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SUSTAINING CHANGE AT BROCK:
Research Report on
Preparing Brock University for the
CAMPUS SUSTAINABILITY AUDIT
2008-2009
Financial support from Deans David Siegel, John Corlett, Ian Brindle, and from Kimberley Meade of the Office of the Associate Vice President gratefully acknowledged. This study received ethical review through Brock University’s Research Ethics Board (File # 08-067 MITCHELL/CORMAN). This report was compiled through collaboration with representatives from Brock University’s Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG); the Ontario Sierra Youth Coalition; Professors June Corman (Sociology) and Richard Mitchell (Child and Youth Studies) co-chairs of Brock’s Fair Trade/Ethical Purchasing Committee; MA in Social Justice and Equity Studies candidate Ms. Avery Kennedy; with Research Assistants Ms. Sinem Arslan and Ms. Melissa Dol support through Experience Works.
Table of Contents
I. Introduction and Rationale 3
Sustainability and Transdisciplinarity at Brock 3
Defining Sustainability Internationally and Locally 5
Sierra Youth Coalition (SYC) and the Sustainable Campuses Project 8
II. The Campus Sustainability Assessment Framework (CSAF) 9
III. Overview of Outcomes from Sustainable Campuses Project Participants 10
McGill University 11
Concordia University 11
Simon Fraser University 12
University of Toronto 13
University of Ottawa 14
IV. Preparing Brock University for the Campus Sustainability Audit 15
Methodology and Objectives 15
Analysis of Findings 17
Salient Quotes from Key Informants in this Study 20
Key Recommendations 23
Conclusions 24
References 26
I. Introduction and Rationale
Sustainability and Transdisciplinarity at Brock University
Post-secondary institutions play one of the most significant roles in promoting awareness of global environmental and social justice issues by demonstrating good practices relative to each. It is readily apparent that Brock University is well placed to play a key role in promoting ethical and green consumption practices on campus in order to inspire changes at local, national or international levels, and at the same time, attract a new generation of environmentally conscious students. Building on similarly designed Canadian research on campus-based sustainability audits, this report contains a review of the literature and an analysis of exploratory findings from a qualitative study conducted in 2008 by Brock University Professors June Corman (Sociology) and Richard Mitchell (Child and Youth Studies). This early phase of the research project received seed funds from the (previous) Dean of Social Sciences David Siegel, and the Dean of Applied Health Sciences John Corlett, as well as the Dean of Mathematics, Sciences and Biological Sciences Ian Brindle, and was carried out in partnership with Brock’s Fair Trade/Ethical Purchasing Committee, stakeholders from the Brock’s Ontario Public Interest Research Group (or OPIRG), and consultants from the Toronto office of Sierra Youth Coalition.
Sustainable ways of life have been embedded within and across many cultures throughout history especially through Indigenous ways of knowing. Human societies all across the globe have developed worldviews based upon rich experiences relating to the environments in which they live. Today, these ‘other knowledge systems’ are referred to as traditional ecological knowledge, indigenous or local knowledges, note Nakashima and Bridgewater (2000). Sustainability is not a contemporary phenomenon, but the solutions undertaken on the most successful Canadian campuses have taken an innovative turn (Beringer, 2006). A comprehensive, multi-systemic, and inclusive approach that reaches beyond traditional hierarchical university structures includes development of permanent partnerships with community-based stakeholders, student and union leaders, faculty, administrative and alumni champions. This conceptual and methodological approach is mirrored in the academic literature of the social sciences, humanities, healthcare and scientific journals as “transdisciplinarity” (Holmes and Gastaldo; 2004; Giroux & Searls-Giroux, 2004; Koizumi, 2001; Nicolescu, 2002).
Quantum physicist Nicolescu (2002: 1) notes how the term “transdisciplinarity first appeared three decades ago almost simultaneously in the works of such varied scholars as Jean Piaget, Edgar Morin, and Erich Jantsch”. It was coined to express the need - particularly within education - to move beyond “disciplinary boundaries, an act that far surpassed the multidisciplinary and the interdisciplinary approaches” being discussed at that point. Similarly, McMaster University educators Henry Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux (2004: 101-103) argue for contemporary thinkers to find new ways of making knowledge meaningful in order to make it transformative. They emphasize how “transdisciplinary work” provides a new academic pathway for knowledge production that historically has been hierarchically ordered and frequently used to create false boundaries within and across disciplines. In their view, transdisciplinarity operates “at the frontiers of knowledge, prompting teachers and students to raise new questions and develop new models of analysis outside the officially sanctioned boundaries of knowledge and established disciplines that control them”.
Transdisciplinary work creates “opportunities for new alliances within and outside the university” and for the development of new tools for working “in spaces that cover a range of practices and institutions” to address the task of learning multiple forms of knowledge and skills to speak to a “wide range of publics”. While educators often find themselves working within established academic silos, they are at liberty to develop “transdisciplinary tools to challenge the limits of established fields and contest the broader economic, political, and cultural conditions that reproduce unequal relations of power and inequity” (Giroux & Searls Giroux, 2004: ibid.; also Austin, Park & Goble, 2008).
Utilizing a similar rationale in his analysis of Canadian society entitled A Fair Country, historian John Ralston Saul observes the potential for romanticism in making connections to Indigenous epistemologies. Nevertheless, a philosophy in which humans are a part of nature, not a species chosen to master it, is now a central assumption for most scientists whether they are looking at climate, water or species (see also Koizumi, 2001). In this same light, Indigenous notions of environmentalism “produced the concept of minimal impairment”, observes Ralston Saul (2008: 81). He contends the “great weakness” in our mainstream appreciation of the environment today is that “we have not looked seriously at how these ideas came about and what their implications are”. He argues that Canadians are attempting to “impose the European, linear view of a human-centred world” onto the current crisis, and thereby suffer from “specialization and narrow silos that dominate education, administration, and policies…rushing about to impose single-faceted solutions to problems we have represented simplistically” (ibid. 86).
We take “an idea such as sustainable development and parse it into the narrowest possible interpretation; there is no reconsideration of the nineteenth-century industrial and managerial idea of development, which has dominated the world since then and which makes humans the purpose of the planet”. While much from this approach has been successful, he bluntly observes “it is also responsible for our environmental crisis”. Thus, he notes how Canadians are being viewed around the world with increasing suspicion. “Our leaders – governmental, private-sector, even much of the academic class – continue to talk as if we were serious environmental players. This sort of discourse, designed to distract Canadians, cuts no ice internationally”, claims Ralston Saul (ibid.).
Yet, in taking this rather dim view of Canadian institutions of higher learning Ralston Saul has apparently overlooked the Sierra Youth Coalition’s ten-year Sustainable Campuses Project undertaken with dozens of participants such as the University of Prince Edward Island and Dalhousie University. The UPEI campus sustainability audit relied on the Campus Sustainability Assessment Framework (CSAF), a methodology developed by Lindsay Cole at Royal Roads University, Victoria, B.C. in 2003 and since then further developed for the Sierra Youth Coalition (SYC) by Geneva Guerin and Lindsay Cole of Sustainability Solutions Group. The Sierra Youth Coalition is Canada’s only national student environmental coalition; it is an independent non-profit organization loosely affiliated with the Sierra Club of Canada, the nation’s largest environmental organization.
The Sierra Youth Coalition disseminates the CSAF through its Sustainable Campuses Project, also referred to as the Academia to Action Project (A2A) or, formerly, the Greening the Ivory Towers Project (GITP, SYC, 2009). Building on their early work in developing the CSAF, Dalhousie University recently took out a full-page Toronto Globe & Mail newspaper advertisement (23 January 2009: A-16) to announce its decision “to develop that new generation of leaders for whom sustainability is second nature … [through] the creation of a first at Canadian universities: Dalhousie’s new College of Sustainability. It’s Environment, Sustainability and Society (ESS) program is …a whole new way of thinking about how to inspire minds”. Indeed, Orr (2004) asserts that no institutions in modern society are better equipped to catalyze the necessary resources and transitions to a more sustainable world than universities.
Well researched Canadian-based initiatives such as the CSAF and the Sustainable Campuses Project offer Brock University stakeholders and students the same opportunity to alter not only our own day-to-day campus functioning, but to influence the broader regional communities wherein we are located. Because of its strategic location as a United Nations Biosphere, our campus finds itself uniquely positioned to play a significantly larger role in raising awareness on environmental and social justice issues, and communicate positive change to current and incoming students. Furthermore, it offers a central Niagara Region site where ongoing sustainability audits may inspire and initiate other environmental and social projects, which in turn could provide a role model for smaller institutions to initiate their own sustainability assessments. Finally, the Brock campus is an institution with a very large ecological “footprint” (see Draper, 2001: Glossary).
Defining Sustainability Internationally and Locally
Emerging as a contemporary political movement and an academic discourse in the 1970s and 1980s, sustainability is now considered critically important and has been the focus of numerous United Nations deliberations and reports. As one of many similar new appointees on Canadian campuses, Sustainability Coordinator Jennifer Davis describes “sustainability as an interdisciplinary concept and the critical issue of our era” (Planning Document for Concordia University, 2007). Beginning with the UN Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, there has been a steady development of national and international sustainability declarations relevant to higher education. The 1972 Declaration, for example, was an attempt to reconsider how human activities were impacting the environment and risking the well-being of human and non-human life. As the complexity of human societies grows so too should the recognition that social, economic, political, and institutional decisions affect the well-being of all life forms on the planet.
In December 2002, the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 57/254 to put in place a United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD), spanning from 2005 to 2014, and designated the Paris-based UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to lead the decade. The founding value of the DESD is respect: respect for others, respect in the present and for future generations, respect for the planet and what it provides to us (resources, fauna and flora). Participation in the DESD challenges us all to adopt new behaviours and practices to secure our future, and breaks down the traditional educational scheme by promoting:
· Interdisciplinary and holistic learning rather than subject-based learning
· Values-based learning
· Critical thinking rather than memorizing
· Multi-method approaches: word, art, drama, debate, etc.
· Participatory decision-making
· Locally relevant information, rather than national
Consequently, intersections among and between economic wealth and social equity are emerging as integral to the recovering environmental integrity.
Although the literature records numerous definitions of sustainability, Cole (2003) defines sustainability relative to higher education as follows: “A sustainable campus community acts upon its local and global responsibilities to protect and enhance the health and well being of humans and ecosystems. It actively engages the knowledge of the university community to address the ecological and social challenges that we face now and in the future”. Perhaps the best known international declaration on sustainability defined the term as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (UN General Assembly Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987).
Notably in the context of the present study, The Talloires Declaration was the first international statement made by university administrators of their comprehensive commitment to develop and apply sustainability in higher education. The Declaration states that “university heads must provide leadership and support to mobilize internal and external resources so that their institutions respond to this urgent challenge” (UNESCO, 1990: 2; see also Wright, 2002: 107). It concludes by asserting that signatories would continue to collaborate on sustainability and encourage universities who were not present to sign the Declaration and join in their initiative.
This global environmental initiative in higher education has been successful insofar as signatories to the Talloires have increased from 20 in 1990 to over 375 in 2008. Wright (2002: 107) analyzes the implementation of the Talloires through an initial examination revealing three categories: a) those that have made no attempt in their institutions at implementation; b) those that are attempting; and c) those that have incorporated umbrella principles from the Declaration into institutional policies and academic curricula. The following Table 1 outlines the most salient international policy documents on the issue relevant to institutions of higher education:
Table 1 - International Declarations on Sustainability (adapted from Wright, 2002: 106)
1972 The Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment1977 The Tbilisi Declaration
1990 University Presidents for a Sustainable Future: The Talloires Declaration
1991 The Halifax Declaration
1992 Report of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development— Chapter 36: ‘Promoting education, public awareness and training’
1993 Ninth International Association of Universities Round Table: The Kyoto Declaration
1993 Association of Commonwealth Universities’ Fifteenth Quinquennial Conference: The Swansea Declaration
1994 CRE-Copernicus Charter
1997 International Conference on Environment and Society—Education and Public Awareness for Sustainability: The Declaration of Thessaloniki
While economic benefits are only one of many lenses through which to view these interconnected strands, this is nonetheless the dominant view here at Brock, across Canadian campuses, and indeed, throughout world society at time of this writing. A not insignificant number of Canadian-based sustainability studies have emerged in the past decade, yet economic data comparing outcomes are still relatively difficult to come by. Writing recently in The Toronto Star (Wallace, 2009) declares: