Catholic Colleges, Universities Take Steps To Go Green

Article By Mandi Stirone

Catholic News Service

Catholic colleges and universities are joining their public counterparts in pursuing green initiatives for their campuses using a variety of resources, offices and organizations.

Students and school officials are tapping into Internet-based initiatives such as theCampus Greening Initiative at http://www.netimpact.org and Campus Climate Challenge, http://www.climatechallenge.org, and they’re also entering competitions such as RecycleMania, which promotes friendly competition among campuses to promote recycling efforts. About 24 Catholic colleges and universities have also joined the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, a group that provides its members with research materials and techniques for encouraging greener campuses.

University of Notre Dame

Sustainability, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, means “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” One of the association’s members, the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, opened an Office of Sustainability in May 2008 to oversee sustainability aspects of the university such as the school’s power plant, dining services, transportation, structures and information technology.

Jim Masurek, Notre Dame’s director of sustainability, is working on an energy and environmental issues committee that includes administrators, faculty members and students who are leaders of the student environmental organization GreeND. The student group, begun in 2007, organized Game Day Recycling on campus where volunteers provide recycling bags to campus tailgaters before football games. Now the event will fall under university staffing, although the students will still have an active role in it.

Santa Clara University

The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education is also running a pilot program that rates and tracks how colleges and universities are making progress toward sustainability; four Catholic institutions are part of the pilot. One of them is Santa Clara University, a Jesuit-run school in California, that has been involved in many sustainability projects, most notably the U.S. Department of Energy’s solar decathlon, during which the school was awarded third prize last year.

In the competition, student teams compete to build a house run entirely by solar power. The houses are then displayed on the National Mall in Washington. Santa Clara students also have participated in environmentally-geared residential learning communities and the university has integrated ecological education into the curriculum.

Other participating pilot schools include the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, MN, and St. John’s University in nearby Collegeville, MN. The two schools, which share a curriculum while remaining individual entities, have been practicing principles of sustainability for over 20 years, according to Derek Larson, Environmental Studies Program Director for both schools.

The Benedictines, who founded the schools, have a “history of living frugally because of a call to self-sufficiency”, remarks Larson. The sustainability rating system, to be released in 2009, is important because there is currently no other universal method for determining which campuses are greenest. Larson reports that this program would “make it harder for schools to buy a green reputation,” by “buying green buildings” that they don’t really need. He adds, “It’s going to level the playing field.” Larson is also convinced that Catholic colleges and universities will receive high marks in green rankings because of their social justice emphasis.

Copyright (c) Catholic News Service www.CatholicNews.com Reprinted with Permission of CNS.

Contacts at Colleges/Universities mentioned above:

University of Notre Dame

Office of Sustainability: http://green.nd.edu/

Santa Clara University

University Office of Sustainability: http://www.scu.edu/sustainability/

College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, MN

St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN

Environmental Studies Program: http://www.csbsju.edu/environmentalstudies/