Campus Ecology - Campus Ecology - National Wildlife Federation

Beyond Towns and Gowns: Making Regional Commitments

Elisabeth Bailey

May 18, 2010

In 1355, the local citizens of Oxford, England attacked the University of Oxford with bows and arrows, killing and maiming scores of scholars after an argument in a tavern escalated into the Battle of St. Scholastica Day. Luckily for modern academics, today's town/gown tensions are more likely to crop up in the form of a cold shoulder or an unfavorable zoning law. When it comes to sustainability concerns, however, neither schools nor municipalities can afford to be separated by the traditional veil of tension between them.

With increasing frequency, colleges and universities are partnering with their wider communities to protect the ecosystems that sustain them both, as historic town and gown considerations grow to include counties, valleys, mountains, and watersheds. Schools and communities are coming up with cooperative, creative solutions to their shared concerns, as in three diverse communities in the northeast:

Maine

"How close are we to Canada? You can see it from my front yard," says Brian Kermath, Director of the Center for Rural Sustainable Development at the University of Maine at Fort Kent. The biggest county east of the Mississippi--just a bit smaller than the entire state of Massachusetts--Aroostook County has a population of just around 70,000 people, and most of them live in the southern part of the county. The town of Fort Kent is to the far north, with a population of just over 4,000. In this richly Acadian area, a majority of residents still speak French and have great pride in their Franco-American heritage.

With a campus of less than a thousand students, the University of Maine at Fort Kent is an important part of the local fabric. A weak economy has decimated the two primary local industries of forestry and agriculture, as mills in the area have closed and fields lie fallow. One of the largest concerns for many residents is the cost of home heating oil. In an area where times are tight and winter temperatures can get to fifty degrees below zero, sustainability can take a backseat to meeting basic needs.

Or, if Kermath has his way, they dovetail. His center is working with local stakeholders and government offices on a plan to encourage sustainable biomass harvest in their area, specifically developing highly efficient wood chips and fuel pellets made from wood, agriculturally grown woody biomass crops like willow or quick-growing switchgrass, which could stimulate the traditional industries of the area while providing low-cost alternatives for home heating and keep more of the dollars spent on energy in the local economy. "We have an ongoing stream of students entering forestry, environmental studies, business and other disciplines, and they're very active in the local community," he says. "Sustainable forest management is one of the keys to northern Maine's future."

New York

"We're centrally isolated here in central New York," joked Marian Brown, Ithaca College's Sustainability Coordinator. "The main industry here is education. We're an economic engine, bringing in employees from eight surrounding counties." Town/gown relationships in Ithaca can be thorny--the schools there form the basis of the local economy, and they are also big consumers of civic resources such as the police and public works. They don't, however, contribute to the traditional funding of these resources, because they are exempt from property and other taxes. A new program is building and strengthening relationships between the schools and the municipal bodies to support their shared sustainability goals.

The Tompkins County Climate Protection Initiative (TCCPI) has brought together Cornell University, Ithaca College, Tompkins Cortland Community College, Cayuga Medical Center, and the Tompkins County Chamber of Commerce, as well as the Tompkins County, City of Ithaca, and Town of Ithaca governments to develop and implement a community-wide climate action plan over the next two years. Their focus is primarily on the retrofitting of buildings--often the most immediate way to save substantial amounts of energy. A student conservation corps, including students from Ithaca College and Cornell University, has been organized through Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County, another TCCPI member organization, to go into homes throughout the Ithaca area to conduct energy audits and make recommendations for weatherizing and renewable energy.

In addition to conservation, TCCPI is looking at a range of climate change concerns in their area. "Natural gas drilling is a big issue here," says Brown. "The Finger Lakes are an important watershed. There's great concern about competing demands to protect the environment for tourism, recreation, and agricultural interests against the economic benefits of tapping into locally abundant natural gas resources to meet our increasing energy needs with the latter's potential to damage the watersheds-so there's a significant move to rebuff drilling. Ithaca is very urban, but if you drive ten minutes in any direction you'll find yourself in farmland." Like Aroostook County, the organization is looking at opportunities to derive biofuels from agricultural lands and biomass for heating applications.

Pennsylvania

According to Stan Kabala, Associate Director of the Center for Environmental Research and Education at Duquesne University, "making an authentic regional commitment to sustainability will require leaders to re-think traditional practice. In turn, our universities must be ready to offer leadership and guidance." In the Pittsburgh region, Kabala and his peers are working in concert to lead a regional transition toward sustainability. Two unique collaborative efforts have been underway for them: a grant-funded curricular project involving Carnegie Mellon University, Duquesne University, and the University of Pittsburgh on campus commitments to climate change action; and the development of the Higher Education Climate Consortium serving the Pittsburgh Climate Initiative. Their process has focused on juxtaposing top-down initiatives with grass-roots efforts.

Students play an important role in these collaborative efforts. Graduate students in Kabala's program have performed greenhouse gas emissions inventories for both the university and municipalities and have written grant applications for three municipalities for state funds to enhance sustainability measures. "One goal is to assess five municipalities in a contiguous zone that encompasses a suburban commercial strip for greenhouse gas emissions patterns," according to Kabala. "It's complicated--there are different decision making apparatuses for the municipalities, school districts, the water authorities, the sewer authorities. Western Pennsylvania is a jigsaw puzzle of local government entities. Add to that the fact that some council members don't believe in climate change and it becomes quite complex. Even so, the good news is that we don't have to bank on one decision maker."

"We live in the Turtle Creek watershed, a tributary of the Monongahela River. The area is quite complex--we have farms, former steel mills, small towns, suburbs--'the works'. One of our largest problems is storm water. This isn't the rustbelt, it's the rain belt," jokes Kabala. In this heavily populated watershed, excess water is an important contributor to quality of Ohio River. Impermeable surface development on hilltops has caused huge amounts of runoff into valleys where smaller, older communities are flooded on an all too regular basis. In working with municipalities and state government to address this issue, "We're the facilitators," says Kabala. "Our role has been to bring in the needed technical experts and assemble the stakeholders--get everyone in the same room: counties, federal, municipal, everyone."

Such initiatives have allowed universities to model their best practices for other institutions in the community and inspired them to move together towards sustainability. "It has done wonders for town/gown relations," says Kabala. "Towns are delighted to see university interest. We, in effect, give municipal government extra staff to do things that they otherwise couldn't accomplish. At the same time, our internal decision-making allows us to move more quickly. We're meeting the needs of our region. Now we're reaching out to the next valley over."