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Photo outside the Denver Convention Center by author.
This past week has been hard to bear, so to speak. The proverbial firehose of information, the struggle to keep focused, the occasional ah-ha moments, not to mention insights and overwhelm, have for me characterized the past few years in general and past week in particular.
Over the past week I’ve been in Denver at the AASHE annual meeting and then ACUPCC Climate Leadership Summit, taking the bus to and from my home in Lafayette, 20 miles away, occasionally checking in at the office in Boulder, as well as catching up on things in the office, such as helping prepare the launch of our NSF funded Climate Literacy Energy Awareness Network, or CLEAN, a digital library collection of reviewed and annotated online resources.
Even without AASHE and the Climate Leadership Summit and day-job responsibilities, it’s been a super busy week, with the release of the new Six Americas update from Yale looking at public understanding of basic climate science, the recent release of the White House Adaptation Report, which mentions the role of education in addressing climate adaptation in passing, and the intriguing report Post-Partisan Power: How a Limited and Direct Approach to Energy Innovation Can Deliver Clean, Cheap Energy, Economic Productivity and National Prosperity by members of the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the Breakthrough Institute, which has energy education and innovation written all over it.
But back at AASHE, there were a few highlights worth mentioning:
- Julie Newman, who directs the Yale Office of Sustainability, and Leith Sharp, who has for nearly two decades helped schools including Harvard integrate sustainability into their cultures, spoke about Change Management for Sustainability. Highlighting the tension and personal challenge to sustain sustainability, to embrace risk in a strategic way, they talked with humor and through personal stories about the building blocks of sustainability, from grass roots to top-down, balancing confidence and capacity, authority with skillful management. Leith spoke of the three stages of change management: Awakening (making it central to the organization, from the top down, inside out,) Pioneering (demonstrating new systems and measures,) and Transformation (fully breaking through silos.) Keys to creating a new set of conditions: timely access to money , capturing savings and then reinvesting, offering incentives and recognition, fostering inclusion, opportunities to learn, and access to expertise. And very importantly: telling compelling stories.
- At the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) Climate Leadership Summit kickoff dinner at the Denver Sheraton on Oct. 12th, former CIA Director James Woolsley channeled the ghosts of John Muir (grandfather of the modern environmental movement,) General George Patton, (keenly concerned about national security from a military perspective,) and Mahatma Gandhi, (devoted to access and equity issues for the poorest people on the planet.) The conclusion they all arrived at is that ultimately clean energy must be generated at the household level through appropriate, renewable technologies; large scale solutions, no matter how clean, will always be flawed because of their environmental impact, their vulnerability to sabotage or other security risks, and/or they won’t be accessible or equitable for those billions of people living in survival mode on pennies or a few dollars a day.
There was much more– articulate, inspired students sharing how they had made their schools’ Climate Action Plans more accessible to other students and faculty, businesses sharing their insights into how to green campuses and prepare students for the emerging green workforce, as well as discussions about evaluating sustainability on campus and among students, faculty and staff through surveys and metrics.
The call from many participants at both meetings was for an online clearinghouse and/or wiki that could help the broad higher education community share ideas, best practices, videos, survey instruments, and effective learning activities. But neither AASHE nor ACUPCC at this point seem to have the bandwidth or skill sets to develop such an online community.
Hmmmmm. I wonder if perhaps some folks in the digital library arena who have worked within higher education could lend a hand?
