By Carrie Wells
20 February 2009

In a little more than a year, Carly Queen’s organization has succeeded in digging a community garden, gathering professors to lecture about sustainability and holding a sustainable fashion show featuring recycled clothes.

Queen, the president and founder of Students Organizing for Sustainability at Georgia Tech University, is a part of a rapidly growing movement for clean energy and sustainable practices that has taken hold on college campuses. Colleges and universities are often the leaders and innovators in the fight against climate change, and the movement often unites students, professors and administrators.

"I am an optimist because I believe that there is still time to change the future," Queen said. "I believe life on earth in the next 50 years can be much better than it is now, for everyone. I do know that I could not live with myself if I didn’t feel that I was having a positive impact in some meaningful way. "

The ways in which university communities raise awareness or reduce their carbon footprint are often creative. Students at the University of Mississippi erected 30 nine-foot-tall windmills on the campus before it hosted the first presidential debate. Getting rid of trays in dining halls is also becoming popular: Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa saved 89 pounds of solid food, 20 gallons of liquid and 289 pounds of total product in one day by getting rid of trays.

Some universities, including Harvard, are offering classes in sustainable building or politicking. Dickinson College is investing in green and community development funds. Colorado State University has a "biomass boiler" that, by burning woodchips, uses half the energy of natural gas.

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Kassie Rohrbach, the co-director of operations and co-founder of Power Vote, a green-movement group, said young people were the first clean energy fighters and the movement is growing rapidly.

"The youth climate movement has been building for the last eight years and it’s the largest it’s ever been," Rohrbach said. "Young people have known it’s an important issue for a number of years now, and now public awareness is becoming broader."

The College Sustainability Report Card, released in September, surveyed 300 schools nationwide and identified 15 schools whose efforts earned an "A-". The Sustainable Endowments Institute, the report card’s publisher, attributed improving scores to rising energy costs and student activism.

Before election day, clean energy and sustainability groups like Power Vote worked to mobilize students out to the polls, even getting former Vice President Al Gore to speak through a live telecast days before the election.

"I really feel that the youth ought to be seen as a valid constituency with real concerns," said Chris Klarer, an organizer from the Energy Action Coalition and recent Southern Illinois University-Carbondale graduate. "We make up 20 percent of the electorate; if elected officials hope to get in office and be successful they need to pay attention to the youth."

Klarer, 23, works with students in southern Illinois, western Kentucky and southwestern Indiana, helping them to form groups, organize demonstrations and pressure their local elected officials.

"All throughout our lives we’ve been told young people are so apathetic, but reality is that is absolutely very far from the truth," said Klarer.

Queen said the barriers to her group’s goals are usually financial, and the university administration is supportive.

"The sense I’ve gotten overall is that everyone is in; we all want to work together to reach our goals and those who aren’t supportive generally just don’t care enough to work against us," Queen said.

"Unfortunately, the off-campus world is not currently so agreeable, but I think it will be, eventually."

The Campus Environment Report Card, which surveyed 75 schools nationwide in July, found many universities were using alternative energy and most were recycling, said Kevin Tanzillo, a spokesman. Of the schools that responded, 47 percent said their technology departments were the primary lobbyists for clean energy, said Tanzillo.

© 2008, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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