Sustaining ourselves

As I write this, it is over 80 degrees Fahrenheit in early October in Minnesota, and although we cannot draw firm conclusions about the global climate from the variability of our weather, these uncommonly warm days do make the scientific consensus about climate change seem very real, and particularly relevant to a college like ours.

Of the 15 ways in which Princeton professors Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala have proposed to curb the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, several involve College of Design disciplines, from reducing automobile use through denser communities, to making buildings and interiors more energy efficient, to ending deforestation by finding alternatives to wood and paper. Their work shows how much our fields are both part of the problem and part of the solution to climate change.

At the College of Design, we have definitely focused on solutions. Making sustainability the theme of the year, we have several leading-edge research efforts under way, many of them led by staff from our Center for Sustainable Building Research (CSBR). We have started to green the college, with staff and students looking at ways to recycle waste and reduce our carbon footprint, and we have begun to plan a University-wide sustainability effort, including mapping all the environmental efforts under way at the institution.

We have also used our own facilities as a living laboratory. Photovoltaic panels on the Rapson Hall roof run our electrical meter backwards, putting power back in the grid, and they will soon be used to split water molecules to make hydrogen for fuel-cell research. And landscape architecture professor Rebecca Krinke's design of a low-maintenance, native landscape along Church Street continues to thrive.

In our teaching, sustainability also looms large. We have entered a second successful year of the MS in sustainable design, one of the first degrees of its kind in the country. We have planned a number of lectures and exhibitions that will look at sustainability from a variety of perspectives. Meanwhile, students across our college have explored the subject in different ways, ranging from graphic design students raising our awareness of energy use and the waste stream, to landscape architecture students organizing a yearlong lunchtime series on climate change.

Sustainability has also allowed us to cross collegiate borders. We have recently joined with Institute of Technology faculty and students to compete as one of 20 universities for the national Solar Decathlon, integrating this effort into our curriculum, to design and build an innovative prefabricated house for display on the Washington, D.C., mall in 2009.

Our outreach efforts on behalf of sustainability are not just local and national, but also regional and international. The Center for Rural Design, a partnership of CDes and the College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences, has begun work on a statewide plan that will look at creating a more sustainable future for Minnesota; our Center for Changing Landscapes has designed environmentally friendly trails in northern Minnesota; and our Metropolitan Design Center and CSBR have examined the environmental effects of various transportation systems.

Internationally, our faculty and students have been documenting and deploying conservation strategies in historically important cities, such as Oaxaca, Mexico; Venice, Italy; and Baku, Azerbaijan. That global reach has extended to conferences as well. In early November, John Koepke and I cochaired a Minneapolis gathering of deans and department heads from North America and abroad to discuss what each school can do in its own region and institution in "Preparing for the Inconvenient Truth," as the conference was called. Sustainability offers an opportunity for colleges like ours to play a leadership role, evident in the number of conference sessions in which Minnesota faculty presented their work. In this area, among others, we are already at the leading edge.

At a recent roundtable discussion organized by the University's Institute on the Environment, our college, along with the Morris campus, was called a poster child for sustainability at the University. That label may be apt, for while our commitment to do all that we can to address the myriad environmental problems we face remains strong, we have taken just the first few steps toward creating a greener future. I invite all of you reading this issue of Emerging to join us as we learn how to sustain this walk.