Recent events on Wall Street and Main Street raise a complicated question: Will the financial crisis help or hurt colleges’ sustainability efforts? Both are possible.
With pundits and politicians talking about how a green economy can save America, it might seem like sustainability’s time has come. After all, sustainability involves knowledge of natural, social, and economic systems, and the recent financial crisis stands as a lesson in system breakdown. The average American is now learning about the unsustainability of an economy based on cheap oil, risky debt, and complicated credit schemes.
At the same time, while sustainability programs might continue to get a lot of play through college marketing departments, the core programs themselves are often financed on a shoestring, especially at small colleges. Low-paid students and recent graduates, with little influence but lots of enthusiasm for environmental issues, frequently serve as sustainability coordinators.
The Wall Street meltdown was bad news to Louise E. Gava, who became St. Lawrence University’s sustainability coordinator after she graduated with a biology degree from the institution last year. “It’s going to hurt us,” she says. St. Lawrence has a significant number of donors from New York’s financial sector. “If we have less money that is kind of slushy, then sustainability will take a hit—that’s inevitable.”
Up to now, Ms. Gava has always pushed sustainability efforts that save money, like energy-efficiency projects. But many sustainability efforts have a return on investment that is difficult to quantify—efforts like educational programs or encouraging local farmers to grow more food for the college. (Projects with an elusive return on investment also happen to be the programs that many students are most interested in.)
She says she was just getting comfortable with proposing such programs when the financial unraveling began.
“They need to happen to make cultural change—and cultural change, while way more important than any financial payback, doesn’t necessarily win approval,” she says. “To get to zero greenhouse-gas emissions, it’s not just going to take putting solar panels on your roof.”
Robert Koester, director of the Center for Energy Research/Education/Service, at Ball State University, says the financial crisis “amplifies the significance of being off grid and locally sourced.” Colleges that have installed renewable-energy systems, like solar panels and wind turbines, will be rewarded—inflation can’t touch the sun or the wind.
The challenge will be future installations of renewable-energy projects amid tight budgets. “One of the problems with green investment is that it is always looked at in terms of first cost and years until payback, which frames the purchase pessimistically,” Mr. Koester says.
No college would think about an endowment investment in terms of years until payback, and green features should be thought of the same way, he says. A college might balk at a green project that takes 10 years to pay back, but such an investment might actually do better than one in the stock market these days.
On the upside, advocates of sustainability see the financial crisis as an opportunity to change the conversation. A well-known symbol of sustainability consists of three interlocking circles: one for environment, one for economy, and one for social responsibility. The environmental facet usually attracts most of the attention. But the financial crisis and its repercussions in society might provide an opportunity to talk about the other two as well.
Peter Bardaglio, a senior fellow at Second Nature, a prominent sustainability organization, says wealthy colleges will probably have to invest in their surrounding communities during a recession. (For example, the University of Pennsylvania, which has done so much to revive the neighborhood around it, will not want to see its work unravel should the businesses in its lively surroundings go bankrupt.) Through those investments, he says, the colleges will underscore the importance of economy and social responsibility in the sustainability equation.
“I’m seeing more integrated thinking out there,” says Terry Link, sustainability director at Michigan State University. He sees new interest in sustainability from people who aren’t known for being environmental firebrands.
This week he gave a lecture on sustainability to a group of retirees in Michigan. “It was the best-received talk I’ve ever had,” he says. “I think if I gave the same talk three weeks ago, it wouldn’t have been the same.”