It is increasingly difficult to deny that human activity brings about the demise of the planet and greatly accelerates global climate change. The United States is the most notorious criminal in this regard, as it is the emitter of 25 percent of all greenhouse gases. Furthermore, college campuses are islands of extreme waste where lights and computers stay on around the clock and mass quantities of food, paper, water, and heat are considered infinitely expendable.
The rampant over-consumption in our country and on our campus is not only a dangerous threat to our existence, but it is unjust. Due to the physical and economic vulnerability of the world's poor, the marginalized are the first to be harmed by climate change.
In light of Boston College's adherence to Jesuit values and commitment to social justice, I must ask what BC is doing to decrease our ecological footprint? There are strong efforts currently being made on campus to reduce our negative impact on the environment by the student group, Ecopledge, but their successes have been limited due to the lack of widespread support on campus.
Through the recent phenomenal assistance of Residential Life and Facilities, two campus-wide efforts to involve the student body in conservation activities, Recyclemania and the Better Off Contest, are currently running. RLF has also been making independent and institutional changes in an effort to strengthen conservation. Members of the Undergraduate Government of Boston College presented a Clean Energy Proposal to the Board of Trustees last semester, petitioning for the adoption of a policy that would convert 60 percent of University energy requirements to clean sources by the year 2010, and 30 percent of energy to clean sources by next school year.
Over 1,000 students and faculty members gave their signatures in support of this proposal, but still no action has been taken by the Board. The challenges posed by global climate change are of great urgency, yet a reduction in consumption on campus has been shamefully slow. Most recently, the Sustainable Endowments Institute graded the University at a C-minus on our Green Report Card.
The report card evaluated the 100 universities with the largest endowments in the country on their sustainability programs and policies in seven categories: climate change and energy, green building, food and recycling, administration, shareholder engagement, investment priorities, and endowment transparency.
Our weakest areas were those pertaining to the lack of transparency in our investments. Due to growing frustration with the efforts of our school, a group of students, faculty, and staff recently gathered to begin a campus initiative: BC Sustainability.
In an effort to combine and organize support for campus sustainability, we were able to identify a number of prime challenges to conservation efforts on campus. We found that concise data from which to mark our progress, or lack there of, is still largely unknown and unmonitored.
There is also an immense lack of coordination and organization of conservation efforts across the varying sectors of campus.
This hinders the ability of the adoption of a comprehensive sustainability effort that can reach out to and reform all corners of this campus. Finally, there appears to be an absence of commitment to a larger vision of sustainability on the part of the administrators of BC.Our group will be collecting data and information from different sectors of campus regarding our consumption patterns and products to evaluate our current environmental impact.
We will also be researching initiatives taken by other leading universities to evaluate where BC is falling behind and what models we could follow when undertaking future reforms.
We hope to collectively create a vision of campus sustainability and build momentum campus-wide in support of a sustainable BC, culminating on April 14, a national day of climate action.
It's time that our concept of sustainability breaks out of the confines of the issue area of "environmentalism" and becomes acknowledged as fundamentally linked to our school's commitment to social justice.
In facing the challenge of climate change, we hope that our University will hold itself to the same standards as it does its students by living up to its exaltations of "men and women for others" and "ever to excel."
Peggy Fox, A&S '08, is the co-director of environmental issues in UGBC.
2008 Woodie Awards
