Learning Resources

Abstract: This article provides a survey of innovative approaches to campus transportation in the United States. The high costs of parking expansion have propelled many institutions toward a transportation demand management strategy, using parking pricing, transit passes for students and employees, and investment in bicycle infrastructure to shift many trips from single-occupant automobiles to other modes of travel. These institutions have experienced multiple benefits, including lower transportation costs, lower environmental impacts, and improved community relations.

Abstract: The natural resource planning theory of Walter Firey is examined as conceptual base for planning efforts aimed at achieving sustainable policies and practices on university and college campuses. Sustainable policies and practices are those that, according to Firey’s theory, are simultaneously ecologically possible, economically gainful, and ethnologically adoptable. Successful planning for sustainability must take all three criteria fully into account in order for sustainability to be achieved. While Firey’s theory may not identify specific policies and practices that are universally applicable in pursuing sustainability, it does provide robust and flexible general principles useful for planners.

Abstract: This article examines the history of higher education for sustainable development and offers examples of it in countries and institutions from both the global North and South. These initiatives vary widely depending on the culture, economic conditions, and environmental demands of the places in which they occur. But every example demonstrates a growing commitment to education that promotes solutions to real problems in an increasingly interdependent world.

Abstract: The challenge of planning a sustainable future is so great and the task so broad that moving our institutions of higher learning, let alone our society, toward sustainability requires an unprecedented coalition of leaders. Planners must use the best skills and knowledge of all members of the academy: faculty, students, staff, trustees, alumni, and administration. This article reviews and critiques the processes, circumstances, and leadership that enabled Northland College to make significant progress toward sustainability. An Environmental Council that supported strong linkages between student learning and sustainability was key to the progress. The council was an incubator of leadership from which students, faculty, and staff emerged as agents of change.

Abstract: Statistics demonstrate that our present land use and consumption patterns present the challenge of meeting contemporary needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Higher education has a special obligation to answer this challenge because it plays a role in producing the leaders, policy makers, and citizens of the world, and it uses a large share of resources to do so. To meet this challenge, sustainable practices and paradigms must permeate colleges and universities, from curricula to physical plant to leadership and institutional policies. This overview of the articles in this theme issue discusses methods for incorporating sustainability into higher education across a wide array of institutional realms.

Abstract: Colleges and universities are expanding at unprecedented rates, creating new hazards for our increasingly fragile natural environments. Higher education administrators and planners are finding that campus development, like suburban sprawl, can disrupt functioning natural systems and destroy the natural, historical, and cultural fabric of the place. To address environmental issues and new regulations, proactive institutions of higher education are taking the lead as stewards of the land by including an environmental component in their campus master plans. An environmental approach to planning incorporates ecological information into campus master plans to ensure a sustainable campus landscape that is beautiful, durable, and distinctive. These Environmental Master Plans are best developed using a democratic process, considering each site’s unique essential environmental resources, the constraints of the regulatory environment, and a continuing education and outreach program. A case study of an Environmental Master Plan at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill illustrates how such a plan was created at one of the nation’s oldest and largest college campuses.

Abstract: The State of California has initiated a number of policies and programs to integrate sustainable building practices into the state’s capital outlay process. Many of these efforts involve new levels of teamwork between diverse state programs and departments. The state’s higher education systems have begun to show a strong level of commitment to sustainable building and have implemented a number of sustainable building measures within their organizations. This article (1) outlines the activities and recommendations of the task force, (2) discusses sustainable building activities in California’s higher education systems, and (3) highlights key issues that California is grappling with in its implementation of sustainable building practices.

Abstract: A growing cadre of progressive K–12 educators believes that sustainability education has a central role in developing in students a sense of responsibility for the future. Leaders within the movement to educate for sustainability see an opportunity in the convergence of the large-scale systemic reform efforts sweeping our nation and the vision and goals of the emerging field of sustainability education. Transformations are appearing in classrooms that have adopted sustainability education as a context for systemic reform efforts, and the results of this are bound to affect the shape of higher education in years to come.