Cloud 37: Lessons from LEED
Last week, one of my colleagues exclaimed that she was on Cloud 9, or rather, Cloud 37. She’s not come down since.
Over the last several years, Rice has undertaken an ambitious $1 billion construction program, and the bulk of these facilities are now open. We’re in celebration mode. Almost all of our new buildings will [...]
Inspiration From Afar
In this era of budget cutting, I’m regularly hearing from my fellow campus sustainability professionals that they’ve had to reduce or eliminate their travel. I’m no exception. The challenge then is to find opportunities to be inspired by the great thinkers and practitioners of the sustainability arena without actually leaving our campuses, for it’s often [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Over-design
Would you wash your hands with a fire hose?
Over the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about a significant source of energy waste, one that burdens utility budgets, frustrates maintenance personnel, and ultimately leads to building occupants who are either too hot or too cold, but never just right. This pernicious source of energy waste [...]
Green Jobs (Everybody Wants One)
I’ve served as a campus sustainability professional since 2004, and my observation has been that each year brings with it a new initiative or buzzword or idea that sweeps through sustainability offices in higher education. For example, 2004 was the year that green building and LEED seemed to reach a tipping point on university campuses, [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )“Wow, What is this Place?”
One of the joys of working as a campus sustainability professional is the opportunity to spend time in the classroom, either as an instructor or as a guest lecturer. For my first guest lecture appearance at Rice, I provided a sustainability walking tour of our campus to students in the sustainable design class in our [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )The Day of Energy Policy
Today was perhaps the biggest day ever for energy policy at Rice University. Famed Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens presented his vision for weaning the United States off of foreign oil to a packed auditorium on the Rice campus in the energy capital of the world, Houston. The thrust of the Pickens Plan features a [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )In 100 Years (Your Campus May Resemble Venice)
Earlier this week, the tides of the Adriatic Sea submerged the Italian city of Venice. The New York Times published an astonishing set of photographs of Venetians and tourists attempting to go about their days, seemingly defiant of the flood. One picture captured tourists thigh-deep in water in Saint Mark’s Square, another showed fashionably-dressed teens [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )The Start-Up Guide for the Campus Sustainability Professional
We’re now over a week past the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s (AASHE’s) 2008 conference and my mind has not stopped racing. With numerous presenters providing ideas, insights, and lessons from leading campus sustainability programs, I feel like my to-do list doubled in three short days. We’re understaffed and overworked, right? [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 6 so far )A Movement Reaches Adulthood (AASHE 2008, Opening Night)
In the spring of 1990, Oberlin College Professor David Orr launched a movement.
Students graduating from Arkansas College (now Lyons College) in Batesville, Arkansas in 1990 may never know that their commencement speaker that year delivered an address that literally changed higher education. Dr. Orr, in posing the provocative question “What is Education For?”, challenged the [...]
