Grist.org, the popular environmental media outlet, issued its first-ever list of top green colleges and universities in the world last August. College of the Atlantic heads that list.
COA's number one billing recognizes the college's longstanding focus on sustainability, as well as its pledge of carbon neutrality last October. Says the article, COA's efforts, "kicked off quite a trend: Now more than 270 other U.S. colleges and universities . . . have pledged to do the same as part of the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment.”
Of course, what Grist doesn't note is that COA's carbon-neutral effort emerges from a philosophy that has been part both of our curriculum and our physical plant since the beginning. Human ecologists are trained to recognize the impact of all their actions. www.grist.org/news/maindish/2007/08/10/colleges/
In October, The Sustainable Endowments Institute gave College of the Atlantic one of the institute's first Sustainability Innovator Awards.
The institute is supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation.
It's mostly interested in the sustainability impact of colleges and universities in the United States and Canada with large endowments, and issues report cards on how the schools with the 200 largest endowments are doing.
We're not on that list.
But this year, the institute also decided to recognize sustainability innovators among schools with smaller endowments.
COA, said the institute's founder and executive director, Mark Orlowsky, "offers an inspiring example of how a small school can have a big impact in meeting the sustainability leadership challenge." According to the report, COA was chosen for its comprehensive sustainability strategy, which "strives to reduce carbon emissions and its overall footprint on the planet. Offering only one degree, human ecology, the entire college community is centered on the concept of sustainability. The college has committed to going carbon neutral by the end of 2007 through reducing emissions and purchasing offsets." |
