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.