TIME NOTICE: This article was written by a student in the Journalism Fundamentals class in the 2024-2025 school year and may not reflect the most current information of the date of publication.
Soleil Torres, senior at Eastern University and president of the EU Earthkeepers Club, spent the summer of 2024 in the beautifully lush country of Costa Rica harvesting strawberries and immersing herself in the native culture. Part of a study abroad program through Au Sable Institute, she was awakened to the sustainable lifestyle of the Costa Rican people. This brought about questions on how she could implement this way of living back home and at Eastern University. Sustainability, she said, is “in the best interest of everyone.”
Torres is representative of the increase in students who see the impacts of sustainability. Since 2015, there has been a 21% increase in the number of college students who would consider themselves knowledgeable about sustainability, while 52% of college students are very or extremely concerned about the effects of climate change on the environment. “The impacts of climate change are being felt first and hardest in communities that have been marginalized and borne the brunt of systemic racism in the United States specifically and then, of course, globally,” Susy Jones, Senior Project Manager at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said. “Solving for climate means solving for justice.”
Universities are in a unique position to be able to make positive change in sustainability efforts by partnering with their communities. “It’s a lot of relationship building at first and trying not to overwhelm communities that are doing a lot of hard work with lots of questions and meetings and workshops and conferences and things like that,” Jones said. “But really meeting people where they are at and trying to learn and then figure out, as we move into our climate work, where does it make sense to partner and share benefits? You can really start to change the way you set up projects to have co-benefits with people in the community that are normally overlooked when big institutions are making decisions.”
University of California, Irvine campus has been making moves on the sustainability front since the 1970’s. The university created a dedicated office to head the green initiatives on their campus and empower students to make change in the environment. Garrett Hurley, director of the Sustainability Resource Center on the campus describes the initiative. “We run a program called Campus as a Living Lab, where we place students in year-long internships with departments on campus.”
Hurley continued, “We actually place students in our Campus Planning and Sustainability Unit on campus, and they’re the ones that do our long-range development plan. They do our sustainability plan. They work with campus units that are building to do the physical planning for our campus and work with the engineers and construction folks. Our goal there is to get our students involved in the process.”
UCI’s campus has been around for about 60 years. “When the campus started, this area was completely agricultural. [The campus] was intentional with its planning to preserve certain areas and has continued to this day. Part of that has also included building sustainable buildings,” Hurley notes.
“In the 70’s, when LEED, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, came around, we really grabbed onto that as a campus and all of our buildings have been built to the highest standard possible as they were happening,” Hurley said.
Because of the vast resources of the university, UCI has been able to reduce emissions by 30% since 2008, and they have spent over $50 million in 2023 on their Green Spend program, which focuses primarily on investing in eco-friendly resources and sustainable needs like electronics and indoor furniture. Through their community-based culture with the program, UCI has also been able to reach their 2025 goal of reducing waste to under 1lb per person.
“I think that the environmental field, the green field, the climate field, has done kind of a bad job in grounding itself in reality sometimes,” Jones said. “I think sometimes the solutions are developed and made and promoted by people with lots of resources and lots of money, and might look a certain way or be from a certain culture. I think that can be very off-putting to people who have a different set of resources and maybe look a little different or have come from different educational backgrounds. I think the field is grappling with that now and realizing how exclusive it sometimes has been.” Jones added, “I think sustainability should not be [just] for wealthy institutions. And it doesn’t have to be.”
Jones explained that small campuses can make just as much impact on their communities as bigger institutions can. Although bigger schools may have more resources, Jones explains, “Every job can be a green job. Sustainability can be a part of everybody’s job description.”
Although Eastern University is smaller and more limited in resources than schools like UCI and MIT, it can certainly learn from the practices of others. Director of Plant Operations at Eastern University Mares Stellfox describes her efforts to make Eastern more sustainable in their practices. “Swarthmore College is very good with their sustainability project, so I have been there one time to tour the facility and see how they do everything because I really want to bring that to Eastern,” she said.
Stellfox has observed Swarthmore’s geothermal initiative and the ways that they will be self-sufficient in energy usage. Although Eastern may not be there financially yet, she says “it takes money to make money.” Over the summer of 2024, Eastern put up new lighting in all the buildings. “It is going to save a ton of kilowatt hours with the new lighting that we’re putting in. It’s going to save a lot of money for the university every year in utility costs, so I am happy we are working on that,” Stellfox said.
Torres hopes to see Eastern’s campus recycle. “I really wish we would recycle because it’s so hard to see, you know, all this recycling in the trash cans, and I’m like, dang! And then I see people, you know, using biodegradable things, but it still doesn’t get recycled, so that doesn’t really do anything. It’s still not going in the right place,” she said.
Stellfox echoes similar sentiments, noting that Eastern does have a recycling program. “We could have a container of single stream stuff, but if somebody throws their sandwich in there, the whole entire container is now compromised, and they can’t use it,” she said.
“With more cooperation campus wide, we can do a much better job with recyclables. I’m hoping that people will be a little bit more open to the geothermal situation,” Stellfox said. “It’s going to take money to do geothermal or anything that’s going to be better, but you’re better off to make it happen than to keep spending good money on bad things. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet to make a better decision or future, because in the end it will pay off.”
Sustainability is possible in every situation. Working together in the community to create a future that is better for everyone is within reach for campuses large and small.
Stellfox adds, “We would much appreciate everyone’s cooperation in the community to help us make certain things happen, like the recyclables, which we can’t do anything about if people don’t cooperate.”