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Greening the Campus:
Exploring Practices,
Curriculum, and Management in Higher Education
Purchase College (SUNY)
Performing Arts Center 
735 Anderson Hill Road
Purchase, New York
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Welcome and Introductory Remarks
by:
Michelle Land
Director, Environmental Consortium of Hudson Valley Colleges & Universities
Elizabeth Langland
Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs, Purchase College
John Cronin
Director, Pace Academy for the Environment
Executive Director, The Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries |
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Michelle Land: Welcome everyone to the second day of the 4th annual conference of the Environmental Consortium of Hudson Valley Colleges and Universities. My name is Michelle Land and I am the director of the Consortium. I am delighted by the enthusiastic response to this year’s conference theme, greening our campuses. We have over 250 people in attendance, and they are representing over 40 institutions of higher education. Fifteen of those institutions have registered as teams with faculty members, students, facilities and administrators, so this is a remarkable achievement. I would like to extend a special thanks to Purchase College for serving as the host institution for our conference, and I would also like to take this opportunity to credit the conference planning committee for all of their hard work in putting this conference together: James Booker (Siena College), Sister Mary Ann Garisto (Mount Saint Vincent College), Alexandra Hankovszky (Pace Law School), George Kraemer (SUNY Purchase College), Jerome Levkov (Iona College), Peggy Minnis (Pace University), Brian Obach (SUNY New Paltz), Lee Paddock (Pace Law School, Marilyn Power (Sarah Lawrence College), Michael Priano (SUNY Westchester Community College), Lindsay Randall (SUNY Purchase College), Fredrica Rudell (Iona College), and a very special thanks to our co-chairs, Judith Schwartzstein and Susan Schwimmer, both of Sarah Lawrence College, thank you all.
It is now my true pleasure to introduce you to the Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs for Purchase College, Elizabeth Langland, who will provide a few welcome introductory remarks. |
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Elizabeth Langland: Thank you, Michelle. As Provost, I’m delighted to welcome you to Purchase College and to extend, as well, a warm welcome from our President, Thomas J. Schwarz. I’m very pleased that you brought your conference, Greening the Campus, to Purchase. The issue of green our culture is a critical one, facing all of us in the 21st century. And those of you who have been reading the New York Times editorial pages are aware that Thomas Friedman is currently in China. The environmental crisis, even disaster facing that country has been his topic and he opens his column today with these words,
A friend of mine here wakes up every morning and does his own air quality test -- as many Beijing residents do: He looks out his 24th-story window and checks how far he can see. On a rare pristine day, when the wind has swept Beijing, he can see the Fragrant Mountain rising to the northwest. On a ''good'' pollution day, he can see the China World building four blocks away. On a bad day, he can't see the building next door.
Friedman concludes, “Without a new cultural revolution to make China more green, more sustainable, the Chinese growth juggernaut will destroy itself.” It is an apocalyptic vision, but as far as Friedman is concerned, apocalypse is eminent reality in China.
Our colleges and universities have a responsibility to educate people about why and how to live greener. It is appropriate that we lead the way, not only with ideas but also with models. Taking responsibility to ensure that we practice what we preach, not only talk the talk, but also walk the walk. I applaud your initiative and I also applaud the creation of the Environmental Consortium of Hudson Valley Colleges and Universities which by my count now has 45 institutional members. The numbers alone speak to the value and importance of the enterprise. At Purchase College, student interest in greening the environment and in our environmental studies major is high. The number of majors is increasing dramatically; a testimony both to the students’ perception of the importance of the topic and to the leadership and quality of the faculty. I thank particularly George Kraemer for spearheading a dynamic major and for bringing to Purchase this important meeting.
I know that the conference is already off to a stimulating start with a roundtable, a poster session, an exhibitor showcase, and keynote address by Steve Curwood. I am confident that the upcoming keynote today and the panel and breakouts will be equally rewarding, and at the end of the day, we will all be your beneficiaries.
Thank you very much. |
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Michelle Land: Our next speaker this morning is John Cronin. He is the executive director of the Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries, and he is also director of Pace Academy for the Environment. John serves as the co-chair of the Environmental Consortium’s Steering Committee.
John Cronin: Good morning everybody, and welcome. I do want to, before I say anything, take this opportunity to ask you all to join me in thanking Michelle Land for her leadership in the Environmental Consortium and for her hard word and the hard work of Donna Kowal in organizing today’s conference, so Michelle, thank you very much.
And there are a few people I want to recognize, and I am going to have to ask them to put their modesty aside and actually show themselves. There are a handful of people who started meeting in 2003 who thought there could actually be an Environmental Consortium of Hudson Valley Colleges and Universities, and you know who you are, and there are not many of you. So if you could just show yourselves. Stuart Belli? Where is John Harrington? Rachel Grob? Where are you? And there are a few others, Roger Panetta, Marilyn Power. Let me explain this to you, and then we can applaud. A group of us started getting together in 2003 and we looked at the Hudson River watershed, and there was something that we discovered. There are 116 colleges and universities in the watershed. Almost all of them offer some sort of environmental course of study or major, but almost none of them have used the larger region as an extended laboratory and classroom of their campuses or their curricula. We got together and we thought, what is the possibility that we could actually get everyone together in one room at least once? And we debated for a while, and in February 2004, we had our first Consortium conference, and we were delighted that we had half the number of people here today representing half the number of institutions that are being represented today. But it was an extraordinary success. The people who came into that room greeted each other like long lost friends, even though they didn’t know each other. They were long lost friends because they all represented isolated programs on their campuses, and were happy to see colleagues, and they also found common purposes. And from that first conference, grew the Environmental Consortium of Hudson Valley Colleges and Universities, which now has 45 member institutions, and it is not just a collection of faculty meeting once in a while. Those of you who are not from a member institution, the way you become a member is the president has to nominate the institution as a member. So the commitment has to come from the top, and has to be supported from underneath. From there we built the Environmental Consortium. With the leadership of Michelle Land, as our director, we have come to where we are now, which I trust a year from now will be twice this large. And so, please join me in thanking the people who were initially involved and thanking each other for being here. I appreciate it very much.
I have been a working environmentalist for 33 years. I was looking up today what a generation equals. And there is a lot of debate on what is the length of a generation. The Jewish Encyclopedia tells us the length of a generation is 35 years, I think, or 36 years. Some people say 30. Some people say 25. So 33 is right in there. I actually have a generation to look backwards on now, and it is a terrific moment for reflection, and two things occur to me.
The first is what Tommy Lee Jones said when he accepted his Academy Award which was, “I’m grateful for the work.” And I am. I am grateful for the work. I have had the great delight to spend my career doing the work I love.
The second part though is to look back on what my influences have been. All of us stand on the shoulders of many, many people to be able to be here today and to be able to discuss these issues in an open forum in an open society. And I thought about the people who have been my personal influences. It is not your usual list, the people who have inspired me in my own environmental philosophy and thinking. And they include some obvious and some not so obvious: Aldo Leopold, John Steinbeck, Carl Sagan, Thomas Berry, Freeman Dyson, and David Orr. David Orr is one of my great environmental heroes. And it is for reasons I’m sure you will hear about today in David’s remarks. But what all these people have in common is they encourage us to look at the environment for what it actually is. The environment is not someplace else that we visit when we have the time to do it. Environmental issues are not just about the birds and the bees. If the global environment is going to survive, it is going to survive because the human has become a successful species, which have been struggling to be for a long, long time. We need great thinkers to point us in that direction. David Orr helps point us in that direction. I won’t go through his biography, first of all it is printed in the program, and second of all he just asked me not to mention his prison record. [laughter] So I’m not going to go through the details of his bio. But I do want to quote something that he said fifteen years ago, that for me, sets out an agenda for the Environmental Consortium, and an agenda for each of our individual institutions, and it is a very simple sentence. “All education is environmental education.” And environment is about all of our lives, it is about everywhere around us and all those thinkers that I mentioned to you, teach that lesson in their own way over and over again. We are very, very fortunate in the United States to have as our living contemporary thinker and leader in guiding us in that kind of thought in David Orr. So David, please come on up.
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