ANAC Commentary

• Peter Bardaglio: “Sustainability Education, the ANAC Mission, and Democratic Citizenship”

"One of our major responsibilities as citizens in a democratic society is to be stewards of our natural resources, making decisions that take into account the need to balance economic growth, social justice, and environmental protection. One of our primary tasks as educators is to arm students to both dream and take action."

—Peter Bardaglio

Peter Bardaglio: “Sustainability Education, the ANAC Mission, and Democratic Citizenship”

Peter Bardaglio

Peter Bardaglio has been Provost at Ithaca College since 2002. Among his many innovations there is the sustainability initiative, an effort to imbed environmental education in the curriculum and to collaborate with the larger Ithaca region in developing a truly environmentally sustainable community. As a result Ithaca has become one of the most environmentally advanced campuses in the nation. Peter agreed to provide this guest commentary and the Ithaca experience will be presented as a case study at the AACU Conference in January in San Francisco.

Global warming, water shortages, soil erosion, and ozone depletion: these are not just abstract issues looming on the distant horizon. Thousands of people are fighting and dying right now in Sudan over a struggle for water and arable land. Native Alaskans are losing their villages to the sea as the Arctic icecap melts and the ocean rises. The battle over the Colorado River has become one of the most explosive political issues in the American West. Conservative estimates calculate that deserts are currently expanding at over 40,000 acres per day. The evidence is all around us that, unless we take action, our children and grandchildren will face an unprecedented global crisis.

Colleges and universities have a crucial role to play in heading off this crisis. We are at one of those exciting, yet scary moments in human history when we have an opportunity – indeed, an imperative – to reinvent the world. Sustainability, often defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” is the key to meeting this challenge. “If we are to achieve a sustainable future,” writes Anthony Cortese, “institutions of higher education must provide the awareness, knowledge, skills and values that equip individuals to pursue life goals in a manner that sustains human and non-human well-being for all current and future generations.”

ANAC institutions, with their commitment to civic engagement and experiential learning in the context of a curriculum that seeks to integrate liberal and professional studies, are uniquely suited to provide the leadership necessary to build a sustainable future. In recognition of this potential, Ithaca College is heading up an effort to implement sustainable development on many fronts in our community. Most important, Ithaca received a National Science Foundation Applying Science to Sustainability Grant in 2002 to support collaboration between the college’s Environmental Studies Program and EcoVillage at Ithaca to foster education and research using EcoVillage as a “living laboratory.” This is the first true partnership between a sustainably designed community and a higher education institution in the United States.

The goals of this innovative relationship are to advance undergraduate learning in sustainability and to encourage students to become involved in science-based community ecological projects. Curricular development, independent study and experiential learning opportunities, and community outreach are the three main components of the program. The curricular effort has resulted in the development of four new interdisciplinary courses on sustainability in the Environmental Studies Program and the introduction of sustainability ideas and theories across the college curriculum, including courses in recreational management, philosophy, business management, history, health policy, and physics. Recent independent studies have included solar photovoltaic installations at the college and EcoVillage, as well as a sustainably designed bus shelter for EcoVillage.

The partnership has achieved some of its greatest successes in the area of community outreach. Public events featuring nationally renowned speakers such as David Orr, distinguished professor and director of the Environmental Studies Program at Oberlin College, and Sandra Steingraber, visiting distinguished scholar at Ithaca and author of several widely acclaimed books on the impact of toxic chemicals on the environment and human health, have been held free of charge on campus and in the community. In addition, the college and EcoVillage have joined with other organizations to sponsor the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, which has become one of the most significant such gatherings in North America. These events have served as a powerful catalyst for the campus and the greater Ithaca community, inspiring a wide range of other activities in the field of sustainability.

Perhaps the undertaking that has the most potential to transform the Ithaca community and the surrounding area is the emergence of a regional sustainability initiative. In September 2003, members of EcoVillage and the IC Environmental Studies Program arranged a meeting of about forty community activists, business leaders, and government officials from Ithaca and the larger Tompkins County area to discuss the idea of mounting a regional sustainability effort. The strong interest generated by this conversation led to a feasibility study this past spring, which collated and inventoried the previous research and data collection carried out relevant to sustainability in Tompkins County. The Sustainable Tompkins Initiative, funded by Ithaca College, the Park Foundation, Cornell University, and several local businesses, also initiated a series of community-wide study circles and “sustainability salons” that explored solutions to some of the major challenges in the region to sustainability. Students from Ithaca College and Tompkins Cortland Community College helped to organize and facilitate this dialogue. As a result of these meetings, Sustainable Tompkins will focus its future work on several projects, including a sustainability information resource hub, local resource- and land-use zoning and regulation review and reform, development of alternative-fuel programs and regional sustainable transportation models, and sustainability education and outreach programs.

In order to build support for its multifaceted sustainability initiative, Ithaca College held a regional sustainability summit on campus in early April. The conference, which brought together about 200 corporate leaders, community activists, policymakers, scholars, and students to promote dialogue on sustainability issues, was the first of its kind in upstate New York. In addition to the educational sessions, EcoVillage provided an informational display, as did Ithaca College’s Resource and Environmental Management Program. Students in the NSF grant-funded classes actively participated in summit events. They hosted the interactive Earth Café 2050, a game designed to illustrate the concept of ecological footprinting, prepared a walk-through exhibit of sustainable building materials, and demonstrated a mobile photovoltaic array.

Besides curricular reform and community outreach, the college has begun to tackle the issue of incorporating sustainability into the management of its resources and physical infrastructure. In particular, it has launched a capital campaign to raise money for the construction of cutting edge, sustainably designed facility for the School of Business. The commitment to move in this direction arose out of Ithaca’s recognition that, if we are to produce graduates who can incorporate social and environmental as well as economic factors into their day-to-day decisionmaking, then we need to provide students with facilities that model this process. Other initiatives include a new Environmental Protection Agency grant to fund student research into ways to enhance the biodiversity of South Hill, where the campus is located, to assess the feasibility of installing wind power generation on this hill, and to develop an interactive web-based biodiversity mapping program. The EPA grant also calls for the creation of a collegiate radio program for environmental news, which the students will write and produce.

As the late Ernest Boyer often pointed out, democracy presents us with both privileges and challenges. The democratic ideal demands that we earn our places in our communities by understanding that good citizenship is a dynamic, living act of will and creation. One of our major responsibilities as citizens in a democratic society is to be stewards of our natural resources, making decisions that take into account the need to balance economic growth, social justice, and environmental protection. One of our primary tasks as educators is to arm students to both dream and take action. In the words of David Orr, we must “present a sense of hopefulness to students, and the competence to act on that hope. That’s different from wishful thinking – ignoring problems or assuming that somehow technology or some mythical ‘they’ is going to figure it out.”

In short, we cannot continue to operate as we have in either higher education or society at large. We can no longer think only in the short term and we can no longer waste natural resources or take the environment for granted. We must learn to care about the needs of the global society as much as our local community. Sustainability, as Orr puts it, is a “question of ethical design,” one that acknowledges that “humans are embedded in a network of obligation and are kin to all life.” With their emphasis on interdisciplinarity, integrated learning, and intentional community, ANAC institutions can help lead the way to a new future, one that embraces rather than denies the interconnectedness and interdependence of the world in which we live.