Permanent Green

On Wednesday, former Vice President and Nobel laureate Albert A. Gore, Jr. will speak to a crowd predicted to number in the thousands. Environmentalists are bursting with excitement to hear the pronouncements of the godfather of green. More than just excitement is the possibility that Gore’s speech will slingshot the university community into an eco-fervor that will put us on course to beat President Faust’s greenhouse gas reduction goal.

By inviting Gore to campus and advertising the event extensivetly, Harvard is showing its will to make environmentalism a social movement and a subject for serious student involvement on campus. However, the extent of this social movement has been limited so far. To instill lasting habits for emissions reduction among students, Harvard must increase efforts to encourage more environemtnally friendly behavior in daily life.

The University has, fortunately, taken admirable steps in this direction already. It could have decided to focus solely on infrastructural reductions, throwing its money at LEED certifications and other building improvements. This strategy could probably succeed. Harvard is old, its buildings and energy sources are relatively inefficient, and there is no shortage of potential structural improvements that would dial back our impact.

Thankfully, Harvard has stuck with its core business as a place of education and decided to make cutting GHG emissions a campus-wide social effort to some extent, not just one for engineers and construction workers. However, in order to make environmentalism a unifying social cause on campus, and ingrain behavior that reduces GHG emissions, Harvard will have to take steps to strengthen and expand its current environmental outreach efforts.

At present, the web of environmental outreach organizations mirrors the university itself in its complexity. Many departments and schools have their own green groups. Each of these groups runs a variety of programs to change the habits within its fief, many of which have been successful. Salient among these programs are green competitions—the Green Cup in the College, the Shut the Sash Competition, which pays labs to close energy-hungry fume hoods, run by the Green Labs program, the Green Skillet contest run by HUDS, and other similar programs across campus—in which groups are rewarded for reducing their environmental impact.

On paper, these groups succeed—at least when it comes to saving their parent institution money. The science complexes in Cambridge and Longwood—usually energy hogs whose buildings use three- to eight-times more energy per square foot than other buildings across campus—avoided the emission of 416 metric tons of carbon and saved $160,000 through the Shut the Sash competition. Since the Resource Efficiency Program (REP)—a university-sposnored initiative that pays students to reach out to others about environmental matters—was founded in 2002, the College has seen savings quantified at over $400,000 over the last fiscal year in utility savings, a large part of which of which, like the 33 percent reduction in food waste or the four percent reduction in fuel used for heating, can be attributed to REP activities. From a purely economic perspective, social outreach pays off

But with a little help from above, REP and its relations across campus could do much better, especially when it comes to involving as much of the community as possible.

Currently, 17 students—one or two in each upperclass house and three in the Yard—spread REP’s message to the 6500-person student body. An ecoREP’s tasks include informing our peers about the environmental impacts of heating, laundry, food, lighting, and every other part of student life. REP would benefit from an increase in size, especially given the diluted value of internet-based communication with students who feel their lives are a never-ending stream of emailed tasks.

REP organizes and promotes the Green Cup, which anchors many of its campaigns throughout the year. The problem with using the Green Cup as an incentive for change is, simply, that it is a poor incentive. The house that claims the Green Cup wins just more than $1000. As the standings begin to shake out, houses that stand to lose tend to tune out, defeating Green Cup’s goal of drumming up environmental excitement within the student body. The College would do well to emulate the Shut the Sash program’s structure: setting each house a number of quantifiable resource-saving goals, and rewarding those houses that meet their goals with regular—and desirable—prizes. This would raise the Green Cup’s cost, but would strengthen the incentive for student involvement.

The College could also reward its students’ ingenuity when it comes to conserving resources and saving money. Presently, six eco-projects per year are awarded small ($150 and less) sums. By rewarding more students with greater prizes for truly valuable green acts—perhaps even on a sliding scale relative to their impact—the College would show students that it’s push for sustainability is not all smoke and mirrors.

Recently, Harvard took the symbolic step of unifying all its environmental efforts under the umbrella of the Office For Sustainability (OFS), which reports directly to Executive Vice President Edward C. Forst. OFS has the power to make sure that the university’s actions to encourage social embrace of environmentalism are in line with its words. The university should seize this momentum to inspire an environemtnal conscience in its community. The enduring mission after the Sustainability Celebration ought to be ensuring that this spotlight on environmental responsibility doesn’t dim.


Jonathan Steinman ’10 is a chemistry concentrator in Winthrop House. He has worked for Harvard College’s Resource Efficiency Program for three years.