Eco-friendly campus? Why bother?

By Terry Savage •

Florida is a priceless jewel, endowed with coral reefs that protect our coastline, palm trees everywhere, and a vibrant social diversity that comes from its location as a gateway into and from the Caribbean and Latin America. And our campus epitomizes this richness, from the Guy Harvey Oceanographic Center through to our institutional commitment to Belonging, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.

So why bother with a weighty concern like the environment?

NSU holds a variety of initiatives devoted to environmental values – from the Greensharks, and the environmental honors fraternity, Epsilon Eta, through to the Nature Club, which oversees the Healing and Medicinal Garden and conducts outings including snorkeling and camping. The Office of Facilities Management has actively sought to create sustainable infrastructure and practices, such as recycling. And the Department of Conflict Resolution Studies has established a Sustainable Development Working Group.

Evaluating universities for their ecologically sustainable policies and behaviors now represents a growing trend among university rankings, nationally (such as, the Princeton Review) and internationally (QS rankings).

Again, the question, why bother?

Voices denying that conditions on our planet are changing have become fewer, and fainter. And the jaded argument that this is an inevitable part of a regenerative cycle spanning millennia has become simply irrelevant: a correlation has been identified between the beginning of the Industrial Revolution – and all the progress it brought – and global warming, and this produced a trend that is now rapidly accelerating.

If a fire started in your home, would you pause and get into a vociferous argument with your neighbors over who to blame – or would you simply do everything you could to put it out?

A few approaches have emerged to addressing our planet’s overheating problem. Green tech is one, and we see that in policies that incentivize renewable energy sources and, crucially, less environmentally destructive vehicles. Another is establishing legal liability for projects and practices that damage and interfere with delicate ecosystems.

A third approach is fair burden sharing. What this looks like is not yet clear, but it does not mean each country should pay equally: the 54 countries in Africa produce less than 4% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, while the US and China, trapped in economic competition, together produce over 50%. Much of the work underway internationally is about looking for ways to establish, in the words of the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change, ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ – and crafting an integrated approach that also tackles poverty and taps into renewable resources, like Africa’s immense sunshine, ergo capacity for solar power.

Amid this global recognition of the need to act, what might a vision of an eco-friendly campus look like? In this, the methodologies used and innovations uncovered by university rankings may be useful. One popular source of comparative data about university performance, QS World University Rankings, has highlighted a few possibilities.

One is sustainable building design, which NSU undertook beginning in 2001 (https://www.nova.edu/gogreen/). Another is renewable energy, such as the photovoltaic and wind turbine system at the Oceanographic Center.

Other QS recommendations tackle waste – not punitively or through waste-shaming but creatively and practically. QS note a growing trend in universities of reducing plastic pollution through the installation of hydration stations to encourage re-use of water bottles and (re-usable bottles). One university in Peru sells paper waste to a recycling company and earmarks the proceeds for scholarships.

Another university, in Switzerland, separates food waste in its canteens and sends it to a nearby farm, where it is turned into biogas fuel, generating electricity for the surrounding community.

The list of possibilities of what can be done is endless. And, beyond the obvious – initial funding – a crucial element in making it happen will be what Conflict Resolution practitioners call a stakeholder mapping: identifying individuals and communities whose interests, needs, and fears, would be impacted as well as those who could influence and inspire the process and its outcomes.

Working with the people to whom our exquisite setting has become home should be the easy part.

Dr. Terry Savage, an associate professor in Halmos College’s Department of Conflict Resolution Studies, is currently building a restorative justice approach to tackling ecological abuse.