A snap shot of three university campuses shows a burgeoning interest by both students and faculty for sustainability and environmental issues.

Dr. Ernest Yanarella, Professor of Political Science and Director of Environmental Studies at the University of Kentucky, has had 37 years to watch the waves of attention paid to the environment ebb and flow in this country. Yanarella is a principle investigator of a grant to better integrate sustainability into its undergraduate curriculum. He says that green approaches to building and land development will ride a rising tide of interest. Out of necessity it is attaining its own sustainability.

“I think that the issues of the environment and concerns over sustainability will simply not go away. We’re fated to live in a century where global environmental problems are going to increasingly come to the fore,” he said. “As a result, the colleges of architecture and engineering are increasingly integrating sustainability issues into their curricula, often times at the introductory level.”

Dr. Pete Melby, Professor of Landscape Architecture at Mississippi State University, said interest on campus in sustainability is on the rise in his field and in building management, and it is drawing increased attention from those in civil engineering. Many see it as a new frontier for creativity.

“That’s one of the reasons students are excited because they see a whole new paradigm waiting to be developed that is not traditional,” he said.

Dr. Jorge Vanegas, who spent a dozen years at Georgia Tech before moving to Texas A & M as Director of the Center for Housing and Urban Development in the College of Architecture, said in the early 90s a review of courses at his former university would have resulted in few that contained the word, ‘sustainable.’ Today, a survey done at the university will reveal dozens of courses that explicitly address that in many ways.

A simple search of the internet on environmentally conscious design, environmental manufacturing, clean production, and other green issues produces wide ranging results.

“What has happened, in my opinion,” relates Vanegas, “is you are seeing a ‘push-pull’ move toward an increased awareness towards an increased understanding and increased embracing of the shift that sustainability demands of the people.”

On Campus
There are four entry points for sustainability into academic life, according to Vanegas: curriculum, research, campus facilities, and the implementation of sustainable practices by the institution. 

Curriculum conveys the information to students through courses and certificate programs. Research creates and generates new knowledge and disseminates it through published papers and other means. Then there are the actual facilities.

“Universities are uniquely poised to serve as living laboratories for sustainability,” he said, by constructing buildings and other features that exhibit sustainable principles for students to observe. Finally, campuses can drive home points on green practices by walking-the-talk.

“You have student groups that are using the campus as a laboratory, a showcase for things like recycling, sensors for lights and indoor environmental quality,” Vanegas said.

Melby and a group of his colleagues at Mississippi State, working with the university and the State of Mississippi, constructed a 25,000 square foot landscape architecture and landscape contracting facility, the Center for Sustainable Design, which opened in 2002.

By incorporating such things as south facing glass coupled with big overhangs, “it uses 70 percent less energy than the two academic buildings on either side of it,” illustrates Melby. “The winter sunlight hits the side of the building and warms it, but the summer sunlight doesn’t hit the south side of the building,” he said, because of the overhangs. “If you keep the sun off the building it will be 8-10 degrees cooler.”

Heavily insulated, with high ceilings, reflective roof and concrete floors, Melby said the structure really is not high-tech.

“The really cool thing is that there is not a lot of sophisticated technology. It’s what people did a hundred years ago when they didn’t have mechanical air conditioning,” he said. “According to Energy Star, it is in the top 10 percent of the most energy-efficient buildings.”

Set in that educational environment, students study courses like “Design of Sustainable Communities,” which goes beyond structures and gets into “life support systems” related to food, water, shelter, energy, waste and landscape management. They use a book Melby wrote with a colleague, Tom Cathcart, a Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, called “Regenerative Design Techniques: Practical Applications in Landscape Design.”

The course work gets into building concepts, which have returned some interesting results. “They knocked the energy use down 70 to90 percent and then made up 10 to 30percent of the energy they needed with photo-voltaics,” he said.

As the Director of the Environmental Studies Minor Program, Yanarella relays that “within the College of Design, landscape architecture programs are going great guns related to sustainability. Architecture has developed four separate degrees, including an advanced degree in historic preservation,” he said. “In civil engineering, there’s a growing core of those who are looking toward some notion of environmental engineering.”

They are investigating concepts related to the “ecological footprint” of a community, which is a way of estimating how much land is necessary to satisfy the human needs for such things as energy and food production on a yearly basis. “The idea behind this is to recognize a large city probably requires many times the land mass of the city itself,” he said. “How do you reduce the ecological foot print of a large city or small town so that it does not take away from the opportunities for communities elsewhere to utilize natural resources?”

Interest there by students in the last few years has literally doubled among under graduates, he said. “I have a senior seminar on environmental studies and it’s now becoming increasingly difficult to teach it as a seminar because of the enrollment numbers.”

Issues related to global warming and the impact on their generation has produced a vested interest by the younger generation, according to Yanarella. “There’s no question about that. It seems despite the long term indifference at the federal level toward global warming, students on campus have been keenly involved in discussions and debates about this,” he said. “Students want the university to strive toward carbon neutrality. The other manifestation is student interest in electric cars and hybrids.”

Market Demand
The job market is ripe with opportunity for those with a diploma in some of these areas, where demand is outpacing supply.

“We have five job offers for every landscape architecture graduate this last year. The last three years it’s been that way,” Melby said. “We are beginning to see clients who are asking for sustainable systems. One boy went to work for a firm that consults with Wal-Mart which is very interested in creating sustainable facilities.”

Vanagas said he is working on a project for a group of companies trying to develop a strategic plan on how to get industry and academia closer. “The reason is they don’t have enough talent, the type of students that they want to hire,” he said.

Yanarella points to other opportunities for students. In the last couple of years there’s been a strong up tick in the market for green products, green strategies in building the urban environment, and a considerable amount of interest in sustainable agriculture.

“There is market interest in energy efficiency driven by a powerful planning imperative to build cities that are more sustainable,” he says.

There’s a lot on the line. All one has to do is look at the Gulf of Mexico to see one area of concern related to stormwater run off.

“There is a 9,000 square mile dead zone off the coast of Louisiana as a result of the Mississippi River that is dead from top to bottom. It’s from runoff originating all the way up in the Midwest,” Melby said.

The issues are global which will foster international conflict if not addressed, according to Yanarella.

“We’re fated to live in a century where natural resource scarcity is going to be even more prominent. Estimates on oil reserves are that we’re at a tipping point. China and India are growing populations and economies, so demand for oil will grow,” he said. There is also the looming crisis over the scarcity of potable water. “The possibility of international friction and war stemming from access to water point to the fact these issues will not go away.”

The New Frontier
Crisis drives interest. For creative minds, sustainability is virgin territory with magnetic appeal. It encompasses more than the challenges and opportunities related to land use and buildings.

“The problem is everybody interprets sustainability from different perspectives,” Vanegas said. “There is no unified body of knowledge or theory on sustainability. It depends on where you look. It can have very rigorous requirements all the way to subjective, rules of thumb and common sense.”

“Students love the idea,” Melby said of the uncharted waters. “They see the opportunity to do something that they’re predecessors have not done.”  SLDT