Sustainability is becoming an oft employed term on university and college campuses across the country these days.  That's good news for activists who for years have been lobbying higher education to carry the mantle of environmental action and awareness.

Determined to ensure that today's currency of the term isn't just lip service, in 2006, a consortium of college and university faculty and staff founded the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).  Its founding resulted from the expansion of the Consortium for Environmental Education in Medicine's (CEEM) mission, which enabled it to absorb the Education for Sustainability Western Network to form AASHE.

In its thorough website, the organization describes its mission, "to see higher education take a leadership role in preparing students and employees to achieve a just and sustainable society."  AASHE contends that the ideal twenty-first century campus "itself would serve as a model of sustainability, with curriculum and operations reflecting an integrative approach to learning and practice.  The process of education would emphasize active, experiential, inquiry based learning and real-world problem solving."

"On the model campus all sectors would work collaboratively to advance sustainability, and the content and context of learning would reflect a focus on systemic, interdisciplinary thinking with respe ct to human health, ethics, future generations, and planetary stewardship."

While some may argue that this vision is more romantic than pragmatic, the success of AASHE in its short history attests to the growing desire of higher education to accept a leadership role in modeling sustainability for their students. Numbers from the organization's conference attendance have more than tripled in three years.

Recently, three Frostburg State University representatives, Kara Rogers Thomas, Sociology, Patrick O'Brien, Student and Community Involvement, and Jeff Sellers, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences VISTA Volunteer, attended the organization's second national conference.

Held in Raleigh, North Carolina's two month old Convention Center - a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified Green building - November 9-11, 2008 the conference hosted a powerhouse of keynote speakers.

From its opening session, attendees could sense the energy, enthusiasm, and optimism in the air.  Citing the nation's recent election results, even those typically conveying a message of doom and gloom noted that there is clearly hope today for a better tomorrow.  They argued, however, that it will be up to the American people to push our administration in the right direction.

Keynote speaker and former Nobel Prize Nominee Vandana Shiva stated it most succinctly, saying, "We're all living in interesting times, but we are living in particularly interesting times.  My dream is to see that energy continue to make change.  I don't expect anything of Obama.  I expect a lot from the American people.  What you need to do is to give the new administration an agenda for food independency."

Shiva was in good company.  Her plenary session was one of four.  The other keynote speakers included Lester Brown, Peter Senge, and Van Jones.  All are heavy hitters in the Sustainability world-all are internationally respected authors and speakers.

Brown is president of Earth Policy Institute, an organization dedicated to building a sustainable future, and author of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.  He has been described by the Washington Post as "one of the world's most influential thinkers."

In his address, Brown argued that it is essential that we choose our language carefully when referring to environmental sustainability.  Sustainability, he argues, is not a choice; it is an imperative.

"We have been talking about sustainability for three decades," said Brown.  "How you label it determines how you talk about it. Will we be sustainable or unsustainable?  We're really talking about whether civilization is going to make it.  We need to talk about it in those terms.  We have to mobilize society to save civilization.  We need to think about the language we use.  It's either sustainable or it's not.  More sustainable only postpones."

He argues, "We're looking at the most drastic threat to food security that we've ever seen.  We're facing problems unlike any we've seen before.  Civilization is in trouble.

"Soil erosion, deforestation, grassland deterioration, and falling water tables are the world's greatest challenges, he says.  Any one of these is capable of contributing to failing states.  "The weight of this stress on governments can be insurmountable, leading to more and more failing states."  Substantiating his point, Brown observed that the list of failing states is growing longer each year.

While Brown is encouraged to see recent progress, he worries that it may be too little, too late.  "How much and how fast do we have to cut carbon emissions to save our ice," he asked.  "We hear people talk about the year 2050 as a target.  The game is going to be over long before that.  We have to cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2020."

"We are limited in our thinking of what is possible by our training and our experiences," Brown told the crowd.  "We've been thinking in incremental terms.  But things are beginning to move fast.  We cannot wait."

To attain the shift in mentality necessary to alter our current course of action and reverse humanity's enormous environmental impact, Brown argues that a wartime effort is needed.  To change habits, he contends, the economy must begin to reflect the indirect costs of our energy consumption.  "Let's tax what we burn, not what we earn," he emphatically called.

"Right now we're leaving costs off the books and we're leaving future generations with the bill," Brown said.  "The market must tell the truth ecologically.  We've been getting bad information and have been making bad decisions.

"The stakes are high and people must understand that.  We know that no civilization has destroyed its environmental support systems and survived-and that is exactly what we have been doing.  Saving civilization is not a spectator sport.  We have to change the system and change it quickly."

A common thread throughout the event's plenary sessions was the need to shift away from humanity's reliance on fossil fuels and non-renewable energy sources to renewable energy sources.  Each of the speakers hoped for a day when renewables such as wind and solar would no longer be referred to as alternatives, but would instead be the energy sources of choice.

Keynote speaker Van Jones, Eco-visionary, human rights attorney, founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and author of The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems, attributed the world's current dire environmental state to "a fundamental flaw of the industrial revolution -our ideas of inexhaustible resources." 

And, making reference to recent news headlines of a world economy spiraling into recession, he argued that, "in the last thirty years the American people were sold a bill of goods that told them that they could have a functioning economy based on consumption without production.  And we outsourced our jobs.  An economy based on debt is not smart savings.  We used to know the value of thrift.  Today, we have a country based on credit cards.  This is an unsustainable relationship based on borrowing and not building."

Environmental and ecological destruction stands testament to this misstep.  We can work to change our structures and rebuild society, Jones argued.  To achieve the goal of sustainability-environmental, economical and social, nations must partner together to grow and develop in a sustainable way.

Jones championed green jobs and stated that it was time that the American people placed a higher value on the technical fields of plumbing, construction, energy grid development and maintenance, etc.  All of those fields can be retooled to accommodate and sustain responsible environmental and green-oriented development.

He outlined a pragmatic, if drastic template for change, saying, "We need to achieve three simple, dramatic and nation changing initiatives.

• 1) Put a Price on Carbon
• 2) Weatherizing and Rebuilding to increase energy efficiency.  Drafty homes make for chilly people and a hot planet.  We need to increase jobs, lower energy bills and increase home values.  That's all possible if we choose to invest in renewable energy sources.
• 3) Invest in Wind and Solar, which requires investing in a new Power Grid to move clean energy around the country.

To those who claim that his recommendations are too daunting for the American nation to embrace, Jones pointed to the building of the United States Interstate System and the incredibly rapid growth of the World Wide Internet to show that such giant leaps are indeed possible.  To those who argue that Jones p lan is too costly, he vehemently responds, "We can't afford not to."

Aware that he was addressing a packed room of educators, Jones stated that, "Teachers have an obligation to make history.  These are historic times.  This is the time to worry about what our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren will say when they ask, what did they do to rescue us?"

Environmental and Economic Sustainability is indelibly tied to Social Sustainability, argued Keynote Speaker Peter Senge.  What is required today is a reorientation of our social practices.

Senge is the founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning, and author of the groundbreaking books including the acclaimed, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization and the recently released The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World.

Senge stated that, since the inception of the Industrial Revolution, society has undergone a dramatic shift-one that is greatly informed and influenced by consumerism.

"The industrial age has changed how we live," he told his audience.  "Machine ways of thinking have come to pervade our culture.  But we are not machines.  Assembly lines erode creativity.  They are all about standardization, speed, and productivity.  And today, we are all involved in these systems."

What has traditionally defined community-nurturing individuals who take care of one another, has been lost and too readily replaced with competition and consumption Senge argued.  Today's metaphors for society are mechanistic rather than natural.  "We are all far too removed from the natural world."

The same theme permeated Vandana Shiva's talk.  Her program bio describes her as a "totally committed, productive and effective activist-advocate-intellectual.  Time magazine identified Dr. Shiva as an environmental hero in 2003 and Asia Week called her one of the five most powerful communicators of Asia."

Shiva's work concentrates on world food systems.  Echoing Brown's warning of the present state of the world's food security, and Senge's observation of society's shift from the natural to the mechanistic, she observed, "We've transformed food from the ecological way of life that nourishes life to things that aren't food and take life away."

Human health is suffering today, Shiva cautioned, because molecules that are entering our food system were never designed to be part of our bodies.  She reminded her audience that items once intended for war are now deployed into our agriculture.

She encourages us to embrace a new world order in which small scale, community produced agriculture is the norm and organic oriented agricultural pursuits are highly valued.

"Biodegradable -- that is the ultimate test of a sustainable food system," said Shiva.  We need to consider, "how much of it remains food and how much of it is not."

"The second source of nutrition is the nutrition we give to the soil," she continued.  "We forget this.  The total mechanistic system is not the way living systems work.  The most important work of growing food is growing foods to feed microorganisms.  If we let that happen, there will be no starvation."

Shiva decried the industrialized, monoculture approach to current farming practices.  In addition to the cost in biodiversity, she argued, there has been a substantial human cost as farmers and villagers are forced to leave their homes and move to overcrowded cities in search of wage labor.

"Every farmer leaving the land is a tragedy," she said. In a somber tone, she reminded conference goers that in the United States, there are more people in jail today than on farms.

In chorus with her fellow plenary speakers, Shiva cited the recent US election and spoke in optimistic terms.  "You brought democracy back," she said.  "That same momentum can shape food democracy."

And, like other conference presenters, she encouraged college campuses to take a leadership role in that movement, urging students, faculty and staff to demand that their institutions make a commitment to using and even producing organic foods.  Edible school yards, she said, should be found on every campus.

"Campuses have always been on the edge of transformation," said Shiva.  "Campuses have always been about making change.  Every campus should be making its own food transition-from monoculture to biodiversity."

On April 18, 2007, FSU president Jonathan Gibralter signed the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment, becoming part of the initiative's Leadership Circle.  Official membership came the following September.  In making that commitment, FSU has pledged to eliminate its carbon emissions and contributions to global warming. Sustainability is poised to become a guiding principle at FSU.

The message AASHE conference speakers drove home was the idea that the transition will not and cannot happen without broad-based public support.  All parties, faculty, staff, students and the general public must work together to demand that academe is modeling sustainability and teaching its students the values that they can then apply to their domestic and professional lives.

FSU conference representatives returned from the AASHE event heartened, but with an awareness of the long and arduous path ahead.  A common expression voiced by dozens of conference attendees was, "don't just talk the talk; walk the walk."

With the inauguration of FSU's Learning Green, Living Green Committee and the ad-hoc establishment of a committee to assess possibilities for incorporating sustainability into the curriculum, FSU has started to embark down the sustainable path.  Leaders in these initiatives argue that, it will be up to the larger campus and regional community to ensure its stead footedness.