William And Mary, And Environmental Justice

The College of William and Mary was the second college to be founded in the American colonies, in 1693 to be exact. But there is nothing colonial about its current thinking on the environment.

In its classrooms, the college has worked to put together a highly interdisciplinary undergraduate green major, called Environmental Science and Policy. Its faculty has focused their research on ecology and conservation, environmental geology/geochemistry, environmental justice, and international aid and policy.

But some of its professors have taken those concerns well beyond the classroom. Emmett Duffy, a professor of marine science at the college's Virginia Institute of Marine Science runs a blog called "The Natural Patriot". In it, Duffy argues for a new form of patriotism grounded in environmental stewardship. He brings a sharp mind and even sharper writing to green scholarship, and that's before you even get to his blogroll and resource links. Very definitely worth a read.

Collaborating On Sustainability

Over the last decades, many colleges and universities and universities have introduced interdisciplinary studies. Under them, students can jump across the campus to fit together the pieces of many different disciplines. At least that's how it works on paper because not every department likes to cut its majors loose.

Now, says The New York Times, that trend is creating a new interdisciplinary focus on sustainability. It cites the creation of the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the new Institute for a Secure and Sustainable Environment at the University of Tennessee as examples.

There's more than environmental green in all of this. The Golisano Institute is named for its billionaire backer, B. Thomas Golisano. The University of California, Berkeley's new sustainability center is funded by a $10 million grant by Dow Chemical. You can read the full Times piece here.

Canon's Big Fat Green Scholarships

What would $78,000 do for your graduate education? That is how much Canon U.S.A. just awarded to each of eight doctoral candidates in the fields of conservation, environmental science and park management.

A decade ago, the U.S. arm of the Japanese imaging company established the Canon National Parks Science Scholars program to conduct research on conservation and sustainability in national parks in the Americas. According to Canon, the scholars picked for the program have done research in more than 85 national parks and published more than 340 scientific papers.

Five of this year's scholars hail from four U.S. colleges and universities--the University of Montana, Rutgers University, Cornell University, Oregon State University--and the others study at University of Alberta and McMaster University in Canada, and the Universidad Austral de Chile in Valdivida, Chile.

For more about the Canon National Parks Science Scholars program, check out Canon's Web site.

Focus Your School On 'Focus The Nation'

Assign the color green to January 31, 2008 on your Google calendar: That's the date for "Focus The Nation".

Think of it as a teach-in on global warming. The non-profit group behind "Focus The Nation" says it has already signed up more than 1,100 colleges and universities across the U.S., as well as high schools and middle schools. The idea is to drop every other subject for the day, and spend 24 hours brainstorming about environmental change. Here's how it will play out at one school, Alfred University in upstate New York: There will be a panel discussion on global warming solutions, an art and essay contest (on recycled paper) and a screening of "The 11th Hour", the environmental movie narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio. Alfred offers a major and minor in environmental studies for undergraduates.

To find out whether your school is already "focused", check here. If it hasn't yet pulled together an agenda, don't despair. The Web site for "Focus The Nation" has a model of how the day could be structured, and offers a way to sign up for a Webcast called "The 2% Solution". That's a reference to how much we need to cut emissions levels per year for the next 40 years to hold global warming to a minimum.

It's going to be interesting to see what comes from a day of collective brainpower.

Students Have A Seat At Bali Climate Talks

Sure, you can study the Kyoto Protocol negotiations in that lecture hall across the quad, but what if you had a chance to be part of them?

This news story says quite a few students are doing just that right now in Bali, where United Nations delegates are meeting on Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism. The CDM, depending on your viewpoint, is either a novel means to an end or a giant loophole in the effort to curb pollution worldwide. The student blog reporting from Bali captures these angles, and more.

According to the story, some 20 students from Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies are in attendance, as well as a contingent from SustainUS, a student network that promotes sustainable development. You can meet the SustainUS delegation here or follow their progress on the student-run environmental blog "It's Getting Hot In Here". Yale's green blog, which regularly chronicles environmental research at the university, is also writing heavily from Bali.

Ohio University Greens Its Courses

When is environmental science not enough? When it is limited to just the ES department.

Ohio University's student newspaper says professors there recently held a workshop on integrating environmentalism into more OU classes. The workshop's organizers seem to have hit a nerve: The newspaper says that 50 faculty members applied for the 20 spots in the workshop. Those who got in heard lectures about different aspects of sustainability and how to incorporate them into their classes. The professors behind the project said they believed that 20 undergraduate courses could eventually be revised to add more green content.

OU, which is located in Athens, Ohio, currently has four undergraduate green majors in its Department of Environmental and Plant Biology, as well as a bachelors in environmental health science. It also offers an interdisciplinary certificate program in environmental studies through its College of Arts and Sciences. At the graduate school level, it offers an interdisciplinary master of science in environmental studies.

Major Buzz About Environmental Science

It's time to declare a major on many college campuses and at the University of Arizona, many students are opting for environmental science.

According to a post on the university newspaper's Web site, one or two students have been coming into the major during the fall semester. Of particular interest: a new concentration in environmental education. UA believes there is a ready market for people who can explain what is going on in environmental science to a broader public.

At, UA, environmental science belongs to its College of Agriculture and Life Sciences' Department of Soil, Water and Environmental Science, which offers bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees. It is conducting interesting research into the impact of chemical contaminants on soil and water supplies, water and waste management and soil and groundwater remediation.

Divorce Is Bad For The Environment

Nothing is safe from the gaze of environmental researchers at America's college's and universities. Nothing, not consumer behavior and now, not even love and marriage.

Jianguo Liu, a professor at Michigan State University, contends in a new study that divorce has a negative impact on the environment. Divorced people, it seems, use more electricity and water than married households: 42% to 61% more resources per person than when they were married.

For more than 20 years, Liu has focused his research on how ecology interacts with socioeconomics, looking at the relationship between nature and humans and how their interactions affect the environment. Michigan State, which is based in East Lansing, Mich., offers 17 majors in aspects of evironmental studies and environmental science. Some of the more unusual ones includes environmental and resource economics, environmental geosciences and environmental toxicology.

Studying Green Marketing

Green majors are looking into environmental science, environmental economics, environmental law and policy, environmental management--and even environmental marketing.

Students at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, a graduate school that is part of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have created a survey to measure consumer attitudes to green marketing. Not just whether they are buying green products, but how attentive they are to a retailer's overall stance on the environment and sustainability.

Bren is small as grad schools go--just 120 master's 35 doctoral candidates. In addition to its focus on environmental science and management, it also offers a doctoral program in environmental and natural resource economics. Its dean is none other than Ernst von Weizsäcker, the former policy director at the United Nations Centre for Science and Technology for Development and director of the Institute for European Environmental Policy. He also chaired the environmental committee of the Bundestag, Germany's parliament. Bren recently received more than $1 million in gifts from Deckers Outdoor Corp. and a UC Santa Barbara alumnus to support graduate students and programs.

Ecology On The Menu

Alice Waters has become almost as well known for her Edible Schoolyard project as for her restaurant, Chez Panisse. Not only are more elementary schools and high schools putting locally grown food on their lunch menus, but more are choosing to grow it themselves.

The Hartford Courant recently profiled one effort by the schools of Bloomfield, Conn. For a bit over a decade, the system has had vocational agriculture science and technology center, where the students learn about environmental issues, plant and animal science and aquaculture.

So it was perhaps not surprising when a new food services manager decided the center could also produce some of the food for the system's cafeterias. What's growing seems a good reflection of Bloomfield's racial diversity: kale, leeks, winter squash, parsley, oregano, onions and Scotch bonnet chile peppers. These kids are also raising their own chickens and eggs.

Score one for sustainability.

Williams Recycles A Professor

Most American colleges have gotten pretty good at recycling the standard stuff, like paper and printer cartridges. But this fall, Williams College managed to recycle a professor.

Thomas C. Jorling first taught at the college from 1972 to 1977, as director of its environmental studies program. Now, after working in government (New York state's Department of Environmental Conservation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) and the private sector, Jorling returned to Williams this fall as a visiting distinguished professor of environmental studies. According to Williams, it is the second time Jorling has circled back through the college.

Jorling has banned laptops and PDAs from his classrooms, but not informed debate: One of his classroom exercises encourages students to weigh why someone might want to go slow on tackling climate change.

Williams' interdisciplinary Center for Environmental Studies will be the hub for Jorling's work. The college also has a 2,500-acre nature preserve, the Hopkins Memorial Forest, where field work is carried out.

Are You Green Enough For The Sierra Club?

Years ago, the commons between dorms was the biggest green element on most college campuses. Now, it seems America's institutions of higher learning are racing to out-do each other with green buildings, locally grown cafeteria food and carbon-neutral footprints.

It was probably inevitable, in this rankings-mad era, that someone would step in to see which colleges were really the greenest of the green. Enter the Sierra Club, with a list of "Cool Schools" that do environmentalism proud. It has named 10 schools to the list, with Oberlin College coming out as No. 1.

It's an interesting list, both for the schools picked and the greening efforts that they have undertaken. But the Sierra Club isn't looking at the environmental science education these institutions are providing and, if you subscribe to the views of Allegheny College's Michael Maniates, greening may just be so much lip service to the environment.

Allegheny Prof: 'Easy Green' Won't Do

Ask somebody to describe their favorite teacher and you likely won't hear a story about a warm and fuzzy personality. The teachers who resonate most are usually tough, and clear-eyed. That should mean a wide audience for Michael Maniates, a professor of political science and environmental science at Allegheny College.

Maniates took to the op-ed pages of The Washington Post just before Thanksgiving to say that all our warm and fuzzy solutions to global warming aren't going to be enough. "Obsessing over recycling and installing a few special light bulbs won't cut it," he wrote. "We need to be looking at fundamental change in our energy, transportation and agricultural systems rather than technological tweaking on the margins, and this means changes and costs that our current and would-be leaders seem afraid to discuss. Which is a pity, since Americans are at their best when they're struggling together, and sometimes with one another, toward difficult goals."

It's a good message, and one that should probably be nailed to a few doors just like Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses to the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg.

Maniates hails from an institution that has been committed to clear-eyed thinking about the environment. Its president for the last decade, Richard J. Cook, once studied remediation efforts at the infamously polluted Love Canal in upstate New York. The environmentalism that Cook has instilled at Allegheny--in the classroom and around the campus--is likely to persist long after he leaves the western Pennsylvania college next spring: Earlier this month, Allegheny was named one of the 11 pilot colleges and universities in the Clinton Foundation's Climate Initiative to green higher ed's campuses.

Texas Students Go For The Cold

When it comes to winter break, most students head for warmer climes. Not so for 14 undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Texas at El Paso. They will be headed to Antarctica on December 13 to do scientific research for three weeks with four UTEP professors.

According to one news report, some of the students on the upcoming trip have already studied the effects of global warming at the Earth's other pole: They spent the summer in Barrow, Alaska examining the shrinking Arctic ice cap.

These expeditions are funded by National Science Foundation grants and a federal program called IPY-ROAM, or International Polar Year Research and Educational Opportunities in Antarctica for Minorities. UTEP offers a bachelor's degree in environmental science, with concentrations in Biology, Chemistry, Geology, Hydrology and Secondary Science Education. It also offers a doctoral program in environmental science and engineering through its Center for Environmental Resource Management.

U Arizona Gets $2.5M To Study Amazon

What is global warming doing to the Amazon? A group of scientists lead by researchers at the University of Arizona has gotten a $2.5 million grant to look for an answer.

The money for the Partnership for International Research and Education--Amazonia is coming from the National Science Foundation. It includes $1.5 million for student stipends and fellowships. Students in PIRE will do field work in tropical ecology and biogeochemistry in the Amazon and at Brazilian scientific institutions. They will also work in the tropical forest biome at the university's Biosphere 2.

PIRE will draw on several departments at the university, from environmental and atmospheric sciences, to evolutionary biology, anthropology, geosciences and Latin American Studies. The University of Arizona offers a bachelor's of science in environmental science, with concentrations in areas such biology, microbiology, chemistry, soil science and hydrology. The university is also home to the Institute for the Study of the Planet Earth, an interdisciplinary center for environmental and climate change science.

Buffalo Gets $3.1 Million Grant

The University at Buffalo has gotten a $3.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation for its graduate environmental science programs.

The grant will fund the work of 25 doctoral students in its Ecosystem Restoration Through Interdisciplinary Exchange program, known appropriately as ERIE. The interdisciplinary program focuses on the ecosystem of the Great Lakes and incorporates U.S., Canadian and Native American perspectives on it. The latter is appropriate, and not only because of the geography: UB Professor Don Grinde is an environmental historian and a Yamasee Indian.

ERIE students will work with seven different departments in the engineering school and UB's College of Arts and Sciences. The university says they may also may work with UB Law School and at Buffalo State College, Niagara University and several Canadian universities. UB was one of only 20 schools selected for the grant, which comes under the NSF's Integrative Graduate Education Research and Traineeship program.

MIT Grad Students Tackle Transportation

I don't know why we are all waiting for Detroit to bring us more environmentally friendly transportation. It looks as if several graduate students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have the matter well in hand.

The students, who are master's or Ph.D. candidates in architecture, urban studies and the Smart Cities project at MIT's Media Lab program, have designed an electric, two-passenger car with America's biggest cities in mind. Ho-hum you say? There's more: These City Cars can be folded and stacked together like so many grocery carts, packing eight cars into a curb spot that might accommodate only one Hummer on any other day. (You can see a picture of it here.) And just like a grocery cart, you would take the first one in the stack, use it, and then return it to another stack. There is a lot of smart technology in these cars, like wheel robots that make it possible to do away with traditional, energy-hogging drive-train elements like engine blocks, gear boxes and differentials.

City Cars have, like doctoral degrees, been a long time in coming. The first mention of the project on MIT's Web site goes back to 2004. But apparently a prototype, which is being produced in conjunction with General Motors (which sponsors the Media Lab), is now due out next spring.

Sustainable Design At Western Washington U

Thanks to the folks at WorldChanging for bringing this twist in environmental studies to my attention. It shows just how far college students are taking their eco thinking these days.

Junior-year industrial design students at Western Washington University are turning trash into treasure--literally. Under a program they have dubbed ReMade, they take industrial refuse and transform it into a new product. Like sushi-rolling mats made from old bicycle spokes or switchplates crafted from street signs. The students must make 20 of each of their designs and then offer them for sale. This year, you can find their work at Seattle's Goods for the Planet and the Seattle Art Museum through December 25.

Western Washington, which is based in Bellingham, Wash., has separate departments for environmental studies and environmental science, both through its Huxley College of the Environment. The industrial design department has just teamed up with Huxley to create a new minor in sustainable design. Western Washington also offers a combined major in economics and environmental studies at its College of Business and Economics.

How Green Is Your Campus?

Want to see the best in environmentally friendly interior and exterior design these days? Then take a trip to America's colleges and universities--like Middlebury College in northern Vermont.

It's not just that these buildings are getting high marks from the U.S. Green Building Council for how environmentally friendly they are. They are great examples of architectural inventiveness and great models of how connected a building can be to its surrounding environment.

The Hillcrest Environmental Center is an 1875 farmhouse. Or, rather, was. A recent report by the Associated Press chronicles how the center, which is home to Middlebury's environmental science program, has been reborn with the marks of Vermont, from an old maple sugar tree as ceiling planks to desktops made from sunflower seed shells. Some 40 professors and 90 students a year will find a home here, the college says.

Is $4 million too much to much to spend on sustainability? Middlebury doesn’t seem to think so.

Environmental Studies Beyond The Science

Studying the environment these days doesn't just mean delving into the science behind the changes in our surroundings. There are environmental courses to be found on a wide range of topics, from film studies to public policy.

So it was that this past year Princeton University's Princeton Environmental Institute, Carl Fields Center and its Center for African American Studies joined forces to look at the emerging issue of environmental justice. The central idea in this field is that environmental problems like air and water pollution weigh more heavily on poor communities than rich ones. This past Friday, the Princeton centers held a free screening of the first two parts of Spike Lee's film about the impact of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, When The Levees Broke; they will screen parts three and four this Friday. On Tuesday, they will host a talk by Majora Carter, the founder of Sustainable South Bronx.

The Princeton Environmental Institute is an interdisciplinary center that coordinates environmental education, research and community outreach by departments in the natural sciences, engineering, social sciences and humanities. It offers an undergraduate certificate in environmental studies as well as graduate and postdoctoral training.

Students Win Prizes For Soil, Water Research

Three college students have been awarded $1,000 each for their environmental research. The prizes were awarded as part of a competition organized by the Adventus Group, a private bioremediation company.

Na Wei, a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was recognized for her study, "Anaerobic MTBE/TBA Biodegradation Under Different Terminal Electron Acceptor Processes." Manmeet Waria from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was singled out for her presentation, "Field-Scale Clean Up of Pesticide Contaminated Soil with Combined Chemical and Biological Approach." The third prizewinner was Rosemary Carrol of the Desert Research Institute, in Reno, Nevada. Her presentation was entitled "Evaluating the Impacts of Uncertainty in Geomorphic Channel Changes on Predicting Mercury Transport and Fate in the Carson River System." The Desert Research Institute is an independent institution within the Nevada higher ed system that has some 500 researchers, staff and students working on research projects all over the world.

Adventus made the awards during the 23rd annual International Conference on Soils, Sediments and Water, which was held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "These impressive young environmentalists all displayed superb thought leadership and presentation skills. Selecting the winning themes was extremely difficult, although the industry will surely be hearing more from these students in years ahead," said Dr. Fayaz Lakhwala, Adventus' director of engineering, in a prepared statement. Adventus, which is based in Freeport, Ill., works on soil, sediment and groundwater remediation worldwide.

Job Alert: Brown ES Center Director

Brown University's Center for Environmental Studies is looking for a new director. Its current director, Osvaldo Sala, a professor of biokigy, has announced that he plans to step down from the center next July. Sala is going to be the director of Brown's Environmental Change Initiative, an interdisciplinary research and education program.

According to a campus newspaper report, the center is looking for "a distinguished scholar with broad interdisciplinary interests in environmental issues" to head up its efforts. The CES is the focus for both Brown's environmental studies program and its community environmental initiatives, which have included a community garden.

But the change at CES seems to be coming at a critical juncture for Brown. The building in which the CES is housed, the Urban Environmental Lab, may be threatened by expansion on campus. The community garden has already been lost, although the center is promising to plant a new one in the spring.

The Environmental Education Two-Step

Let's face it: College is ridiculously expensive these days. Some kids are cutting the cost by doing the first year or two at a community college and then finishing their bachelors elsewhere. I've been seeing it in a few different majors, but not in environmental science or environmental studies. Until now.

Late last week, Hudson Valley Community College signed an official transfer agreement with the State University of New York Plattsburgh. Eighteen academic programs are covered by the agreement, including HVCC's associate's degree in biology. Students may apply its credits to a SUNY Plattsburgh bachelor's in biochemistry, biology, ecology or environmental science. And the schools, both of which are located in upstate New York in the Albany area, indicated that there would be more agreements forthcoming between them in the area of environmental science.

SUNY Plattsburgh currently offers majors in both environmental science and environmental studies. There are four degree options in the former, including both a bachelor's of arts and a bachelor's of science in environmental science, a B.S. in ecology and a B.A. with a concentration in environmental planning and management. The environmental studies major combines work in the sciences with courses in social sciences and the humanities. SUNY Plattsburgh also is home to the Center for Earth and Environmental Science, which houses its ES, geology and geography programs.

Lights, Camera, Action!

Al Gore did it, so did Leonardo DiCaprio. Now you can do it too: Make a documentary film about the environment. Better still, it will count toward your degree.

Professor Gregg Mittman has added two filmmaking classes to the roster this fall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. One traces the history of environmental films; the other is a hands-on class in making a documentary.

"I want to open up what we think is a good environmental film and how we might tell other types of stories to change our interactions and attitudes," Mitman said in a news release from the university. "Leonardo DiCaprio's recent film 'The 11th Hour' had so much gloom and doom. Good stories should mobilize our interests into actions."

His courses seem to be doing that. Trailers for some of the student films were shown on Friday night as part of the university's Tales From Planet Earth Film Festival. If you want to get a better idea of what's going on in Mittman's classes, check out the trailers here.

Sustainability Conference At Vanderbilt

I like citizen journalism more and more each day. It allows me to learn about events like the Net Impact Conference that is being hosted this year at Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management, and pass that learning along to you.

Net Impact, which was founded in 1993 by MBA students to foster socially-responsible business leaders, is using this year's conference to show what's being done by the business community on sustainability. It has brought together an impressive list of speakers from Yvon Chouinard, the founder of outdoor gear retailer Patagonia to John Replogle, CEO of Burt's Bees and Andy Savitz, author of "The Triple Bottom Line" to talk about subjects like the greening of the music and fashion industries.

The conference wraps tomorrow, November 3, but a group of bloggers from Owen has captured a lot of details about all of the proceedings here. Vanderbilt offers an undergraduate degree in earth and environment sciences as well as master's and Ph.D degrees in Environmental Engineering.

An "A" For Sustainability

Kudos to Harvard University, Dartmouth University, the University of Washington, Middlebury College, Carleton College and the University of Vermont! All of these institutions received an overall "A" grade on the newly released College Sustainability Report Card 2008.

The report card is published by the Cambridge, Mass.-based Sustainable Endowments Institute. It focuses, cleverly enough, on the 200 public and private universities with the largest endowments. The schools were graded in five categories: administration, climate change and energy, food and recycling, green building and transportation. Interestingly, the schools scored their highest grades for food and recycling, with 29% earning an "A" in that category. The report found that 70% of the schools buy food from local farms and that 64% serve fair trade coffee.

You can view the full report card--including the four schools that got overall failing grades--here.

Gift Funds ES Chair At Dartmouth

Environmental studies is beginning to attract the big money. The latest example is at Dartmouth University, which has just revealed a $2.5 million alumni gift to endow a professorship in the field. The inaugural holder of the Richard and Jane Pearl Professorship in Environmental Studies will be Andrew Friedland, the current chair of Dartmouth's Environmental Studies Program.

According to Dartmouth, Friedland's research focuses on the effect of atmospheric pollutants on high-elevation forests, as well as on how our individual energy choices affects the environment. Friedland, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, has been on Dartmouth's faculty since 1987. He is also a co-founder of Dartmouth's graduate program in Earth, Ecosystem, and Ecological Sciences.

Dartmouth currently offers undergraduate majors in environmental studies and environmental earth sciences. It also offers both master's and Ph.D degrees in earth sciences.

Green Job: Bowdoin College

From time to time, this blog will take a look at jobs in environmental studies, both those for graduates and those on the campuses educating those students.

A posting went up on Thursday for the director of the Environmental Studies program at Bowdoin College. The job board note says the post, which will begin next fall, is for a candidate at the associate or full professor level and adds this: "The director will hold a joint appointment in the Environmental Studies program and a department appropriate to his/her disciplinary specialization."

That's because at Bowdoin, which is based on a bucolic campus in Brunswick, Maine, environmental studies is not a standalone major. The college calls it a "coordinate", which means that it expects it to be pared with one of the school's other offerings. The environmental studies department's home page says that students have combined ES with majors from biology to women's studies.

For those interested, the job posting is here.

Northern Michigan Plant Protest

Educating students about the environment can have unintended consequences: They can become more protective of the environment on their very own campus.

So it was this past week at Northern Michigan University. Students there are challenging the Marquette-Mich.-based institution's plan to build new dorms because the construction would destroy a native plant research project on campus. Student representatives met with NMU's president and brought along a petition bearing 900 names and information on future plans for the four-year-old native plant project. NMU offers majors in both environmental conservation and environmental science.

And the whole thing may be more than a bit ironic since the tag line on NMU's Web site is "Northern. Naturally."

The Young And The Greenish

There are plenty of colleges and universities across the United States that now offer environmental studies. But this week's New York Times had a piece on the environmentalism that's popping up in and around secondary school classrooms.

Things like greening buildings with solar panels, compact fluorescent bulbs and environmentally friendly cleaners, championed by groups like Grassroots Environmental Education. Or measures to ban the idling of car engines at school pickup point. The photo accompanying the story shows middle school kids planting a garden. Some secondary schools are taking it further, the story notes. Some of the schools recognized by the Maryland Association for Environmental and Outdoor Education assign environmentally themed readings for homework. Green California Schools will hold a summit and exposition for educators in Pasadena in December.

Of course, there are naysayers. Folks who can't see that there's room for an "e" in each of the so-called three "Rs". They probably don't recycle either.

WSU's Sustainability Smackdown

Not that long ago, college environmental events were as dull as a U.N. General Assembly session. Thankfully, somebody figured out that you can draw more people with a bit of fun. Like the "Sustainability Smackdown" taking place at Washington State University today.

Yes, there will still be lectures and presentations, but the three student groups sponsoring the event--the local Roots and Shoots chapter, the WSU Sustainability Club and the WSU Environmental Science Club--also want to see some fresh thinking on sustainability from students who might not have thought about it before.

There will be potentially be some green in it for the winners, and I don't just mean the plant kind. Smackdown attendees will vote to award $1,000 to the student group with the best sustainability idea. And students may also get a chance to participate in challenge issued by KEEN, the outdoor performance footwear and gear maker. It plans to award $150,000 in prizes to the best ideas or projects that support sustainability. The winners will be announced at the KEEN's Hybrid.STAND Festival in its home base of Portland, Ore., in June 2008.

Roots and Shoots, by the way, is a global environmental and humanitarian education program that was inspired by the work of primatologist Jane Goodall. More on its work later.

Professor Plastic Power

You may have heard that Discovery Channel is launching a network on environmental issues, Planet Green, next spring. But there are already intimations of what shows will be on the new network, like "Eco-Tech", which ran a segment last night that featured Alan Heeger, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Heeger is already quite well known as one of the three winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2000. But his research into conducting polymers has led him to develop technology that stands to revolutionize the way we will all go solar. Without abandoning his work at UCSB, Heeger co-founded a company called Konarka Technologies, which makes its headquarters in Lowell, Mass., a town more known as a leader of earlier industrial revolutions than current eco-technology. No matter: Konarka is rolling out Power Plastic®, a photovoltaic material that basically puts solar power cells on flexible plastic, not glass. According to the Discovery Channel report, the technology stands to cut the cost of solar panels in half--if not more--while producing more power.

Universities have gotten very smart about helping professors commercialize their research. Look for a lot more breakthroughs like Heeger's in environmental technology for the mass market.

The University Of Vermont's 'Revolutionary Mind'

One of the best things about the green revolution now taking place on America's campuses is that it is demolishing the ivory tower. Academics are engaging the real world, and often in surprising ways.

Saleem Ali, an associate professor of environmental planning at the University of Vermont's Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, has been recognized by SEED magazine as one of eight "revolutionary minds" for 2007. According to the university, Ali has gotten India and Pakistan to sit down for talks later this year to turn the Siachen Glacier that straddles their border into a peace park. The park could be a place for both nations to cool their quarrels--and preserve the glacier's ecosystem in the process.

The award was revealed in the October issue of SEED, a relatively new magazine. But it is unfortunately not part of its online content.

Ali, who is also an adjunct faculty member of Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, devotes his research to the causes and effects of environmental conflicts, as well as to using the environment as an agent for peace. In September, MIT Press published his new book, "Peace Parks: Conservation and Conflict Resolution".

University, College Win Livable Building Awards

The Center for the Built Environment at the University of California, Berkeley has chosen higher education buildings to be two of the three winners of its Livable Building Awards for 2007.

Carnegie Institution for Science's Global Ecology Research Center at Stanford University won for features such as a radiant cooling system that has helped to cut carbon emissions from building operations by 72%. Its wood doors were salvaged from old wine vats and it also has an energy-efficient water system.

Also a winner: The Kirsch Center at De Anza College and part of the credit for the award definitely belongs to the Cupertino, Calif., community college's own students. De Anza's student government earmarked $180,000 of its own funds for the center, which has gotten second-highest designation from the U.S. Green Building Council.

With green building so hot a topic on college campuses these days, it's perhaps not surprising that there was also a university among the seven finalists. Donald Bren Hall at the University of California, Santa Barbara was given an honorable mention.

Cool Heads At The Carnegie Institution

There's an interesting opinion piece in The New York Times this morning. Ken Caldeira, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, thinks it may be possible to cool the globe by shooting small amounts of sulfate particles into the stratosphere. He likens the strategy to the cooling that followed the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. It blasted large amounts of sulfate particles into the sky, which then reflected the sun's rays away from the Earth.

I'll leave it to others to discuss the scientific merits of Caldeira's proposal. The purpose of this blog is to look at where you can get an education in the environment, and the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology certainly qualifies as one of those places. Housed on the campus of Stanford University, it has offered research opportunities to undergrads, graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and their professors since 2002. You can check out some of its recent research topics here. For the post-doctoral crowd, its Web site notes an opening for an associate in global ecology to conduct research on permafrost feedbacks to the global carbon cycle. The application deadline was October 1, but the post is still up and it notes that later applications may be considered.