2008 Woodie Awards
Going Green
Brenden Filkens
Issue date: 4/22/08 Section: Features
The colorful definition of "green" has taken a back seat to the global demand to reduce environmental impact.
With countless national ranking systems evaluating the University on different levels and from different perspectives, it has become unclear how green UVM really is.
Many of these ranking systems are less than accurate, Gioia Thompson, director of the Office of Sustainability at UVM, said.
They are often organizations that choose what components of being "green" are important to them and rank accordingly, but don't necessarily represent reality, she said.
Not only are there endless components to reducing ecological impact, but it is also very easy to cheat these ranking systems, Thompson said.
Even Thompson has been offered and declined cheating techniques that could be grant UVM a nice green title in the public eye, she said.
But as UVM sophomore Elias Rosenblatt said, "labels are good, but what are we really doing? Being at the top of these lists should not be at the forefront of our goals."
"We could have the most recycling, if we just bought a ton of New York Times and threw them in our recycling bins," Thompson said. "But that doesn't make us green."
"Green is any activity (or lack there of) that reduces our impact on the environment," Alan McIntosh, a UVM professor and director of the Water Research and Lake Studies Center, said.
To Thompson, this translates - with respect to a university - into impact per student, which really comes down to "space per student."
She said that this definition is controversial among colleagues and critics, but is the reality.
Eighty percent of all carbon emissions come from buildings versus roughly 20 percent from transportation and other sources, she said.
"We still heat all of our buildings with fossil fuels," she said. This is compared to universities like McGill in Montreal that use primarily hydropower.
According to Green Building Coordinator Michelle Mullarkey, UVM is putting a lot of it efforts toward better utilizing space on campus more efficiently for fossil fuels.
With countless national ranking systems evaluating the University on different levels and from different perspectives, it has become unclear how green UVM really is.
Many of these ranking systems are less than accurate, Gioia Thompson, director of the Office of Sustainability at UVM, said.
They are often organizations that choose what components of being "green" are important to them and rank accordingly, but don't necessarily represent reality, she said.
Not only are there endless components to reducing ecological impact, but it is also very easy to cheat these ranking systems, Thompson said.
Even Thompson has been offered and declined cheating techniques that could be grant UVM a nice green title in the public eye, she said.
But as UVM sophomore Elias Rosenblatt said, "labels are good, but what are we really doing? Being at the top of these lists should not be at the forefront of our goals."
"We could have the most recycling, if we just bought a ton of New York Times and threw them in our recycling bins," Thompson said. "But that doesn't make us green."
"Green is any activity (or lack there of) that reduces our impact on the environment," Alan McIntosh, a UVM professor and director of the Water Research and Lake Studies Center, said.
To Thompson, this translates - with respect to a university - into impact per student, which really comes down to "space per student."
She said that this definition is controversial among colleagues and critics, but is the reality.
Eighty percent of all carbon emissions come from buildings versus roughly 20 percent from transportation and other sources, she said.
"We still heat all of our buildings with fossil fuels," she said. This is compared to universities like McGill in Montreal that use primarily hydropower.
According to Green Building Coordinator Michelle Mullarkey, UVM is putting a lot of it efforts toward better utilizing space on campus more efficiently for fossil fuels.
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Jim Peden
posted 4/21/08 @ 10:30 PM EST
Since the HadCRUT3 temperature data indicates that global warming ground to a halt almost 10 years ago, and we have apparently entered a cooling cycle (decadal temperature decline of 0. (Continued…)
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