The Garden on the Hill

This past weekend when I flew to Vermont for an environmental studies conference at Middlebury College I knew I would be impressed by the elite liberal arts school's efforts at "greening" its campus, curriculum, and student body.  After all, Middlebury received a grade of A- on the College Sustainability Report Card for 2008. Furman, the greenest school in our region, scored B- on the same report.

Middlebury College has all the tools it needs to be a leader in sustainable higher education: an endowment of $850 million, thousands of acres of college land in the Green Mountains, and it's been teaching environmental studies since 1965.

Middlebury's large endowment, when coupled with a progressive administration, faculty, and student body, has created a large canvas for some bold experiments in sustainability, most remarkably a student-driven commitment backed by the board of trustees to attain "carbon neutrality" (eliminating their net emissions of carbon dixiode) by 2016.

I took a "sustainable campus" tour while I was at Middlebury, and it began in the 3,200 acres of farm fields on the east side of the college. Most of the Middlebury College land is leased to local farmers, but we were shown a plot of willow shrubs the college has begun to plant, cultivate, and harvest to burn in their boilers, replacing half the fuel oil that heats the campus in winter.
 
The leggy, multi-stalked willow shrubs are a renewable resource, and burning them as fuel adds less carbon to the atmosphere. When the operation is in full production there will be 1,200 acres of willows grown and harvested for the college's heating budget, and half as much fuel oil will be trucked from the distant terminals.

After seeing the willows we moved on to the community garden, a remarkable little knoll-top where students, faculty, and staff have cultivated small plots of vegetables and flowers. There's a solar pump for watering, a fire pit, a fairy-tale potting shed, and outhouse, all with "green roofs" of native grass and flowers. There's a huge pile of compost for renewing the soil, and many of the vegetables grown in the garden end up in the college dining halls.

Construction (with student and faculty labor and timber cut right on the college lands) is underway on a "shade house" where classes in literature, dance and art will meet a half-mile walk or bike ride from the campus center. There are even active beehives where biology sections study pollinators.

After leaving the garden knoll we drove back up into the 200-year old center of the campus. Here Middlebury has made a commitment that any new construction must be certified green, and any renovations must meet a strict set of standards for energy and environment. We had lunch at their newly renovated Franklin Center for Environmental Studies, a 19th century farm house expanded for use by their environmental studies faculty and staff. The building has blond wood floors harvested from college maple, and all the furniture is manufactured locally. Even the signs are made from salvaged slate tiles from the building's original roof.

Walking through the Middlebury campus you are assured that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. No executive decisions are made-from buildings and grounds, to athletics, to curriculum-without considering how they might affect the carbon footprint of the community.  They recycle their waste. They account for all college trips on a carbon calculator. They compost paper and food scraps from all corners of the campus and create rich soil for the garden. Nature writer John Muir would be proud of Middlebury. It seems they accept that when you touch a strand the whole web shakes.

At Wofford, where I teach, sustainability just came on the radar a few years ago. We are guarded about investments and expenditures since we don't have an endowment tipping toward a billion dollars. At Middlebury they've had four decades to work out ideas and actions for building a sustainable present and future.  Here in the South we're just getting started.