The role of universities in the transition to environmental sustainability
Last summer, I finished the manuscript for my new book: Environmentally Sustainable Growth: A Pragmatic ApproachMy team and I have been reviewing the proofs and index for the past few weeks, and Columbia Press has told me it will be published in about five months. The main point of the book is that we are in the midst of a generation-long struggle to transform our economy from a one-time linear model to one based on renewable resources and a deep concern for environmental protection. It’s going to be a long transition period, but it’s going well. As I reviewed the manuscript, I began to think about the various work I had done at Columbia University and the role of the university in facilitating this critical shift.
Few are interested in the complexities of long-term change, and many have no patience for it. I dedicate my new book to my three granddaughters, because I suspect this transition will be more important to their lives than mine. I want them to live in a world of hope and promise, and building that world requires us to use new technologies to solve problems created by existing technologies. The type of change we need requires the type of government leadership that Joe Biden has shown in addressing the climate crisis, as well as the type of corporate leadership that I discuss in my new book from companies like Apple, Etsy, and Walmart. It also requires university leadership.
Columbia’s sustainability record is spotty but improving. Of course, I go back to when I came to Columbia in 1981 as an assistant professor and one of my four courses was Environmental Politics and Policy. Shortly after I arrived, a senior executive put his arm around my shoulder and said, “Look, Steve, no one comes to New York City to study the environment. We want you to teach another management class”. It wasn’t until I became SIPA’s Associate Dean in 1987 that I began teaching environmental courses and I was able to create a new focus in environmental policy research. But things improved, and soon our Lamont geoscientists began teaching an environmental science course called “Environmental Science for Policymaking”—a course designed for science-illiterate people like me who research and create public policy . In 1996, Mike Crow founded the Earth Institute and we started the game. I became the Institute’s Director of Education in 2002, and we established a comprehensive undergraduate, master’s and doctoral program with a focus on environmental sustainability. Thousands of students study with us and our alumni network is growing, inspiring and impressive.
Our researchers, especially those at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and other key research units on the Lamont Campus, continue to generate world-class insights into the state of our planet. We were even able to attract one of the best environmental lawyers in the country, Mike Gerald, who established the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at our law school. My colleague Shahid Naeem has now recruited University Professor Ruth DeFries to our ecosystem. Many other eminent environmental scholars followed.i guess people Do Come to New York to study the environment.
But there are a lot of things that other universities and Columbia don’t do. The funding base for research on our planet is thin, and the hundreds of soft-fund researchers employed by Columbia constantly fight for grants to keep it afloat. The federal government under Biden has reopened Trump’s shuttered environmental research operations, but who knows what’s next? Universities seem to be able to raise money for medical research, but endowments for environmental research remain sparse. We know far more about the human body than we do about Earth’s biodiversity. We also have not raised enough scholarships to ensure that everyone who is eligible to study with us has access to the educational opportunities we have in our environment. Our undergraduate and doctoral programs are excellent at supporting students, but the funding model for our specialist masters programs sees tuition fees as an investment in students. In most cases, the investment pays off, but for some students, the required cost or debt can hinder learning. In the Sustainability Stewardship program that I direct, we recently formed an advisory board to help generate new scholarship, but we still have a long way to go.
So far, my focus has been on my own universities, but we are only one of them. Many schools are developing educational programs addressing various elements of environmental sustainability.When Mike Crow became president of ASU, he created the School of Sustainability, and John Doerr recently donated $1.1 billion to Stanford to create the School of Sustainability. The fundamental work of universities is to create and disseminate new knowledge. We are slowly institutionalizing the field of planetary sustainability at American University, which is central to our mission.
But that’s far from our only job. Our campus and endowment give us the opportunity to lead by example. In Colombia, we occupy very expensive land in a very expensive city. Our iconic campus in Morningside Heights is mostly landmarks, mostly old buildings, old energy and waste infrastructure, and high operating and maintenance budgets. It took us over a decade to convince our facilities personnel of the importance of environmental performance. Many are on board now, but face costly hurdles from our beautiful but inefficient campuses. Our new campus in Manhattanville, a quarter of a mile away, is full of modern and greener buildings, but sadly it’s built next to the Hudson River, just a few feet above sea level. The new campus will require costly engineering to control the flooding that climate change will inevitably bring.
The transition to environmental sustainability also requires a transition to organizational sustainability, which involves encouraging diversity, equity, inclusion, and access, as well as a focus on community impact and organizational transparency. Fortunately, in its failed effort to build a gymnasium in a valuable community park, Columbia University has come a long way to provide separate and unequal facilities for students and the Harlem community. Back in the late 1960s, student activists at Columbia closed the university and blocked construction of the gymnasium. Fortunately, institutions have the capacity to learn, and when the site for the Manhattanville campus was chosen, the university and the community worked out a $70 million community benefit agreement to ensure the new campus would become a community asset.
Like all large and powerful institutions, universities need to internalize concern for environmental impact in their standard operating procedures. They must transition to electric vehicles and utilize renewable energy. While Columbia students do not drive to campus, most students at most universities do. The huge car parks at many universities could be enclosed and then covered with solar panels. Charging stations can be built into these new parking structures. Construction costs can be recovered through reduced energy costs and charges. Food waste at the university should be separated from other waste and composted or disposed of in an anaerobic digester. These are just examples of the various best environmental practices that universities should adhere to.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, universities must teach environmental ethics and respect for our planet. Urban universities must take students to the countryside to experience nature first-hand. One of the greatest threats to environmental sustainability is that we may somehow allow virtual experiences of nature to replace real ones, and technology to replace the natural world. Protecting nature is necessary to protect human life today, but one day technology will have the ability to replace the natural world. The only way to prevent this from happening is to include in our education system the same respect we teach for life on Earth that we teach for human life. Environmental protection is a kind of value, which requires faith and even some spirituality. For religious people, the question is simple: what gives humans the right to destroy what our gods have created? For the less religious, the issue is more complex, but at its core is a key part of a moral value system that values ​​the natural world. Protecting the Earth is as self-defensive as protecting any other valuable and beautiful creation. It is the university’s job to foster and teach environmental ethics and to ensure that it permeates education from preschool through graduate school.
