During lunch at last year’s Building Energy conference they first caught my eye: students and young people. Whole tables were circled with them. When the Building Energy planning committee gathered to plan this year’s conference, we all agreed that we wanted and needed to see that trend continue. But who were they? What brought them to NESEA? And how were they taking what they learned at the conference back to their campuses and places of employment?
Student Encounters
My first student encounter was at NESEA’s Annual Meeting in Providence this fall where I met Courtney Blodgett, a senior in Environmental Science at the University of Rhode Island. I learned that she was working to get a wind turbine installed at URI’s Bay Campus in Narragansett. Four hundred students, faculty, and staff signed a petition supporting the turbine and gained the university president’s support for the project. She and others are working with NESEA member Erich Stephens of People’s Power & Light to make this project a reality. Courtney has worked with other committed students to raise awareness of energy issues on her campus, advocated for and begun a campus recycling program, and was part of a group that made URI one of the first campuses to offer Fair Trade coffee—all efforts that reflect an understanding of the many critical issues related to sustainability.
Students like Courtney find opportunities to be effective, while gaining an understanding of the issues and learning advocacy techniques, through their involvement in campus environmental organizations. One such organization is the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC), a national organization that is represented on Courtney’s campus. SEAC consists of both local groups and regional and state networks, which are linked through websites that offer students access to resources and ideas (SEAC maintains a database of speakers, for example) and unites their efforts. SEAC sponsors a national movement called "Youth Power Shift," whose intention is shifting the balance of energy generation to renewables on campuses. Across the country, students are working to convince their campuses to buy wind energy, install solar panels and wind turbines, and buy renewable energy credits. As Courtney says, "It’s a very exciting time for the student renewable energy movement."
It wasn’t long before I realized just how much students were doing. Kushagra Nandan, who is currently working as an intern at AstroPower, is working with NESEA on the Building Energy conference to attract students. At her University of Massachusetts campus at Lowell, students formed a solar energy club, which has been involved in bringing photovoltaics to remote Peruvian villages for the past six years. Working from design to installation and continuously monitoring the systems, students visit this region twice each year under the guidance of a faculty advisor. These systems power vaccine refrigerators and remote medical clinics and provide the students with practical experience with renewable energy in a meaningful application.
Jeff Reamer, a student at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, explains that his school has recently entered into a contract to purchase energy from the Fenner wind farm to green the school’s power. The school has also just installed a fuel cell built by Fuel Cell Energy, whose purchase was subsidized by the CT Clean Energy Fund. Not busy enough? Students are conducting a CO2 inventory for the school and plan to make Yale climate neutral, similar to the effort conducted at Tufts. All of these initiatives at Yale have been and continue to be student led.
Sustainable Curricula
At many campuses across the Northeast, projects relating to sustainability emerge directly from the curriculum. Through the Tufts Climate Initiative, students have influenced renovations to a campus building to include lighting controls, reduced equipment sizing, and solar hot water. The SUNY Syracuse campus cuts down on energy usage by monitoring energy consumption for the Jahn Chemistry Lab and adding alternative fuel vehicles to the college’s transportation fleet. At Middlebury College, students are producing biodiesel fuel in their own refinery and running a test vehicle, which travels around the community. At the University of Vermont, students working with NESEA business member Solar Works have installed a 5kW array on the campus library. UVM students are conducting a study to identify the major sources of greenhouse gas emissions on campus, and are looking for ways to reduce them. These projects and the curricula they are derived from are essential to institutions hoping to recruit students to their growing environmental programs.
Beyond the Schools
An encounter with young people outside a campus setting came at Fast Forward, a special day-long event organized by ArchVoices and focusing on students and young architects at the Build Boston conference in November. Here I heard from an impressive group of students and young professionals. They included the producers of the magazine 30-60-90, dedicated to printing the work of students and young designers; the creators of Public Architecture, advocates for 1% pro bono work in the public interest sector by all practicing architects; and Design Corps, an organization that links students, architects, and designers with local community-based development programs. These diverse projects were all informed by an explicit desire for the opportunity to apply design expertise in the public interest sector, and by a distinct distaste for the prospect of becoming anonymous "CAD monkeys" in brand-name firms. The participants’ energy, imagination, initiative, and goals for sustainability were consistently inspiring.
This was my brief taste of what the next generation is not just thinking about, but doing. Chances are good that no matter where you find yourself in the Northeast, there are students and young people beginning careers who are anxious to be involved in work that will make a difference. They join those of us already at work in our common desire to live, learn, and practice the principles that promote sustainability. We welcome them to our community, and we would be wise to take an interest in theirs!
Jamie Wolf is the owner of Wolfworks, Inc. in Avon, CT and has been an active NESEA member for over 15 years.
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