Leveraging Change: The Role of the University in a Sustainable Future

Anthony D. Cortese, ScD

MIT panel on Alliance for Global Sustainability
Cambridge, MA
January 2000

Good morning. It is a great honor and privilege for me to be part of this groundbreaking alliance and this magnificent meeting. I was really inspired by what President Hasumi said this morning. He said we need a revolution, and I believe we do need a revolution. We need a mindset change if we are to attain a just and sustainable future. And the revolution must be in our thinking. As Einstein has said, "We cannot solve the problems of today at the level of thinking at which they were first created." Another way of saying it is what one of my psychologist friends said, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." Jean-Lou Chameau, Dean of Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology has said, "We need to change the mindsets not just the problem sets."


A Sustainable Future

Fundamentally, the issue of sustainability is an ethical issue: do we make a conscious choice to lead to a just and sustainable future? This is an amazing time to be alive to make that choice. I feel very humble, and very nervous, about the decisions that we have to make, because we are the first generation in human history that is capable of and is affecting the habitability of the planet. And we are also the first generation who recognizes that we can affect the habitability of the planet. What will future generations say to us if we didn't act when we knew? And I think this, to me, says why it is so critical for higher education to take this on, and why the AGS is such an important initiative.

We have often thought about the environment as a competing interest, and we have looked at the individual social, cultural, economic, population, crime and health issues as separate and independent issues when they are clearly interdependent. As Peter Dunn said in an editorial in The New York Times, "The environment is not a competing interest, it's the playing field on which all interests intersect." The economic system is a subset of the biosphere, not an equal to it as is now taught in much of neoclassical economics.

We do not change by negative information. If we have learned anything in the environmental field, we have learned that more negative doom-and-gloom is not going to make change. We must tell the truth, and the truth is that we are in trouble. But we must also paint a picture of a future that is so desirable that people will want to move from where they are now to that new future - a sustainable future. As Alan Atkisson has said in his recent book, Believing Cassandra: An Optimist's View in a Pessimists' World, sustainability may not be the best word, like democracy is the worst form of government except for all the rest. I think sustainability is the worst word except for all the rest.

Let us imagine a society that has all present and future humans healthy and where they have their basic needs met, have fair and equitable access to Earth's resources, have a decent quality of life while we preserve the biologically diverse ecosystems on which we all depend. Imagine future scientists, engineers, and business people designing technology and economic activities that sustain rather than degrade the natural environment, that enhance human health and well-being, and that mimic and live within the limits of natural systems -- a future where we design our technology inspired by the biological model where there is no such thing as waste, where every waste product is a raw material or nutrient for another species, where one does everything using renewable energy (not fossil energy). Imagine all professionals understanding their connections to the natural world and to other humans, knowing where products and services come from, knowing where wastes go, and knowing what they do to humans and other living species and how to minimize this ecological footprint.

The ecological footprint that we have is invisible to most of us. The average person would not know that for every 100 lbs. of product in the United States, we actually move 3200 lbs. of material and energy which go almost immediately to waste before we ever see the product or the service. It is invisible, and we must make the invisible visible.

Then imagine that all current and future generations are able to meet their basic needs, pursue meaningful work, and have the opportunity to realize their full human potential both personally and socially. Imagine that we have stabilized the population because we have increased the education as well as the social and economic status of women. Imagine that we have timely and accurate economic and ecological signals: micro-economic signals for price that reflect the true social cost and environmental cost to society, and macro-economic indicators that reflect what the true well-being is, and ecological signals that come back to us in time for us to make the changes.

One of the problems with the great complexity of the environmental issues that we face today is that by the time we receive the signals back-and global warming is a perfect example of this-we have set into motion changes that we cannot undo for several centuries. So having more timely ecological signals is crucial.

And finally, imagine that we have reduced resource consumption and waste dramatically in the developed world so that there is opportunity in the developing world to be able to do that. Is this utopia? No. But it is possible because of the thousands of things that are being done, not only in universities but also in major industries around the world today. In effect, what we have to put into our minds is to decouple social and economic progress from environmental deterioration-or, a positive way of saying it, that we are going to align our business and economic strategies with natural systems. Imagine, as Bill McDonough, former Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia says, "We must take the filters out of the pipes and put the filters in our minds."


The Role of Higher Education

Higher education is critical to the above scenario for several reasons. It prepares most of the professionals who develop, manage, teach in, and influence society's institutions. Industry is one of the most powerful of those institutions. In order to become sustainable, industry needs to hire graduates who know how to help make those businesses sustainable. Industry must also have a large constituency of consumers who are well educated enough to want to buy products from the environmentally and socially responsible companies over those companies that are not.

Higher education plays a critical role in the creation and dissemination of knowledge and values. It trains all the K-through-12 teachers. In the United States, we are going to replace 2 million teachers in the next decade. This is a great opportunity if we get in and change the way we are teaching the future teachers in the universities. Higher education has the critical mass and diversity of skills to help society move forward sustainably. It has unique freedom to develop new ideas to comment on society because of academic freedom and to engage in bold experimentation. It is also a large economic engine. There are 4096 higher education institutions in the United States when you include all the community colleges, universities and professional schools-with a total of 14.6 million students. The annual operational budgets of those universities total $190 Billion. It is greater than the GDP of all but 20 countries in the world. Their endowment is over $230 billion.

Imagine if the universities were modeling sustainability by purchasing environmentally friendly products. And imagine the leverage if universities were utilizing the faculty and students to do the research to help them make those decisions. When they graduate the students would be able to walk out into the world and be demanding the same kinds of environmentally friendly products and know how to help business create them. Although higher education is very high leverage, as Dr. Schmidheiny said earlier, it is an overlooked leverage point in the transition to sustainable development. We have approximately two decades to turn this rocket ship, called 'Earth' around.

Now despite the excellent work at a number of universities, and some of the work that is going on that you will be hearing about here at MIT that I am very impressed with, the fact is that sustainability education is not a priority in higher education. For example, interdependence in a global society and creating a sustainable future is not seen as a business imperative in the majority of business schools today. Higher education should be the beacons and leaders. Currently, it is behind where industry, government and many non-governmental organizations are. And to a certain extent, by the way we are organized and functioning in higher education we are actually reinforcing the current unsustainable and inequitable paradigm in many respects. As David Orr, Professor of Environmental Studies at Oberlin College has said, " The crisis we have is not in education but of education."


A New Framework for Higher Education

So what would the new framework for university operation and student experience look like that would be transformative and that would allow us to turn out the kinds of graduates that I was talking about? The education of all professionals will reflect the new approach to learning and practice: The university will operate as a fully integrated community that models social and biological sustainability itself and its interdependence with a local, regional, and global community. In many cases, we think of teaching, research, operations and relations with a community as separate: they are not. Indeed, since students learn from everything around them and everyone they talk to, sometimes called the "shadow curriculum," which is all those activities and things around them that affect their learning.

The content of learning must embrace interdisciplinary systems thinking to address environmentally sustainable action on local, regional, and global scales over short, medium and intergenerational time periods. Education must have the same lateral rigor as it does vertical rigor. The problem we have now is that we think of knowledge in little compartments. As Chet Bowers has said, "The world has problems, and the universities have departments." We need systems thinking, because we need a shared framework for understanding and how to deal with complex nonlinear systems that are characteristic of today's society and the natural world.

The context has to change. We have to make the human relationship to the environment, values and ethics a central part of teaching in all the disciplines, not just in educating environmental specialists. Environmental specialists are necessary but not sufficient to achieve sustainability, because all humans occupy ecosystems, consume resources, and produce pollution and waste. We have to understand that we are an integral part of nature and that we are co-evolving with other species in the biosphere.

We also need to think about how to assess and minimize the ecological footprint of human activity. And here, again, I mention the idea of biologically inspired models. Values are also critical. We need to educate our students for character and citizenship as much as for commerce and career, because it will be values, not just science, that will inform our decisions about the right technologies to employ, in the right place and at the right time.

The process of education must emphasize more active and experiential learning and real-world problem solving on the campus and in the larger community. For example, the learning experience of students would include working on real-world actual problems of communities, government and industry as a normal part of the curriculum, so that service learning is a normal part of the curriculum, not something special. Also, the idea of working in groups, so that they will be able to effectively collaborate as future managers and leaders, comes out of the kind of experiential learning in trying to reduce the ecological footprint of the campus and of the communities in which they live. This is critical, because one of the problems with disciplinary understanding is that we often have difficulty talking to each other. We have to learn to collaborate and cooperate in order to make a difference.

And finally, higher education must practice what it preaches and make sustainability an integral part of the operations, purchasing, and investments, and it must tie these efforts to the formal curriculum. I was glad to hear about the initiative at MIT that is going on. It is really excellent. The university is a microcosm of the larger community. Therefore, the manner in which it carries out its daily activities is an important demonstration of ways to achieve environmentally responsible living and reinforcing the desired value and behaviors in the whole community. By focusing on itself, the university can engage students in understanding the institutional metabolism and the ecological footprint of materials and activities. And students can be made aware of their ecological address and footprint, and they can and should be actively engaged in the practice of environmentally sustainable living. This will also provide them with complex, critical thinking and problem-solving skills. And again think of the market demand for environmentally preferable products that will occur.

Imagine if all the universities were all doing environmentally friendly purchasing. There are already many examples of this. In a report recently by the Natural Wildlife Federation, the Campus Ecology Program did a study of 15 universities and 23 projects in which they looked at ways to reduce the ecological footprint of those universities. The average saving per year was $17 Million. For example, Cornell addressed the problem so many universities have with parking. They were looking to build 3100 new parking spaces. They figured it was going to cost $12,000 per parking space. So they decided to do a demand management program, subsidized public transportation, gave incentives for the faculty to carpool and gave them the best parking spaces. They reduced traffic by 25% and they are saving $3.1 Million per year as well as dramatically reducing their environmental impact.

Now there are many advantages for higher education to practice sustainability. The PEER program that is going on at MIT is an excellent example of the kind of work that needs to be done. But such a program must be seamless, bringing in the entire curriculum in the university, not just in a few parts of engineering. I congratulate Professor Steinfeld for this. I believe the other advantages to the university from practicing sustainability are increased respect by society, more money, attracting the best faculty and students, attracting research funding, and better community-university relations (since the universities are actually helping to solve problems in the community). Second Nature is in existence to try to help universities do that. We provide training and technical assistance to make that happen.

This new idea of the university as an integrated community will also bring people out of the woodwork in some strikingly positive ways. My experience at Tufts was that nothing united the community more than when we decided to try to reduce the ecological footprint of the university. There are many people who care about these issues but who don't know how to connect with each other. I challenge the AGS to think about ways to communicate what you are doing within your own universities and across the universities, and also, to make sure that the threads of the entire AGS program really are moving towards sustainability and using the broad set of sustainability indicators in order to do that.