Second Nature

TCCPI at Fifteen

/ Peter Bardaglio / Leave a comment

It’s hard to believe, but this summer marks the 15th anniversary of the Tompkins County Climate Protection Initiative. At the time of TCCPI’s launch in June 2008 I was working on a book with a colleague at Second Nature, a nonprofit think tank in Boston dedicated to promoting the higher education sustainability movement. One of the key themes in the book, Boldly Sustainable: Hope and Opportunity for Higher Education in the Age of Climate Change (2009) was the need for greater collaboration between colleges and universities and the communities in which they operated.

I was drafting a chapter for the book in early 2008 on sustainability, economic development, and community partnerships, exploring several case studies across the U.S., including Ithaca. I had stepped down the previous year from the provost’s office at Ithaca College, where I had helped lead what became a nationally recognized sustainability initiative, to join Second Nature as a senior fellow. Having left the academic world following a quarter century as a faculty member and administrator, I became much more aware of the disconnect between campuses and communities in the emerging sustainability movement. 

Time for Collaboration

Looking over the Ithaca landscape, it seemed to me that the time was right for an effort that would bring together higher education institutions, local governments, nonprofits, and businesses around the need for climate action and the energy transition. I brought the idea to the Park Foundation and submitted a grant proposal for what became TCCPI; the foundation generously funded the proposal and has continued to do so with unstinting support.

In that time, TCCPI has held about 165 monthly meetings, published 76 newsletters, and issued 14 annual reports of member accomplishments regarding climate action, clean energy, and sustainability. In 2016, as part of an effort to strengthen our engagement with the private sector, we established (with the assistance of a grant from NYSERDA) the Ithaca 2030 District, part of what is now a network of 24 urban districts in the U.S. and Canada dedicated to improving the energy and water performance of commercial buildings in downtown areas. 

From an initial base of 15 buildings, the Ithaca 2030 District has grown to 44 buildings with 584,381 square feet of committed space. Besides our quarterly meetings and newsletters, we provide each property member with an interactive, online dashboard that measures the energy and water performance of their individual buildings. These dashboards are regularly updated so that owners, managers, and tenants can monitor their progress. You can find our latest annual district-level report here.

Policy Advocacy

Apart from the founding of the Ithaca 2030 District, perhaps the most significant change in TCCPI since its beginning is the extent to which we have become involved over the last few years in policy advocacy. Our activities in this area are primarily focused on the state level, and we are members of three statewide activist coalitions: NY Renews, Renewable Heat Now, and Climate Can’t Wait. The passage of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act in 2019 and the subsequent establishment of the Climate Action Council, which released its recommendations for a state climate plan this past December, as well as the flurry of bills sparked by these recommendations, have constituted the main catalyst for this evolution in TCCPI’s work. At the local level, we have been a strong and active supporter of the Ithaca Green New Deal.

Underlying this new attention on policy advocacy is a mounting sense of urgency as the climate crisis becomes an undeniable reality of our present, one that has had a disproportionate impact on marginalized groups and which demands that we place equity and justice at the center of our efforts. In the face of this growing awareness and public support for action, however, the fossil fuel industry and its allies have responded with misinformation, fear mongering, and a deep-seated commitment to maintaining the status quo.

In the process, it’s become clear that the most effective way to push back and secure a safe, just, and healthy future is collective action by well-organized citizens fighting for our communities and making sure no one is left behind. Animated by this spirit, TCCPI will keep moving forward in the years to come. As Thomas Berry writes in The Great Work: Our Way into the Future, unless we devote ourselves to preserve and enhance the life, beauty, and diversity of the planet for the generations to come, we will become “impoverished in all that makes us human.”

Creating New Spaces for Connecting in New Ways

/ Peter Bardaglio / 1 Comment

As more than one study has determined, we have the means at our disposal to move into a clean energy world in which the power of the wind, sun, water, tides, and other renewable sources is tapped and runaway climate change is averted.  The latest of these reports comes from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which earlier this month released an investigation surveying the already existing technologies that, in combination, could make this happen.  The critical missing components are the necessary policies that would drive change in this direction and the political will to implement them.

I get up every day and do the work that I do because I want to help create the public pressure and culture of collaboration that will make these changes occur.  I get up every day and do the work that I do because I believe each one of us has the responsibility to be a subject in history and not just an object of history.  I get up every day and do the work that I do because there is no silver bullet, no magic wand, that can make the immense problems confronting us go away.  The only thing that will work is to escape from the old myths of independence and self-reliance and embrace the truths of interdependence and mutuality.

Understanding these truths and harnessing the power of the network is at the heart of what makes Second Nature so effective.  The American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) and Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) are both products of this approach to change. They are collaborative efforts to create the conditions for the emergence of a new paradigm, one that involves a shift from the mechanistic, atomistic solutions of the industrial age to the organic, interconnected web of the digital age.  They are part of the largest social movement in all human history, what Paul Hawken calls “the blessed unrest.”

The overturning of the old paradigm will only happen if we intentionally and strategically create what Gibrán Rivera refers to as “the spaces for connection.”  Collaboration, inclusivity, and mutual respect make it possible for us to move upstream, where the real solutions are.  As Rivera puts it, “By re-inventing the ways in which we come together we begin to live in the world we are trying to build.”  Second Nature, together with the generous support of the Park Foundation, have provided me with the invaluable space not only for connection but also experimentation, the opportunity to reinvent myself as a social entrepreneur and explore new models of partnership and change such as the Tompkins County Climate Protection Initiative (TCCPI).  And for that I will always be grateful.

Note: This post originally appeared in Second Nature’s blog here.

A New Era in Higher Education?

/ Peter Bardaglio / Leave a comment

What does it mean to be “boldly sustainable” in higher education? That’s the question that my former Second Nature colleague Andrea Putman and I set out to tackle in our 2009 book on how the sustainability movement could transform colleges and universities. A revitalized sense of mission, more sustainable communities, and leadership that addresses the complex, interconnected problems of our time, both in the academy and in the world at large: these are the hallmarks of what could be a new era in higher education.

“Occasionally something different happens,” writes Peter Senge, “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.”[i] If colleges and universities can demonstrate how to cultivate a sense of collective responsibility for the good of the whole, they will not only bring about a long overdue transformation of higher education but also create the possibility of a more sustainable civilization.

Adam Joseph Lewis Center at Oberlin College

Educational institutions that ignore sustainability or treat it as one more thing to stir into the mix, rather than an approach that transforms everything, will find it increasingly difficult to compete. Sustainability should be seen as the central organizing principle, a core strategy in an intellectual, social, and cultural sense.[ii] And it should be recognized that these three strands – the intellectual, social, and cultural – can not be unraveled and separated without undermining the capacity of education to be an effective force moving forward.

Sustainability as a core intellectual, social, and cultural strategy means acknowledging that we have an opportunity and imperative to reinvent our relationship to the world, even as that world is remaking itself as a result of globalization, technological innovation, the rise of the knowledge economy, and profound demographic shifts. 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 those of our local community, realizing that our families’ well-being is inextricably linked to the well-being of the planet. Sustainability, as David Orr puts it, is a “design challenge like no other” based on the proposition that “humans are embedded in a network of obligation and are kin to all life.”[iii]

A commitment to sustainability will result in a more holistic and purpose-driven education. “There are two types of education,” John Adams shrewdly noted. “One should teach us how to make a living, and the other how to live.” But are these two types mutually exclusive, or can we bring them together in a new synthesis? Viewed through the lens of sustainability, it quickly becomes clear that we must. Today’s students will not be able to build a more sustainable society if they are not prepared do both. They must be able to ask the important questions, grasp the big picture, and commit to an ethos of stewardship (“how to live”) at the same time that they acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and professional training to make a real difference in the world (“how to make a living”).

It is clear, in other words, that we must arm students both to dream and take action. As Orr puts it, we must “present a sense of hopefulness to students, and the competence to act on that hope.”[iv] Such an education should involve experiential, project-based learning that connects the classroom and the larger world, and it should foster whole-systems thinking that focuses on the interactions between human and natural systems.

Perhaps the most important impact that educational institutions can have on efforts to meet the challenge of climate disruption is to shift the current dominant narrative from one that emphasizes the problems and barriers to one that underscores the vast potential of human ingenuity and creativity.[v] “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas,” John Maynard Keynes observed, “but in escaping from the old ones.”[vi]

By letting go of ideas that have outlived their usefulness, we clear the space for fresh perspectives to emerge. Higher education, more than any other institution in our society, can generate the intellectual, social, and cultural capital to escape the gravitational pull of the old, dysfunctional ideas and behaviors that have brought us to our current impasse, launching us into a new world of hope and opportunity. In the current age of climate change, the need for such transformative leadership has never been greater.[vii]

Notes

This essay is adapted from Peter Bardaglio and Andrea Putman, Boldly Sustainable: Hope and Opportunity for Higher Education in the Age of Climate Change (2009). For more information about the book, click here.

[i] Peter Senge et. al., The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World (New York: Doubleday, 2008), p. 5.

[ii] Michael Crow, “American Research Universities During the Long Twilight of the Stone Age,” elaboration on remarks delivered at the Rocky Mountain Sustainability Summit, University of Colorado, Boulder, February 21, 2007, p. 3. http://president.asu.edu/files/2007_0212StoneAge.pdf.

[iii] David W. Orr, The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 10-11.

[iv] Quoted in Marci Janas, “Ancestry and Influence: A Portrait of David Orr,” September 17, 1998. http://www.oberlin.edu/news-info/98sep/orr_profile.html.

[v] William E. Easterling III, Brian H. Hurd, and Joel B. Smith, Coping with Global Climate Change: The Role of Adaptation in the United States, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, June 2004. http://www.pewclimate.org/docUploads/Adaptation.pdf.

[vi] John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harcourt, 1964), p. viii.

[vii] See Alexander Astin and Helen S. Astin, Leadership Reconsidered: Engaging Higher Education in Social Change (Battle Creek, MI: Kellogg Foundation, 2000), pp. 8-16 for an excellent discussion of the principles of transformative leadership.