Environmental Impact
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the greenest of us all?
THOSE INDEFATIGABLE students in Environmental Studies 50 are at it again. The five juniors and five seniors who took the course last spring had to pick a class project. They decided on something sure to cause hurt feelings at some colleges and perhaps excessive smugness at others. Comparisons, as we all know, are odious. They spent the entire term comparing environmentalists.
As a first step they picked five New England colleges and universities that have outstanding environmental reputations. Bowdoin College. Brown University. Dartmouth College. Middlebury College, Tufts University. They then did a ten-part environmental audit of each school. Ten times they ranked each school, from best to worst. Finally, they combined scores, as you might at a track meet, and produced general rankings: Top School in Study, Bottom School in Study, etc.
So who won? Who lost? I'm not going to tell you yet, and it would be really rotten to skip ahead and find out. Don't you believe in suspense? You need to hear a little about the audit first.
The first thing our students judged was the quality of environmental education at each school. Quite right, too. Education is what we're here for. Brown adopted a proud new motto in 1990: "Brown is
Green." Only semi-green, our students concluded. In quality of environmental education they put Brown at the very bottom, chiefly because they thought its program was understaffed. Bowdoin ranked fourth, Tufts third. As for Dartmouth and Middlebury: good news. We tied for first. As well we might. They have people like John Elder. We have people like Donella Meadows.
The second category our students judged was energy use, with its attendant pollution. Again, quite right. Colleges use a humongous amount of energy, vast quantities of fossil fuel. The figures go up every year. Here Bowdoin placed last—didn't even prove auditable. Fourth came Tufts, which uses mainly natural gas, cleanest of fossil faels. In third place Middlebury, big user of oil, former big user of coal, which it gave up entirely on environmental grounds. Second place: Dartmouth—even though we buy a lot of power that is 40 percent generated by coalfired plants. The College's excellent energy management program more than made up, the students felt. Credit Mike Getter, Phil Chaput, Bill Hochstin, and many another in Facilities Operation. And the winner: Brown.
We are efficient, but Brown is more efficient. It has the lowest energy use per capita of any of the five schools.
The third category is what the students call politics by which they mean what effect, if any, each college has on the world beyond its campus, and also how much new awareness is created on the campus itself. Middlebury, with its energy council and its full-time environmental coordinator, comes first. Dartmouth, I'm sorry to say, placed fourth.
Don't worry, I'm not going to go through all ten categories. Just one more, which is solid waste management. Here all sorts of things come up. Toner cartridges—those things that feed chemicals into copy machines for example. Tufts has a copy center. "The center does not recycle its toner cartridges; they are simply thrown away in the building." Dartmouth, on the other hand, put in a lot of effort. "Four years of research have gone into testing a variety of recycled cartridges before a highly satisfactory brand produced locally in New Hampshire was chosen." But Middlebury, as is so often the case in this report, emerges the clear winner, while we are only third. That's primarily because of our low diversion rate from landfills via recycling. Mind you, we don't do badly. We divert 30 percent of the College's waste stream, which is a lot better than Bowdoin's feeble 15.6 percent or Brown's nicetry 23 percent. But when you see that Middle bury diverts 64 percent, it's not hard to figure why they win.
Enough. It's time to get to the final rankings. Number Five is... Bowdoin, with only 36 points. In fourth place comes partly green Brown: 48 points. Third, Tufts: 54 points. Now a big jump to second place. Dartmouth: 69 points. Finally, the clear winner, Middle bury: 89 points. At least we are No. 2. That's no bad place to be, especially if it should make us want to try harder.
I have to add one more thing. Not every proposal in the report convinces me. I think the students are being wildly unrealistic, for example, when they suggest that all five colleges deliberately reduce the number of parking places on campus so as to discourage people from driving to work. Seems that would be like reducing the proportion of A's that teachers give so as to discourage students from working for grades. But most of the students' ideas seem sound, and all their facts are interesting. How I'd love to see a similar report that included Harvard and Yale and the University of Massachusetts and Ohio State and the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Where can we find a giant mirror?
