Examining Conn’s Environmental Stewardship

What does it mean to be “green?” Does it end with environmental stewardship, or does it have socio-political and economical implications?  Keeping that in mind, how “green” or sustainable is Connecticut College?

I considered these questions, among others, while writing this piece, and in engaging in conversation with Josh Stoffel, Co-Director of Sustainability at the College.

During my talk with Stoffel, I learned about some of the successes and challenges that he perceives in promoting the ideas of “sustainability” on our campus. For Stoffel, sustainability is about “developing long lasting solutions” to the common issues facing us all, involving the three E’s defined as: “the environment, economics and equity.” Efforts towards sustainability need to be foregrounded in economics. Especially for an administration interested in the bottom line, sustainability needs to be cost effective.

As Stoffel sees it, sustainability is not an isolated idea purely concerning environmental issues and divorced from broader social issues of inclusion. While readily admitting that college is a “bubble,” Stoffel also sees the College as being a “microcosm of the world at large,” affected by the very issues that exist in the broader world.

Sustainability can be deeply embedded in the everyday lives of college students involving broader issues of race, class, and gender. For this very reason, advancing sustainability on campus provides many opportunities to experiment with potential solutions to our common issues relating to the environment, inclusivity and social justice, and even cost effectiveness.

To elucidate this idea, Stoffel gave me the example of students’ daily participation in the college’s “food culture,” which provides unique opportunities for involving the local community, including local farmers and small businesses and the College’s own Sprout Garden. In this regard, The Office of Sustainability  works with the New London County Food Policy Council which also includes non-profits, for-profit small businesses and health districts in the area.

In the spring of last year, following student protests about equity and inclusion, the faculty adopted a motion to pilot “Full Participation” at the College. The projects of the Office of Sustainability  are led by student Sustainability Fellows, and Stoffel sees this as full participation in action. He believes that although student-led sustainability projects take more time and effort because of their relative inexperience, it is worthwhile all the same, because what is important is that the students learn and grow from their work in sustainability at the College. Another project of which Stoffel is very proud is the “Sustainable Buildings Project,” in which the Office of Sustainability  has been working with facilities to ensure that renovations and repairs are done in a sustainable manner.

Professor Chad Jones of the Botany department feels that some colleges view sustainability as a marketing tool used for attracting students, and often lose sight of substance in the process. In his view, what is far more important for Connecticut College as an educational institution is to broadly educate its students in the ideas of sustainability, and more generally inculcate a strong foundation for the ideas of sustainability in the College, extending to the local community.

One idea that is quickly gaining traction is fossil fuel divestments. Students and other stakeholders in a variety of colleges and universities across the United States are demanding that their institutions divest from corporations and organizations that profit from the emission of fossil fuels.

With regard to this issue of fossil fuel divestments especially, Connecticut College appears to live up to its reputation for general political apathy. Students at Wesleyan University in Middletown, for instance, have organized sit-ins to protest for divestments.  They have been met with some success, as the Wesleyan Ethics Committee and Board of Trustees will vote on the matter. Their college president even gave a commitment with regard to investments in coal. -Unfortunately, so far, no such large scale student organized attempt at demanding fossil fuel divestment or even further exploration of the issue appears to exist at Connecticut College. Given the apparent lack of student interest here, the administration appears to not view the matter seriously.

In a conversation I had last year with Paul Maroni, Vice President for Finance at the College, I asked about the possibility of fossil fuel divestments at Conn, which Maroni saw as unviable because of the specific way Connecticut College manages its investments.  According to Maroni, because Connecticut College’s endowment is relatively small, the College’s investments are not under direct control and are instead managed by external fund managers. Hence, Maroni saw the exertion of pressure on these fund managers as difficult and futile.

Maroni also remarked that some of the announcements of fossil fuel divestments from other colleges could be deceiving. This may very well be true, and the College’s finances may be more opaque and secretive than the United States Federal Reserve’s announcements – as a professor of mine once joked. But what Maroni emphasized even then was that the College’s obligations toward environmental sustainability were pursued within the context of the institution through its Office of Sustainability .

Connecticut College has successfully made it onto Princeton Review’s “Guide to Green Colleges” for five consecutive years. That does not, however, make Connecticut College a national leader in sustainability despite some of the merits of its intersectional approaches to sustainability. The issues of environmental sustainability are too urgent for institutions to rest on their laurels.

Given our current lifestyles, the achievement of sustainability is a long way ahead. A larger proportion of the student body needs to awaken from its apathy and take a bigger and more active role in pushing through environmentally sustainable efforts. Eco-friendliness should not be confined to a few clubs, departments or buildings on campus. Rather, it should involve us all. Consciousness about the importance of sustainability is the first step toward direct action. •