'Sustainability' From A to Z: a Round-Table Discussion

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Recently The Chronicle met in Boston with a group of architects and campus-sustainability directors to talk about climate change, poverty, energy use, environmental health, and the role that colleges, and particularly their facilities offices, can play in dealing with those issues.

The participants were Sarah Hammond Creighton, director of campus sustainability at Tufts University; Thomas Fisher, an architect who is dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; Tom Kelly, director of the office of sustainability at the University of New Hampshire; and Ellen Watts, a founder and principal at Architerra, a Boston-based architecture firm devoted to sustainability. The Chronicle's Scott Carlson was the moderator. The transcript that follows has been edited for length and clarity.

People interpret sustainability differently, so let's start with a definition of what sustainability is.

TOM KELLY: It's about redirecting society in fundamental ways. ... Solving a problem in higher education is really reductionist, where you break things apart into their component pieces, and you get at the essence of things by getting at the smallest piece. ... But sustainability is almost an opposite outlook. It pushes problems together, which can appear to overcomplicate things, but it looks for where connections are and what kind of interventions can solve multiple problems.

SARAH HAMMOND CREIGHTON: It's this link between problems that leads us to the classic definition of "meeting the needs of present generations without compromising the needs of future generations" [paraphrasing a definition of sustainability as laid out in the "Brundtland Report" from the U.N. World Commission on Environment and Development].

THOMAS FISHER: I tend to think of it in a slightly different way. I think it's about the survivability of our civilization and possibly our species. When you see that we are headed in 40 or 50 years to 550 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere, to nine billion to ten billion people on the planet, with four-fifths of the population having difficulty getting access to fresh water, along with the end of cheap oil and so on, ... I think we're facing as a civilization, and maybe as a species, a collapse, as Jared Diamond has written. [See Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond (Viking, 2004), and The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, by Thomas F. Homer-Dixon (Island Press, 2006).]

ELLEN WATTS: Far more people think hybrid cars are the answer to our environmental problems than building, design, and construction. That simply isn't true. Buildings account for a third of our energy consumption and two-thirds of our electricity use, and way more than that if you take into account the embodied energy in building products.

Certainly everyone seems to be putting up a green building these days. Are buildings and facilities the best place to begin to approach sustainability?

THOMAS FISHER: One of the things that Bill McDonough says is that we talk a lot about efficiency, but efficiency is really just slowing down our path to the edge of a cliff. So buying fleets of hybrid cars, doing a green building, putting on a green roof — all of these are good things. But we are in some fundamental way just slowing down the inevitable. So the question really is, How do you take a right turn so you don't go off the cliff? I'm not sure we know how to do that. [See Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart (North Point Press, 2002). Chapter 2 explains "why being 'less bad' is no good."]

SARAH HAMMOND CREIGHTON: Right now we are making most of our facilities and construction decisions on the old "benefit" paradigm. ... Those are marginal decisions that are still viewed only on the dollar payback. If you think about things in terms of risk and planning, you get a whole different set of decision inputs. For example, distributed generation [cogeneration, fuel cells, wind power] on campus in some cases has a cost benefit, and in some cases it doesn't. But look at the benefit of reliable power on campus, reducing the frequency of outages. In Boston we know about brownouts. They're real. ... To connect that risk to the mission of the institution changes the investment decisions you come to.

Why is sustainability in facilities important?

TOM KELLY: Higher education, which has been criticized for many years in the United States for not addressing the challenges we face as a society, de-educates the next generation of leaders. It desensitizes them by putting these questions of facilities and operations at the margins, in the background, and saying that the "real" heart of the issue is inside the classroom, up on a hill, or in a tower. ... Right now we're teaching them that none of this [green movement in facilities] matters that much, because we don't bring them into the process. We don't say why we are doing this — or, if we do, there is a piece in the newspaper saying that we do it to save money.

THOMAS FISHER: This goes back to Plato's Academy, which had this division between thinking and making, and making was of a lower level. Facilities are about using your hands, and that is of less value than thought, and we're hamstrung by that. ... Universities used to be sustainable communities. When the Cambridge colleges were built, they planted forests with each college so they would have a supply of materials to repair that college. Often they grew their food locally and they used local materials. ... We've forgotten that. In some ways, this is just remembering what we used to know.

ELLEN WATTS: Look at the potential. Universities are still largely self-planned, self-regulated, self-contained, often even legally protected from controls by local zoning. The acreage and square footage that is involved is astounding. The colleges in the Boston area comprise more than the entire downtown-Boston office market — 60 million square feet. We celebrate the six LEED-registered [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a program of the U.S. Green Building Council] and certified buildings out of a sampling of more than 1,200 buildings on those campuses. ... But we actually find over three years that energy utilization per person on those campuses is still increasing, in spite of [the cost of] fossil fuels' doubling. ... Even more astounding, on campuses that have attended little to energy policy, the average kid is consuming more than the average American household. It is out of control.

SARAH HAMMOND CREIGHTON: The key people in the environmental piece of sustainability ... are the operations people. ... There is a set of extremely important things that the operations people do or need to do. For 15 years, I have been talking to students who want to green their campus, and the first question I always ask is, Have you talked to your facilities director? Fifty percent of those students say, Not yet. I say, Before you talk to me, you have to talk with them. First of all, they may have already done a lot, and second, they are the people you will need to partner with if you want to make something happen. ...

Let's get back to the makers and the thinkers. The facilities people give a tour of our boiler plant as part of our climate-change course. Students love it. But let's remember: These are people who wear their names on their shirts. That right there says something about how we value what they do. Right now facilities are a support of the education, not part of it.

How can architecture and facilities become teachable moments?

SARAH HAMMOND CREIGHTON: The facilities themselves certainly teach. We hide how we handle waste. ... Ask any student in any high-school class, Where does your water come from, and where does your waste go? They can't answer it, and [neither can] college students. Just simply pointing out that buildings have costs and wastes is important. ... There is a huge wealth of knowledge within facilities and also within the people who make facilities run. That is of great value to students. We have had students tell us that the most useful parts of their entire academic experience were projects that they worked on with the grounds manager.

ELLEN WATTS: One of the most important charges we feel as architects is to reveal how things work. ... We have been trying to put on display all of those workings that are usually out of sight, out of mind. ... We have been making, for example, mechanical galleries that put enthalpy heat-recovery wheels behind glass, that put composters servicing stacks of composting toilets on display where their workings and biological processes can be studied and appreciated. ... More and more we are opting to expose structural systems and other elements of mechanical systems that are sometimes concealed — just to make people curious.

In building sustainably, there's a lot of room for out-of-the-box thinking.

ELLEN WATTS: A couple of years ago, I was involved in a major expansion of one of the largest law schools in the United States. We were trying to make the facility as sustainable as we could, and we were trying to think beyond the LEED point system. ... We found out that every single one of the students drove to this law school, even though the housing for the law school, which was about 1,500 students, was only a quarter of a mile away — a really beautiful walk. The reason the students confessed they drove was because the law school did not have any lockers, and they needed to carry not only laptops but also huge law volumes, and running back and forth from their car trunks was an every-other-hour activity for them. We probably did more to reduce carbon emissions in that new facility by providing lockers in the law school. ... And yet you don't get LEED points for lockers.

In recent years, many college campuses have become more and more like country clubs. Do you think colleges have the will to push students to change their lifestyles and make sacrifices?

TOM KELLY: Students really do want to change the world, and they come into higher education full of huge ideas. And what happens is, they run into a brick wall. ... The students become very disenchanted and very disappointed with what they end up experiencing. ... That's the de-education I was talking about. Experiential learning ... is part of the whole spirit of wanting to change the world. Harnessing that spirit and feeding it, rather than trying to beat it out of them to become disembodied specialists, is what education is supposed to be. I think we could join forces with a lot of people who haven't been thinking about sustainability but have been thinking about higher-education reform — we have a common agenda.

SARAH HAMMOND CREIGHTON: While I agree with Tom that students want to change the world, in our experience at Tufts, we offer fair-trade coffee as an option, and we're willing to offer more and pay the price, but students aren't choosing it, despite education efforts. I'm not sure what that says, except that everyone's actions are not always what they say. Similarly, I have a new study where I ask groups of environmentalists: Do you think climate change is the most important problem of our time? Everyone raises their hands. Do you think reducing greenhouse-gas emission is the solution? Everyone raises their hands. ... Then: How many of you think your own emissions are 7 percent below 1990 levels? Two people out of 60 raise their hands. Awareness alone is not the solution, and we are spending way too much time in the sustainability movement focusing on awareness. We need to move to real action to keep from going over the cliff — and that's where facilities come in.

THOMAS FISHER: I think one of the challenges, though, is that all of our institutions are competing for these groups of students, many of whom are affluent. We're all afraid to have anyone sacrifice, because they might go to the college in the next state that has the hotel-like dorm and the lush rec facilities. Nobody wants to make the first step. Part of this, of course, is sensitizing our students to the fact that in the global spectrum, we are a tiny group of highly affluent people in a global population that is incredibly impoverished. I've been teaching classes on homelessness where our students spend a day as homeless people. They meet at the shelter at 7 a.m., and they go out the door with no money and nothing to eat until the shelter opens again at 6. ... What it does is sensitize students to the fact that most people have very little, and all of this plushness that our institutions are using to attract students is an anomaly.

TOM KELLY: I would vigorously oppose characterizing sustainability as sacrifice. I think that is playing into the hands of the status quo. If you think about enhancing quality of life, that's what sustainability is about. ... The whole move of higher education becoming a business — students as customers, education as commodity — is one of the most dangerous things that has happened to higher education. That is why we compete with luxury. The universities are about branding themselves, and now sustainability is a way to brand your university.

In the economy, the holiest word is "growth." Everyone wants to grow their campusesputting up new buildings, renovating, expanding. How does that fit into the discussion of sustainability?

THOMAS FISHER: Well, this sounds old-fashioned, but you used to go to college for inner growth. We still do, obviously, but so much of it is focused on external, material growth. ... This is the cultural shift we have to get back to. We have got to recognize that we do not have the resources to continue to grow materially in the way we have been doing. ... We have to reorient our culture toward the idea of inner growth, of which education is a key activity.

SARAH HAMMOND CREIGHTON: We need to grow smart. Space utilization is critical. One of the reasons that certain kinds of colleges have more chemistry labs per student has to do in part with how they schedule chemistry labs. ... The utilization of those high-energy-intensity spaces is greater and more efficient at places with fewer resources. At Tufts we changed the schedule and increased the amount of square feet available by about 20 percent. We spent almost no dollars. That's huge, and that's how you grow. ... At Tufts, I believe we've picked the low-hanging fruit. ... To me there is a set of minimum criteria before you can even claim that you are moving toward sustainability.

ELLEN WATTS: Maybe not at Sarah's institution, but at plenty of others, we see low-hanging fruit all the time. ... Very often when we talk to the registrar, we find that classroom and laboratory utilization is less than 50 percent. So much more resourcefulness could be attained, even through scheduling. In programming laboratories — we design a lot of those — we often [hear]: We need this many laboratories so that each faculty member can have his own lab, because if not, we'd have to hire a lab tech to set the labs up during the changeover. Well, how much does a lab tech cost a year? $50,000? That's way less expensive than building gobs of square footage.

Let's look to the future. Are you optimists or pessimists?

THOMAS FISHER: I actually think universities are headed not so much to a cliff but toward a brick wall. Tuition has risen far faster than inflation. ... We are going to be less affluent in this country, and our institutions are going to be less affluent. And what I hope comes of that is not just trying to maintain the old paradigm and watch everything slowly decay, but that we actually go through the paradigm shift and fundamentally operate in different ways. It is a higher quality of life, but it will be very different from how we operate now. I actually think it will be closer to what universities used to be — a sort of rediscovering of what we are and what we used to know that we have forgotten.