SUSTAINABILITY IN SCHOOLS

Jordan Lutz is a sustainability project manager at Bemidji State University.

He’s part of the office that helps the university and its students go green, focusing on everything from recycling to lighting to cutting down on waste in food services.

But it was a long road getting there. Lutz used to be a field technician criss-crossing the country to help with underground oil cleanup. If an old industrial site had contamination, he was your guy — helping map out threats to nearby water sources and more.

“I always felt very reactionary,” he said. The job gave him a chance to make the world brighter and greener, but he wanted to help stop those messes from happening at all.

“Bemidji State University’s campus is on the western shore of Lake Bemidji itself,” he said. “Our community is pretty tied into the outdoor enthusiast opportunities this provides. If we are not caring for and maintaining those natural spaces, we risk losing that part of our lifestyle. A lot of folks are tied into fisheries and the vibrancy of what they can harvest in this area.”

At BSU and at campuses around the upper Midwest, professionals like Lutz are helping reshape the way colleges and universities fit into the world around them. That cuts down on their carbon footprint, responds to rising student demand, and – oftentimes – saves colleges money.

Take South Dakota State University’s Barry Mielke. He points out that recent banks of solar panels on campus rooftops were set to pay for themselves in about 13 years, with a full lifetime of about 20 to 25 years of use.

“Our rule of thumb for an energy conser- vation project is 15 years or less,” he said. “So we should see savings there.”

Perhaps the most famous impacts of the sustainability movement are big projects like those: big banks of solar panels or campus-wide recycling programs. At the University of North Dakota, leaders tout a natural gas steam plant dedicated in 2020 — replacing a coal-burning plant. UND’s top brass said at the time that the change would save about 40,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide every year.

Michael Nord is the assistant director of energy and continuous improvement services at UND. He said that he’s also excited about what the future might hold. Artificial intelligence means that soon, buildings equipped with sophisticated sensors might carefully self-regulate more and more.

“Building automation is flashy to me, and we’ve had it here for many, many years,” he said. “But it keeps growing and the technology grows, and it makes our buildings smart.”

Big plans and big projects are happening at the University of Minnesota Duluth, too. Jonna Korpi, the director of the university’s office of sustainability, said she’s excited about the planning process that will soon update the University of Minnesota’s climate action plan.

“If we have this integrated plan, we can think really strategically and hopefully proactively…to be like, let’s not just do the same thing that we’ve been doing, let’s think about how we can make this better,” Korpi said.

There are a lot of directions that plan could lead. One potential benchmark is carbon neutrality as soon as 2050 for campuses across the Minnesota system.

And there are lots of big, potential projects that Korpi is excited about at UMD. One of them is the switch from a steam heating system to a hot water heating system – which means less energy is involved in the process.

“That requires going into every single building, every single office and literally changing out every pipe to be a smaller diameter (or) maybe be a com- pletely different profile in terms of the radiators that are in a space,” she said. “So that is a huge, huge project. But that by itself would be a game changer to get us to the next stage.

The shift towards green policy has been dramatic in recent years. Almost universally, university leaders point out that the students arriving now have far more of an appetite for going green than they did a generation ago.

That’s increasingly affecting the admissions process. According to a survey from Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse, 45% of participating students “considered environmental sustainability in their college enrollment decision.” About 12% said it “influenced their choice of college. The Washington Post published an article in March headlined “Want to choose a climate-friendly college? Here are some standouts.”

Rian Nostrum is the director of residence life at North Dakota State University. He said students at NDSU aren’t choosing or rejecting the school over environmental concerns — though he said that future may not be far off.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you were doing a follow-up three to five years from now that I’d be like, ‘Oh, remember when we talked about that? Yeah, we are absolutely there now,’” Nostrum said.

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Students like Lauren Collins are on the leading edge of that change. Collins is a rising senior and president of UND’s Students for Sustainability club, working for more change on campus. One of the goals of the club, she said, is more systemic: for sustainability to be discussed during freshman orientation.

“I just remember being a kid and learning about climate change itself,” she said, but also individual disasters. “I remember that oil spill caused by BP was very heavy on my mind as a child.”

And colleges are increasingly tailoring programs for careers in environmental studies. Bemidji State University has a new “indigenous sustainability studies program,” built for those “who want to solve sustainability problems using Indigenous knowledge and modern science,” per the program’s web page. The discipline brings students into indigenous studies classes and environmental courses “that are grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing.”

“We have a responsibility as members of a community of life to do things in certain ways,” said Erika Bailey-Johnson, the school’s sustainability director. “And many times we’ve forgotten what that means.”

Programs like those are churning out new students all the time who go on to positions, private and public, all over the country. Not so long ago, Maggie Torness was one of them. Now she’s sustainability coordinator at Black Hills State University and South Dakota School of Mines – a role announced in early May.

“It’s interesting, it’s challenging work,” she said. “I feel like there’s a lot to learn and unpack, just because I feel like sustainability relates to so many different things on campus. You really have to learn how the whole campus ecosystem functions in order to determine, okay, this would be a good project to focus on.”

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