With the Copenhagen talks approaching, it's hard not to wonder why more people aren't engaged in the effort to prevent runaway climate change. Even as President Obama pledges 17% emissions cuts going into these crucial negotiations, new polls show that as many as 30% of Americans don't believe in global warming. Obviously, something's not working here.

Unless we move from trying to scare people into action by apocalyptic predictions of the coming climate disaster and focus on the hope and opportunity that can be generated by moving to a new energy economy, we're not going to be able to move forward at the pace necessary to have a meaningful impact. Climate and Energy Truths: Our Common Future, a study issued earlier this year by EcoAmerica, underscores the importance of grasping this insight. Carrying out focus groups and online and phone surveys, the study tested a range of conceputal frameworks and messages for speaking with the American public about energy and climate change.  It's worth reading in its entirety, but here's the report's bottom line: it's far easier to engage people "around the energy debate than the climate change debate."

There is a similar need to shift the framework in higher education when it comes to sustainability. As Andrea Putman and I note in our editorial "A New Era in Higher Education?" (in the October issue of Sustainability: The Journal of Record), the most forward looking corporations understand the need to make sustainability a strategic imperative and are gaining significant ground on their competitors during the current recession. As the recent Aberdeen Group report "The ROI of Sustainability" puts it, “Far from being a philanthropic ‘nice to have’ [sustainability is a] ‘must have’ strategy for long-term, business viability and success.”

What's the lesson here for higher education leaders? Too many of them are looking at sustainability in terms of what their institutions could do to promote it ("the right thing to do") and not enough are asking, how can sustainability help us become more strategic and perform more effectively ("the smart thing to do")? The big idea that they need to wrap their heads around is that sustainability as a driver can make their institutions smarter, more reslient, and less costly to operate. Perhaps reading the EcoAmerica report would help them better share this perspective with their institutions' stakeholders and move them forward to the new energy future that beckons.

 

        

For Blog Action Day - Climate Change, a brief excerpt from Boldly Sustainable: Hope and Opportunity for Higher Education in the Age of Climate Change (NACUBO, 2009), which I co-authored with Andrea Putman, my colleague at Second Nature:

Designing a sustainable world is not simply a technocratic exercise. It is as much a cultural and ethical project as a scientific and engineering endeavor. It requires imagination, versatility, and creativity, a willingness to live our lives differently. Only if we come to comprehend that, as the ecologist and theologian Thomas Berry observes, “the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects,” will we achieve a level of awareness sufficient to produce viable solutions. We must understand that we are woven inextricably into the fabric of life and do not stand apart from it, exercising dominion over the world around us. The “environment” is not something that exists separate from human beings but rather is what makes human life possible...

How do we want to be remembered: as leaders who understood the need to address upstream the pressing issues of our age and acted with courage and foresight, or as people whose primary goals were short-term advantage and gain and who cared for little else besides self advancement? The present moment is unlike any other in terms of what is at stake. As Berry writes, it is a moment that calls on us to transform our exploitation of the earth into a relationship that is “mutually beneficial.” And, as luck would have it, the moment is brief. Unless we act now to preserve and enhance the life, beauty, and diversity of the planet for future generations, we will become, in Berry’s words, “impoverished in all that makes us human.” The question is no longer why we should address climate destabilization, and in some cases, it is not even how. The question has become how fast and effectively we can move forward. In short, to what extent are we willing to be boldly sustainable? ...

Given global threats such as the growing disruption of the climate, staggering levels of poverty in the developing world, and the looming peak oil crisis, it is remarkable how insular much of the higher education establishment is. Amid the day-to-day tasks of measuring learning outcomes, recruiting students, cultivating donors, balancing the budget, applying for grants, and keeping controversy to a minimum, surprisingly little time or energy is spent on how to address the truly serious problems that promise to upend the lives of the next generations. “One could make the case that our universities are actually mired in the Stone Age,” notes Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University. “Our universities remain highly static, resistant to change, unwilling to evolve in pace with real time.” Just as our prehistoric ancestors went about busting up rocks, we view the world as something to break down and take apart rather than to understand holistically and live in harmony with. In Crow's words, we seek to “heat it, beat it, melt it, smash it, burn it and blow it up.”

It is time for a new set of priorities that move us from “the Stone Age to the Sustainability Age.” How can it make sense for universities and colleges to keep doing what they do when they have contributed in large part to the current predicament? In light of how we got where we are, shouldn’t higher education leaders rethink the way that teaching, research, and learning take place and how they operate their facilities? More people, both inside and outside academia, are asking these questions. Now, more than ever, we need to keep in mind Eric Hoffer’s acerbic observation that “in times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”

Although colleges and universities may be inherently conservative, they must respond to the dramatically altered circumstances or run the risk of becoming irrelevant. Sustainability, as Peter Senge puts it, is “the necessary revolution.”The high stakes involved in meeting the challenges of sustainability and climate change mean that effective leadership, strategic thinking, and implementation in higher education are more imperative than ever. They demand a shift from maintaining the status quo to bringing about transformation. “Boldly sustainable” is not just a battle cry. It is a powerful strategy for higher education to achieve renewal, reformation, and relevance in the 21st century. It is an opportunity for colleges and universities to avoid the fate of collapsing under the weight of their own self-absorption, isolation, and obtuseness,to avoid becoming the intellectual equivalent of Easter Island.

        

My Dad, perhaps more than anyone, taught me how to think long term and why it was important, and he passed on his lifelong love of the outdoors to my brothers and me. He also taught us the importance of family and, by example, what it meant to be entrepreneurial. I delivered this eulogy at his memorial service in Suffield, CT -- where we grew up -- on September 28, 2009:

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea.

But such a tide as moving seems asleep
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home!

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For though from out our bourn of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1889

My Dad loved life and he loved his family and friends. He was also independent, proud, and stubborn, and he was very, very smart. Anyone who underestimated Dad made a big mistake. He was naturally curious about the world, kept an open mind, and was always ready to embrace new experiences. He had an amazing amount of energy and once he set his mind on something, you could be sure he would accomplish it. And good luck if you couldn’t keep up with him.

Just six weeks ago, Dad drove up to Maine to celebrate my brother George’s birthday. George offered to come down and get him, and his business partner and close friend Phil Shuman offered to drive him up. Dad was not in good health, but he insisted that the only way he was going to Maine was if he could get there on his own. So he set off in his trusty BMW, with Chilli his loyal cocker spaniel at his side, heading north. It took him something like seven hours to get there, he said later, in part because he wasn’t feeling well and in part because Chilli had important business to conduct on the way.

The drive back to Suffield a few days later was altogether different. Perhaps revved up by the birthday celebration and time with his family, he set his cruise control at 78 mph and got home in four and a half hours. To this day we’re not really sure who was actually driving that car, and I’m not sure Dad ever really knew either.Two things we do know for sure, however: first, there were no bathroom breaks for poor old Chilli; and second, Dad had done it his way once again.

Just a few days later, Dad was in the hospital fighting for his life. He was in tremendous pain, suffering from an infection of his esophagus and unable to swallow any food. Even then he did not lose his sense of humor. For a few days he shared the room with an elderly gentleman who was suffering from dementia and would call out from time to time, reliving some incident from his past. At one point, suddenly sitting upright, he shouted, "Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Dad couldn’t resist and responded in as loud a voice as he could muster, "Giddy up, giddy up!" Even as I was trying hard to stifle my laughter, I thought what a perfect expression of my father’s personality this moment captured. Throughout his life, people had told him to slow down, trim his sails, don’t dream so big, and he would have none of it. Instead, with a "giddy up" or two, he would simply forge ahead.

One of the great truths is that we die the way we live. The courage and determination that Dad displayed in the last days of his life was simply an extension of how he had always lived. At 18 years old, he rescued a couple who had fallen through the ice. Afterwards he said nothing about the incident to his mother, who scolded him for coming home soaking wet on such a cold day.

Only when the husband and wife, grateful that Dad had saved their lives, went to the local newspaper did the story become public. "At no time during the proceedings did he show any indications of losing his head or becoming excited," the couple told the reporter. "‘Just hang on; don’t get flustered; I’ll get you out,’ he kept repeating reassuringly to them.’"

Dad was just as stoic and courageous during his last few years when he fought for his own life. Diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma just two days before my stepmother Ruth passed away, he never gave up. Although the loss of Ruth crushed him, he kept moving forward.

As his longtime friend Neil Smit told me in a recent phone conversation, "George was a hard plower." Neil was referring to Dad’s approach to skiing, which he gave up only a couple of years ago, but he was also talking about his approach to life. "Enduring the battle with his body as it began to fail, he continued to live his life," our son Jesse wrote after Dad died. "He did not throw the towel in and he fought for all his days."

One of my favorite quotes comes from John Shedd’s Salt from My Attic: "A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." If anybody ever embodied this spirit, my Dad did. Not that he went looking for trouble recklessly. After all, he was an accountant. But he was always eager to embark on a new adventure. That was why he loved sailing and why some of his happiest days were on his boat Freedom, cruising along the East Coast from Maine to Florida.

Dad’s love of adventure was not confined to the water. He had always wanted to go skydiving, so for his 75th birthday Ruth arranged for lessons and a jump at the Vero Beach airport in Florida, where he was stationed during with the Navy during World War II. I remember like it was yesterday the excitement in his voice when he called afterwards, still standing out on the airfield. "I did it!" he exclaimed. Included in Ruth’s birthday present was a video of the jump, capturing the exuberant expression on his face as he descended.To this day, whenever I watch the video, I laugh until I have tears running down my cheeks because the soundtrack is Steppenwolf’s "Born to be Wild." Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper had nothing on my Dad.

Some of my best days with my father were when I visited him and Ruth at their place on the ocean in Vero Beach, just south of Sebastian Inlet. It was a magical place on the narrowest part of the barrier island, and only a few hundred yards separated the Atlantic from the Indian River. I would go in the spring, just as baseball was getting underway, and we would head over to Dodgertown on the mainland to watch the exhibition games, eat a hot dog, and have a beer. Afterwards we would stop at a bait shop, pick up some live shrimp and go fishing off the dock back at the lagoon, watching the sun set across the water.

What I realized during this time with my father was that, late in his life, he had learned to live in the moment. This was not necessarily an easy achievement for him, because as Neil says, Dad was a "hard plower." Patience was not one of his greatest strengths and he was always looking ahead. But it was different in Florida. He and Ruth had discovered a place where the land, sea, and sky all came together in one glorious symphony, and it made their hearts sing. Both the past and future drifted away on the tide, leaving only the moment in which they lived.

Loss, although intense, brings great clarity. During the last five weeks as I spent each day with Dad, rooting for the Red Sox, doing crossword puzzles, talking, and sitting with him while he slept, I slowly came to grips with the reality that his life would soon end. In those moments, I realized what I most admired about my father: his integrity. By integrity, I don’t mean just strong ethics, important as they are, but also a consistency between inner core values and outer behavior that creates a sense of wholeness and resilience.

Although Dad kept up to date on a lot of things, he was old fashioned in his belief that hard work, family, and education were the keys to a good life. And you couldn’t spend a day with him without understanding that he lived these beliefs, they weren’t just empty words. As John Adams once observed, "There are two types of education. One should teach us how to make a living, and the other how to live." My father’s life was a testament to the wisdom of Adams’s insight.

So Dad has crossed the bar and put out to sea on his last great adventure. He will be sorely missed. But, as my father’s cousin Giorgio wrote from Italy when Ruth passed away, "We don’t ask you, Lord, why do you carry her away now, but we say thank you, Lord, because you gave her to us for many, special years." The same is true of Dad: he was a gift we will hold in our hearts forever. The flood may bear him far, but we rejoice knowing that he will finally meet his Pilot face to face. May he rest in peace.

        

Be sure to take a look at this recent article and video published by the Mc Kinsey Quarterly: "When Sustainability Means More than ‘Green’." The article is adapted from Adam Werback’s new book, Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto, in which he urges businesses to turn to sustainability in order to gain long-term profitability and transparency. Werback, of course, is the former president of the Sierra Club and current corporate consultant helping to guide Wal-Mart's wide-ranging sustainability initiative.

"To endure in a changeable world with more limits on resources and less credit," writes Werbach, "companies must develop and execute a strategy for sustainability." This is very similar to the argument that my co-author Andrea Putman and I make in our new book Boldly Sustainable: Hope and Opportunity for Higher Education in the Age of Climate Change regarding colleges and universities. In our case, we contend that the institutions that successfully implement sustainability measures across their campuses will make the necessary organizational and pedagogical changes that will allow them not only to survive but thrive in the 21st century.

In Werbach's words, "Every crisis is an opportunity. The crisis we face now is our chance—your chance—to build a strategy for sustainability into the core of your company and your life. Such a strategy is a necessity, not an idealistic illusion." Read his article and watch the interview with him here.

        

If you missed "Watching Whales Watching Us": in last Sunday's NY Times Magazine, it's worth taking the time to go back and read this lengthy but fascinating article. Charles Siebert, author of The Wauchula Woods Accord: Toward a New Understanding of Animals, explores the latest research on whale cognition. The bottom line: "Whales, we now know, teach and learn. They scheme. They cooperate, and they grieve. They recognize themselves and their friends...And perhaps most stunningly, given all of our transgressions against them, they may even, in certain circumstances, learned to trust us again."

You have to plow through the first couple of pages, which detail the recent legal controversies involving whales, environmentalists, and the U.S. Navy. Not necessarily the most effective way to engage your readers. (I wonder if any of the U.S. senators currently grilling Judge Sotomeyer on Capitol Hill will ask her to take a position on this classic clash between national security and the natural world.) 

What follows this rather slow beginning are some truly compelling accounts of encounters with the gray whales off the Baja's western coast. Interactions with the whales have reached the point where it's not unknown for these giant creatures to dive under a fishing boat and lift it on its back, giving the folks on board the joy ride of their lives. One of the researchers who have been studying these extraordinary high jinks since the late 1990s sums up her view: "I was not prepared for the profound nature of what’s going on down here. These encounters are highly unique and rare. And there’s another word for it: it’s an enigma."

Going off the deep end alert: I've thought for a long time that interspecies communication will be the next really big killer app. I wonder what the rest of the gang will want to tell us about the sixth mass species extinction, this one courtesy of human-induced climate change and habitat destruction. What happens when they get to vote? Beam me up, Scotty!

        

Boldly Sustainable got a nice mention in Wednesday's issue of Inside Higher Ed. In "Getting to Green," the sustainability blog for IHE, G. Rendell writes that my co-author Andrea Putman and I "not only describe how colleges and universities can save money by reducing their environmental footprints, they explain how a profound commitment to sustainability is the basis for defining higher ed's 21st century market sector."



It's always a happy moment when a reader grasps the larger implications of one's work.  As I've written in this space previously, sustainability is a strategic imperative for colleges and universities. In the words of Cornell President David Skorton, "sustainability is no longer an elective." (See New York Times, June 13, 2007). Those leaders who understand this new reality and act on it will be the ones whose institutions are most likely to survive the current upheaval in higher education.

Why do I say this? Some recent data, which came out after the book went to press, underscores the extent to which corporations that have made a deep commitment to sustainability are financially better off than those that have not. In a report released this past February, "Green Winners: The Performance of Sustainability," A.T. Kearney noted that in 16 out of 18 industries, companies with a strong sustainability commitment were “the clear leaders in the financial markets" and they outperformed industry averages by 15% in the second half of 2008. Among the common characteristics of these leading companies were the following:

• Focus on long-term strategy, not just short-term gains
• Strong corporate governance
• Sound risk-management practices
• History of investment in innovations

An even more recent study by the Aberdeen Group found that sustainability initiatives cut overall costs in over 200 companies by 6 to 10%; at the same time, customer retention rates increased 16%.

These are by any measure impressive results and deserve close consideration. Higher education, and the economy in general, are not just experiencing a conventional downturn right now; they are undergoing a major paradigm shift in which the old rules will no longer apply and the new way of doing business will have to take into account the previously overlooked value of ecoservices that are under unprecedented stress.

As Jhana Senxian and Cindy Jutras, the authors of the Aberdeen Group's "The ROI of Sustainability," contend, "far from being a philanthropic 'nice to have,’" sustainability is a "'must have' strategy for long-term, business viability and success."

        

 

Tompkins County Climate Protection Initiative – Working Together for a Brighter Future

433 N. Aurora Street
Ithaca, NY 14850

For Immediate Release                                                 Contact: Peter Bardaglio

July 10, 2009                                                                          (607) 229-6183

                                                                                             pbardaglio@secondnature.org

Climate Protection Initiative Joins in Summer Energy Efficiency Rollout

 

ITHACA, NY – The heat is on to improve residential energy efficiency this summer in Tompkins County.

The Tompkins County Climate Protection Initiative (TCCPI), launched in June 2008, has joined with coalition partners Tompkins County Workforce Investment Board, Tompkins Community Action, Performance Systems Development, LLC, Park Foundation, and Cornell Cooperative Extension – Tompkins County to undertake a summer youth energy efficiency campaign focusing on rural communities in the county.

 

Thanks to federal economic stimulus funding channeled through the Tompkins County Workforce Investment Board, Tompkins Community Action (TCAction) has hired 100 youth ages 14 to 24 for the summer, 50 of whom will be involved in energy work. Ten will be learning about energy audit and energy efficiency repairs by working on crews; the other 40 will be going door-to-door, distributing educational materials on energy savings in the home and available state and federal incentives for energy efficiency upgrades.

In addition, the youth will seek to register each household visited with Green Energy COMPASS, a service developed by Performance Systems Development (PSD) to track and benchmark residential energy performance and carbon emissions. This service will provide residents with an analysis of their utility bills, measure their own progress on reducing usage, and gauge their progress against a cohort made up of their neighbors who have also signed up to participate. PSD, besides providing the usage of COMPASS, is also offering training on how to make the most of the service.

 

According to Stacey Murphy, TCAction’s director of energy services, the youth will focus on low-income households in about 16 neighborhoods in rural areas of Tompkins County. “We hope to meet people where they are, engage them in some basic steps they can make to save energy and money, and then move them in a more comprehensive direction,” says Murphy.

 

Funding from TCCPI and the Park Foundation has made it possible for the Cornell Cooperative Extension – Tompkins County (CCE) to hire 12 Cornell University and Ithaca College students to help produce materials for the door-to-door awareness campaign and to provide maps to help TCAction identify the neighborhoods to be canvassed.

 

As part of the effort to stimulate interest in energy efficiency, CCE is working with the college students to launch a leadership education program aimed at engaging community leaders to carry out energy efficiency improvements in their homes. In some cases, they are offering these leaders a utility bill analysis and abbreviated home energy assessment, including some initial predictions of potential savings. The students will then produce short videos in which these leaders talk about the improvements they have made and their impact on energy bills.

 

“We believe these videos will be a powerful tool for peer-to-peer marketing this summer and beyond, helping to persuade residents that it makes financial and environmental sense to upgrade their homes,” says Ken Schlather, executive director of CCE. 

 

TCCPI seeks to leverage the climate action commitments made by Cornell University, Ithaca College, Tompkins Cortland Community College, Tompkins County, and the City of Ithaca to mobilize a countywide energy efficiency effort focused primarily on the retrofitting of buildings. The initiative has brought together a wide range of community partners from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. 

Current partners include:

 

Alternatives Federal Credit Union

Catholic Charities – Tompkins and Tioga

Cayuga Medical Center
City of Ithaca

Cornell Cooperative Extension Tompkins County

Cornell University
Downtown Ithaca Alliance

Ithaca Carshare
Ithaca College
Ithaca-Tompkins County Transportation Council

Paleontological Research Institute/Museum of the Earth

Park Foundation

Performance Systems Development, LLC

Sustainable Tompkins

Sustainable Transitions

Tompkins Community Action

Tompkins Tompkins Cortland Community College

Tompkins County Area DevelopmentTompkins County Chamber of Commerce

Tompkins County Council of Governments

Tompkins County Legislature

Tompkins County Planning Department

Tompkins County  Workforce Investment Board

Town of Caroline

Town of Ithaca

Travis & Travis/Ithaca Rentals and Renovations

 

“We hope to establish a model of cross-sector collaboration for other communities around the country who are interested in energy efficiency and climate protection,” says Peter Bardaglio, coordinator of TCCPI and senior fellow at Second Nature, which oversees the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment (ACUPCC).

Cornell University, Ithaca College, and Tompkins Cortland Community College are signatories to the ACUPCC, which seeks to achieve carbon neutrality at the participating higher education institutions “as soon as possible” and to promote the research and education needed to stabilize the earth’s climate.

 

Driving the climate protection effort locally is the target established by the Tompkins County Legislature in December 2008 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by the year 2050, cutting two percent of 2008 base year emissions per year for the next 40 years. The action steps necessary to achieve this goal are outlined in the Energy and Greenhouse Gas Emissions Element, which was developed by the Tompkins County Planning Office under the direction of Ed Marx, Commissioner of Planning.

 

Learn more about the Tompkins County Climate Protection Initiative at: www.tccpi.org.

 

 

###

        

In this week's "Brainstorm,"  The Chronicle Review blog, Stan Katz offers a thoughtful critique of Mark Taylor's op-ed in the April 27th issue of the NY Times (see previous blog entry). His main criticism is that Taylor only offers a grocery list of suggested reforms, many of which are old ideas and don't hang together. Fair enough. From my perspective, though, one of the readers who writes in support of Taylor makes the most salient point:

"I think Taylor is spot-on in terms of restructuring the curriculum— particularly as it relates to more integration and less disciplinary 'silos.' As inter and multi disciplinary programs increase, colleges and universities are being stretched to meet the new demands (e.g. environmental sciences/studies).

With crises (like climate change) come opportunities to re-imagine teaching and learning in higher education. The current general education model is woefully inadequate and amounts to a “checkbox” caricature of the liberal arts.

Tomorrow’s students need to be systems-thinkers (and doers). From my seat, I worry that we are driving around in the higher education equivalent of a Chevy Nova. It’s time to imagine if things were otherwise."

        

From Peter Senge's The Necessary Revolution: "Occasionally something different happens, a collective awakening to new possibilities that changes everything over time -- how people see the world, what they value, how society defines progress and organizes itself, and how institutions operate."  In Boldly Sustainable: Hope and Opportunity for Higher Education in the Age of Climate Change, released last month, Andrea Putman and I explore the potential of the sustainability revolution to transform higher education.

I think a lot of us are ready for big changes in higher ed.  See Mark Taylor's recent op-ed in the New York Times, "End the University as We Know It."  Despite these calls for change, of course, there is always the chance that higher ed will end up becoming what Putman and I call "the intellectual equivalent of Easter Island": a place we pay a lot of money to visit and then leave -- in the end, the encounter doesn't have much impact except to remind us how isolated the place is from the rest of the world. The university either becomes the engine driving us into a sustainable future or it becomes a curiosity/exotic luxury. Nothing in between. The rest of us will move to the Web or create new learning communities. Of course, these are not mutually exclusive options; indeed, for some people, they are one and the same.

        

My Second Nature colleague and co-author Andrea Putman and I had an article adapted from Boldly Sustainable in the March 31 issue of ClimateEdu, the newsletter for the National Wildlife Federation's Campus Ecology Program:

Is Culture Shift Possible?

Peter Bardaglio and Andrea Putman

March 31, 2009

A student faces off with Oberlin College's energy orbs, which track electricity usage in the dorms. (Oberlin College)

Students and visitors walking into a residence hall at Oberlin College shouldn't be surprised to find glowing orbs mounted on walls, changing colors throughout the day. Sound like one of the DHARMA Initiative research stations on the television show "Lost"? These orbs are part of an ongoing experiment to better understand how to encourage reduced energy consumption. The color of the "energy orbs" tells building residents how they're doing in real time. Bright red means energy consumption is higher than average, yellow indicates things are running at about average, and green means consumption is below average.

As the Oberlin energy orbs suggest, at the heart of sustainability is the goal of moving from a culture of consumption to one of conservation. Simply greening campus operations is not enough. Moving toward sustainability hinges on our ability to inspire and maintain changes in behavior, expectations, and norms. Until people remember to turn off their computers, hop on the bus, or put their soda bottles in the recycling bin, it will be difficult to make much progress.

How one frames the message has a clear impact on how effectively it is communicated. "It's not about telling people, 'You have to do this, you have to do that,'" notes Oberlin College undergraduate Lucas Brown. "It's about fitting sustainability into our own lives." The energy orbs provide a quick, easy way to tell what the level of energy use is in the building without a lot of technical detail and in a way that motivates rather than alienates the residents. In fact, this kind of real-time feedback at Oberlin led to cuts of more than 50% in energy consumption during the experiment.

Simply put, inundating people with facts and figures can lead to paralysis. Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale University Project on Climate Change, contends that "you have to have an emotional response-bad or good-to put a high priority on doing something." But just scaring people with apocalyptic messages about the future won't work either. Instead, people have to be presented with concrete, positive actions; otherwise they can feel overwhelmed and powerless.

Environmental psychologist Doug McKenzie-Mohr suggests that the most effective way to promote sustainable behavior is to adopt community-based social marketing in place of the usual information-based campaigns. In his words, community-based social marketing focuses on "initiatives delivered at the community level which focus on removing barriers to an activity while simultaneously enhancing the activities' benefits." Community-based social marketing involves four steps: (1) identifying the barriers to a particular activity; (2) developing a strategy based on these data; (3) piloting a strategy; and (4) assessing the strategy's success once it has been implemented across a community.

According to McKenzie-Mohr, among the most effective tools in community-based social marketing is commitment. Securing a small commitment at the outset leads to a successful larger request. Thus, asking someone to put a bumper sticker on his or her car about buying green products increases the possibility that the person will actually purchase these products.

Another important tool is the use of eye-catching prompts that remind people to turn off the lights, turn down the thermostat, or check the air pressure in their tires. In addition, norm-based messaging can be very persuasive. A 2007 study showed that giving households regular feedback on how much energy they were using relative to the rest of the group, along with a signal of social approval or disapproval (in the form of happy- or sad-face emoticons), led almost everyone to cut down on their energy consumption. "Keeping up with the Joneses," it turns out, works as a powerful motivator in arenas other than consumer goods.

Communicating messages that are easy to remember, clear, and specific, and establishing personal and community goals are also key to successful social marketing. As part of an energy savings campaign, for example, University of Buffalo, Tufts University and Williams College urged students to "do it in the dark," a message sure to resonate with this demographic group. Finally, the careful use of incentives that reward positive action rather than penalize negative behavior is a critical tool in moving people toward more sustainable behavior.

Clearly, attempts to change behavior and values raise a number of thorny issues. "Campuses will become sustainable only when they have universal buy-in and enthusiastic participation from all stakeholders," observes Derek Larson, director of the Environmental Studies Program at the College of St. Benedict/St. John's University. "This requires a cultural shift that leads people to ask themselves 'what is the most sustainable way to do this?' before making a decision, rather than asking 'what is the cheapest way to do this?' or 'how have we done this in the past?' as is common practice at most institutions."

The biggest question is whether a culture fueled by billions of advertising dollars and powered by decades of cheap oil and energy can change fast enough to avert disaster. Just as smoking habits have altered significantly over the last 20 years, more sustainable behaviors will probably take hold. But will they do so in time to make a difference? Although no one knows the answer to this question, the participation of colleges and universities in this effort can certainly improve our chances. What color is your campus's energy orb?