Sustainability is Sexy

Sustainability is a lot like learning how ride a bike, except you never really learn how ride the bike of sustainability. Once I asked a room full of student environmental leaders from around the Northwest who would consider their eating habits to be ecologically sustainable - and no one raised their hand. It is never very inspiring when even the people advocating a cause aren't actually able to live up to that cause in real life. At Lewis & Clark I took a great class on the political economy of food. We would spend all class talking about how bad the industrial food system is and how the corporations are destroying the environment. However after one particularly heated discussion, someone said, “None of this really matters because we all know that this weekend we are all going to get drunk on some shitty beer”. This has always stayed with me. Now when I go to talks about sustainability they are always exciting but I frequently ask myself whether I could see some frat boy announce to his brothers, “I refuse to drink cheap beer because of the ecological impact corn farms are having on our environment. I will only play beer pong with local organic beer”. Any real solution to the environmental problems we are facing will have to be able to convince even those frat boys to act radically different.
Sustainability is defined as many things, but all of these definitions include three important categories: economics, ecology, and equity. Underlying each is the idea that we should be, as the Department of Ecology puts it, “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” This column understands that sustainability is very important, but that it also needs to be based in the actual so as not to avoid becoming just as useless as another bumper sticker.
So this is where Lewis and Clark stands. In 2005 the 3 campuses of L&C bought 8,216, 514 kW of electricity - the vast majority of which did not come from renewable sources. This is equal to 122,070,284 pounds of carbon per year... which is the same as driving a SUV around for 12,000,000,000 miles every year. However various leaders around our campus have since taken up the charge. In 2007, President Hochsettler signed the President's Climate Commitment which says that our campus will become carbon neutral by 2050. Last year, through the hard work of Elise Maxwell and SEED the school changed its Student Green Energy Policy from an “opt-in” to an “opt-out,” requiring students to check a box saying that don't want to pay for green energy. This raised the amount of renewable energy we bought from 375,600 kW to 1,200,000 kW, or over 1/8th of our total energy purchases. Since 1991 our school's building area has gone up by 41%, students living on campus has risen 21%, faculty and staff 14%, yet our energy consumption has only gone up by 10%. This relatively small increase can be attributed to Richard Bettega, who is a member of the Sustainability Council, and his genuine dedication to making the school consume less energy. If you see either Elise or Richard around campus give them a hug for helping to make us a lot greener (also give Shane Rivera a hug because he has a sign offering you to). Sustainability is an issue that we all have to get to know and I hope to use this column to make some people get to know it a little better so that one day we really will know how to ride a bike and beer pong will be played with local organic beer.