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.