ed u cating for change
project to green and upgrade its most prominent building. The multimilliondollar project will result in major CO2 emissions reductions and hundreds of thousands of dollars of energy savings. Food, Farm, and Sustainability summer program. This summer we will launch a
six-week, multidisciplinary course that links farm experience, laboratory science, and analysis of global food and resource politics. Transition Hampshire. Students and staff have established a branch of the Transition Towns movement, which seeks to make communities healthier, happier, and more sustainable from the bottom up. Next year will see a Transition mod and a course entitled Think Globally, Design Locally. I hope that they succeed in their ambition to make Hampshire the first Transition college. Environmental project revolving fund.
Using grant funds, Hampshire has set up a $75,000 revolving fund managed by the Environmental Committee for projects that improve the College’s environmental performance and have a financial payback. Creativity Center. With Eileen Fisher’s generous help, we have created a transdisciplinary mash-up of students, faculty, and staff seeking progress by looking at things from creative angles. Comprehensive sustainability program.
We are initiating a comprehensive program seeking transitions in the way Hampshire feeds itself, uses its farm, operates its campus, integrates sustainability in its curriculum, and defines its culture. This is part of a vision of a school that thrives at the intersection of learning and life, that sees art, culture, science, and justice not as alternatives, but as interlinked parts of humanity. At Hampshire’s opening convocation, the poet Archibald MacLeish said, “I feel a sense of excited hope. In a time like ours it is only the impossible commitments which are believable, for only the impossible commitments are now worth making.” This is Hampshire’s time. Let us embrace it.
Leading Innovation in Food, Health, and Sustainability By Gary Hirshberg 72F
H ampshire is where my formal climate change education began 40 years ago. I wandered into courses with Ray Coppinger and John Reid and with Ray Bradley at UMass and learned then what we now know: human activities are fundamentally and perhaps irreversibly changing the planet forever. I learned that our climate problems are only symptoms of a deeper human and ecological crisis, that science explained only part of the problem. I learned that our problems were: Philosophical. That the planet is not a subsidiary of our economies. That we had it all backwards. All commerce has been made possible by a bountiful earth. Economic. We had built an entire modern economic system on myths—waste, “away,” and externalities. Problems such as climate change, or a national obesity or cancer epidemic are direct consequences of our economic choices, and yet because they do not appear on our profit and loss statements or our balance sheets, in economic terms they do not exist. Sociologic. Material value had become a higher priority than fairness, compassion, kindness, empathy. In short, I received a classic Hampshire education—a multidisciplinary, integrated odyssey into the ecology of economics in which all aspects of our relationships to each other and our planet were of course interconnected. Through my Division III, I learned something even more important—I learned how to learn and I learned that I actually had the capacity to delve into and take on complex problems. With this hard-won confidence, I left Hampshire College to focus on climate solutions, to advance strategies that are now on the front burners of some of the world’s leading corporations. With Samuel Kaymen, I formed Stonyfield to prove that reducing climate, water, and toxic footprints is in fact highly profitable. In short, I brought the classic Hampshire College approach of asking “Why not?” and indeed discovered and proved an entirely new way of doing commerce. Stonyfield is a direct product of the Hampshire education Speaking of doing things differently, I want to say a word about Jonathan Lash. He has, with the same sense of urgency he and I feel about the planetary crisis, put forward a classic Hampshire vision for a bold, unprecedented, multidisciplinary leap into the 21st century that will make Hampshire a leader in innovation in food, health, and sustainability. Jonathan understands that we are not going to slow down and conserve our way to solving the global climate, water, and toxins crises, that we actually need to engage in the business of restoration. My wife, Meg, and I are so impressed and convinced of the uniqueness of this vision, this man, and the capabilities of this College to rise once again to the challenges of focusing, not on the problems that led us here, but rather on the pathways for how we as a society can reverse our way out of this ecological cul-de-sac, that we are proud to make a $1 million lead gift to get this ball rolling. What goes around comes around. My education here put me on a path that has been profitable for many, including me. And now I am proud to plow back some nutrients and fertility into Hampshire’s 21st-century soils.
Summer 2012 To Know Is Not Enough
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