Eleanor Babcock
11/1/15
Cool Campus

Our class topic of focus this week was all about campus sustainability relating to climate change and sustainability efforts. I was not present in class on Tuesday this week because I attended the AASHE conference in the Twin Cities. AASHE stands for the Association for Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. For this blog, I would like to reflect on my experience at AASHE and share some information and knowledge I accumulated while being at the conference because I feel it lines up with our class discussions this week.

The Sunday portion of the conference was the student summit. Students who advocate for a certain aspect of sustainability on their campus presented. I found it interesting to hear from my peers as to how they're using their resources to become more knowledgeable and implement new sustainable programs on their campuses.

I also attended the conference on Tuesday. This day of the conference was interesting because the demographics switched from predominantly students to campus sustainability representatives and professors. There were more options of sessions to attend and I found them interesting because these ideas and programs were coming from a different lens.

The most interesting experience I had at the AASHE conference was on Tuesday was at a session on measuring impacts of campus oil and gas consumption. I decided to go to this one because it expanded the topic of climate change from campus carbon emissions to other sources of resource use and how to measure those types of environmental impacts. My experience was unique because I was the only member who attended this specific conference. The two presenters invited me to join them in a smalll group discussion where they began to inform me on their work with campus oil and gas consumption. Their major concern for oil and gas consumption was land ethics. If campuses make the shift to renewables there are negative impacts including issues with land-use contracts, Free People and Informed Conscent (FPIC) and other resource issues such as water use. The presentors had an interesting take on how to assess oil and gas consumption, they tended to focus on the ethical side of the impacts ratrher than the environmental side.

About ten minutes into the small group presentation, something out of the ordinary happened. A man walked in and sat down and began to discuss the importance of oil and gas consumption in terms of divestment. Divestment is the removal of university stocks in oil and gas companies. As the man spoke I realized this was no ordinary man. He spoke with intelligence on the topic and contributed wise remarks about divestment and campus sustainability. A few minutes into his talk, he finally introduced himself as the president of Unity college. Yes, I was sitting in a conference room with Stephan Mulkey, president of the first college in the nation to divest. One of the most interesting points he made about divestment is that our investment is financially imperative for universities. The driving force behind some of the most un-sustainable actions we do as a campus is money. Economics always tends to trump environmental impact. Ethics are not among one of the driving decisions for good campus sustainability decisions.

As the conversation between the presenters and Stephan Mulkey went on, their discussion went off topic from oil and gas consumption and divestment to talk about other important issues regarding campus sustainability, they were all very interesting and insightful. I really enjoyed the AASHE conference and I feel I learned a lot about campus sustainability initiatives from my peers and the presenters.