Everyone has heard the eco-awareness buzz. From light bulbs to LEED, sustainability has become a bonafide trend on which college union professionals—and the rest of the world—are being called upon to act. But what does sustainability mean beyond environmental sensitivity? What should those beyond higher education facilities professionals be doing to make our campuses more sustainable?
Tom Kelly, chief sustainability officer (CSO) and director of the University Office of Sustainability at the University of New Hampshire, provided answers to these and many more questions during an interview on May 5, 2008. Kelly has been working in the field of higher education and sustainable development for more than 15 years in the United States, Colombia, and Brazil. He is a founding member of the Northeast Campus Sustainability Consortium and is involved in numerous projects throughout the world relating to sustainability.
ACUI: Tom, the “CSO” title is relatively uncommon. Tell me about how this position evolved.
Tom Kelly: Well, I began in 1997 as the founding director of the Office of Sustainability at the University of New Hampshire. From the beginning, our charge was to integrate sustainability across the entire fabric of the university, so it really had a university-wide vision and charge. We organized this program over four thematic areas: climate and energy; biodiversity and ecosystems; the food system; and culture, and we look at how those systems are treated within our core components of curriculum, operations, research, and engagement.
While this approach worked reasonably well, at the level of a director you don’t always have the necessary access to policy-making to make things happen. After 10 years as director of this area, we had a new president arrive who was interested in having my office report directly to the provost, and as his first official act on the job, he not only made that change but also renamed the position “chief sustainability officer” both to convey that it was a senior-level responsibility and also to underscore that it was a senior-level commitment to sustainability on the part of the university.
ACUI: What are your primary responsibilities as CSO?
Tom Kelly: I think the primary goal has not changed, and that is to ensure that we are systematically integrating sustainability into our programming, into our policy making, and into our decision-making in every aspect and at every level of the university. What has changed is the priority level of sustainability and its central role in decision-making, and that brings greater empowerment to move things forward as well as greater accountability for ensuring we are setting the right goals and achieving them. That means that I work with administrators from all across the university in areas as diverse as finance, enrollment management and research, as well as directly with the provost on things relating to our academic plan. I also work with many groups of faculty, staff, and deans and with a wide variety of departments and organizations on specific programmatic innovations.
ACUI: So, it sounds like you’re in a lot of meetings, yes?
Tom Kelly: Yes, that’s true—a lot of meetings to be certain. It’s about bringing people together across these boundaries that are so well established at the institution, across colleges, across departments, and across a host of functions involving faculty, staff, and students—a lot of bridging.
ACUI: Regarding the term “sustainability,” it seems to mean different things to different people, and it also seems to be an issue on many levels. Could you give us your thoughts on a global level on the challenges we face?
Tom Kelly: Sure, and my comments here really derive from the framework that I mentioned earlier, where we built around the findings of the international scientific community and the international policy community. So we look at the four major areas of crisis. Regarding the climate system, the Intergovenmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment shows that the science is crystal clear. Ecosystem health, as reflected in the millennium ecosystem assessment, is also crystal clear scientifically. In the food system, from a health and nutrition standpoint, we see an epidemic of obesity but also continuing hunger on all scales—global, national, and local. And in the cultural system, we see a consumer society all caught up in the unsustainable pattern of consumption, raising serious questions about the quality of life and what really sustains a high quality of life. And people are increasingly coming to the conclusion that it’s a lot more than just high levels of consumption. So from a sustainability viewpoint, we have these many complex challenges that need to be addressed, and the key to sustainability is that we don’t look at any of them in isolation, but rather push them together and look at how they overlap so that we can find creative solutions that work across all of these systems.
ACUI: Now, bring us down to the level of higher education. Can you comment on how these issues play out there?
Tom Kelly: Certainly. When we take it to higher education, that’s where we address what we call the CORE: Curriculum, Operations, Research, and Engagement. And in that continuum of the CORE, when we put it all together, that is what we refer to as the “sustainable learning community.” For example, let’s talk about the area of food, which is one of the four key systems. Within our own operations we have a Local Harvest Initiative with our dining services area wherein we work closely with the dining staff who are engaged in efforts such as local and regional procurement, the composting of all food waste, and making the dining hall itself more energy efficient and more water efficient. At the same time, we are educating students (who are their customers) about where their food comes from and about healthy eating. So that’s an operational example.
On an academic level, we’ve worked for the past two years on a curriculum project to create a new dual major in Eco-Gastronomy, linking sustainable agriculture, food entrepreneurship, and nutrition. So, students from any primary major will be able to opt for this major, and it will be an experiential, interdisciplinary, and international experience. As a part of that effort, we’re collaborating with the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy, which was started by the Slow Food International founder, Carlo Petrini. Our students will go to the University of Gastronomic Sciences as part of this dual major, and students from the University of Gastronomic Sciences will come to the University of New Hampshire as well. So, that’s an example of a curricular project within this framework that I’ve been talking about.
We’ve also gone through a year-long strategic planning process here to create the New Hampshire Center for a Food-Secure Future. That’s a research and engagement activity bringing faculty together from the areas of sustainable agriculture, food enterprises, and nutrition to look at the health and sustainability of the food system in our state and in our region.
ACUI: Tom, to your knowledge, is this the first-ever Eco-Gastronomy curriculum?
Tom Kelly: Yes, it is the first that I’m aware of, although in Italy, the University of Gastronomic Sciences has started similar initiatives. We gave Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food International, an honorary degree in 2006 here at the University of New Hampshire, and he spent four days with us. We had a whole series of meetings with different groups of faculty, and through our conversations with him, we created this idea. It’s really exciting.
ACUI: OK, so in the context of a college union, which has as its primary mission the building of community on campus, but which also involves itself in a variety of auxiliary operations like dining services, what challenges and opportunities to you see for us in the area of sustainability?
Tom Kelly: I really believe that the concept of community is at the center of sustainability. I mean, that whole notion of building a community—which I know speaks to your audience—is what sustainability is all about for me. So, I think one opportunity for your colleagues is to now see their longstanding efforts to build community in a new light, which could perhaps deepen the connections they feel and broaden the collaborations that they engage in with faculty, staff, and administrators towards what I feel is the larger goal of a sustainable community.
One example of how this plays out on our campus is the annual Local Harvest Dinner, where members of both the university and the larger community come together for a great, huge dinner. Local farmers set up tables where people can meet them and learn about their efforts, a wide variety of other groups set up information tables, and it’s just a very nice community-building activity.
We also have a number of student organizations that have formed in these areas of interest. For instance, we coordinate a working group on food systems that got a plot of land certified organic on the main campus about five years ago and almost immediately, an organic gardening club was formed. Now in their fourth year of existence, the club has won all kinds of awards for their efforts. They sell vegetables to our dining halls, they set up a farmers’ market tent in the spring and fall, they donate to local food pantries on a regular basis, and they organize a community dinner once a month to help build community in our area.
ACUI: Tom, let’s talk a bit about students as customers or consumers. We are seeing increased interest in nutritional labeling, in environmentally responsible meal plans, and in things like fair trade coffee and sweat shop abuse. Can you comment on those movements?
Tom Kelly: I think the challenge and the opportunity with those kinds of issues is to connect them with the larger framework of sustaining a community. As we try to advance a common conception of sustainability, we always run into those who think it’s just about the environment—about recycling and preserving natural resources. But when we rephrase the question to read: “What is it that sustains us as human beings and as human communities?” we find that beyond clean air, clean water, and healthy food, people want to talk about a whole host of other things such as a sense of community, common experiences, transportation, livelihood, and companies that don’t exploit labor in order to get a cheap retail price for their products. In truth, all of these things can be addressed together in a large, integrated manner.
I think there is a tendency for campuses to have a collection of special interest groups, each of which has its own little niche, as in “I’m a human rights advocate,” or “I’m an environmental advocate,” or “I’m a nutrition advocate.” The opportunity in sustainability is to very actively ask: “How do all of these different concerns, each of which is clearly important, connect in a larger framework?” That kind of approach gets us to the heart of sustainability and to the public policies that need to be addressed.
ACUI: The whole area of student involvement is something that we are a part of as college union and student activities professionals. Do you have thoughts on what we can do to help students engage in the sustainability effort?
Tom Kelly: Sure. An example of student involvement on our campus is a group called the Ecological Advocates. This student organization formed as result of a competition called the Waste Watch Energy Challenge that takes place in our dormitories. After that competition, some students assumed leadership roles in their dorms and continued to get together around ecology issues. And we certainly have other student groups that have formed to advocate for sustainable living activities in the context of their living units.
Professional staff in college unions can really assist these different interest groups by creating an opportunity for them to explore how their various areas of interest relate to each other, and that can be a very interesting intellectual exercise as well as a practical way to think about collaboration. Certainly any kind of programming or facilitation that college union professionals can provide in this regard, particularly in collaboration with faculty in a co-curricular context, would be extremely helpful.
Another way for your colleagues to nurture student involvement, and particularly for those who have their own facilities, is to engage students in looking at practices within their buildings relative to energy, water, food, and all those various factors.
ACUI: You just mentioned partnerships with faculty, which makes me wonder about the applicability of the service-learning model to sustainability. Can you comment?
Tom Kelly: Certainly. This idea of a sustainable learning community is a key concept for us, and in a sustainable learning community, everything is curriculum, everyone is an educator, and it’s really about how we put it all together. It’s taking the service-learning model and placing it within a framework that reflects a continuum of activities—all of which are required to create a sustainable community. It’s people seeing activities that they are already engaged in, but in a broader framework, which can lead to new kinds of collaboration. For example, we have a program called the New Hampshire Carbon Challenge developed by two women to focus on household-level changes that people can make. And it’s led to a whole series of things and a growing demand from communities for technical support and assistance on how to make adjustments within their own households, businesses, and towns to reduce energy consumption, reduce emissions, and, quite frankly, save money. While we focus a lot on climate, energy, ecosystem, and other environmental issues, we need to make sure that students understand that literacy programs and outreach to those who are experiencing difficulties are also part and parcel of what sustains a human being and a high quality of life. In other words, we keep coming back to sustainable communities.
ACUI: Have you had any more thoughts about the future of dining services as they relate to sustainability?
Tom Kelly: There is in my mind a potential disconnect between our sustainability goals and the sort of “marketing perspective” that characterizes the student mantra as “I want what I want, when I want it.” One of my pet peeves, quite frankly, is the whole notion of the consumer. I think it’s a degraded notion of a human being and a caricature of someone who’s driven by price and convenience. “Consumer” may indeed be one piece of a person, but what about the “citizen,” who represents the human being in social or political settings? Citizens do buy things, so they are customers in that respect, but they also have a set of values and concerns that extend far beyond price and convenience. So I think that re-engaging the civic culture and the “student as citizen” is a really vital part of a sustainable community. And I would put that in contrast to the consumer notion or the conception of the consumer. You know, from a business standpoint, when you look at student behavior and you look at the focus group feedback, it really is a generation that “wants what they want, when they want it.” So it’s not that you can ignore that, but I think to see and engage the other dimensions of the students is not just important, but is a very fulfilling thing to do.