainability perspectives into the curriculum.
That's a shame.
In fact, of the whole 357 pages, only two (realistically, more like 1.3) talk about what schools have done in terms of sustainability-related development of faculty and staff. And, of that 1.3 pages, less than half relates to faculty in their role as teachers. The most common approach to encouraging and enabling faculty to instill sustainability into the curriculum is some combination of workshops and stipends.
Workshops (often 2 or 3 days long, most commonly during the summer) share ideas, hints, success stories about how a sustainability perspective can be injected into pretty much any subject matter. After all, if your subject is biology or environmental studies, how to teach sustainability is pretty obvious. If you're in engineering, architecture or resource economics it's only slightly harder. But teaching sustainability in the business school has to be done comprehensively, or it could be seen as promoting greenwashing. And do you teach sustainability in humanities courses? If so, how?
Stipends are offered on the theory that faculty respond to financial incentives -- sometimes, pretty small financial incentives. If you're going to revise a syllabus or two over the summer anyway, and the university will throw a few bucks your way if you work a sustainability-related theme in there ... why not?
Given the reputation of faculty members as independent-minded, mandates aren't the way to go. So, the obvious question is what else schools should be doing. Is there something about the way courses get developed and taught which, subtly or otherwise, discourages the inclusion of sustainability-related perspectives? Is there some incentive (short of reduced teaching load -- let's stay realistic here!) that would induce you to work more sustainability issues, cases, considerations, theories into your classroom? Or, to consider the other possibility, are you already doing that and the school's just not reporting it to AASHE (so far as you know)?
