News

Sustainability committee oversees rollover funds

In print | September 10, 2009

After a campus-wide vote last spring, this year’s Student Council will give $43,500 to the Sustainability Committee to invest in environmental sustainability and awareness on the Swarthmore College campus.

The money is reserved for sustainability projects that will, in turn, save the college money. Those savings will then be reinvested in a “revolving green fund.”

“We invest in a project that will eventually pay back over time,” said Rebecca Ringle ’11, a two-year Sustainability Committee member.

According to Ringle, she and the rest of the Sustainability Committee are “keeping [their] minds open” about how to spend the money they will oversee. The committee is looking for projects that are low-cost and generate a large return. For instance, the committee recently sponsored a project to change all of the lights in Sharples to LEDs, greatly reducing energy costs in the building.

“Our options for doing a really big project are actually pretty limited,” Ringle said. “Forty-three thousand, five hundred dollars sounds like a lot of money, but when you’re installing photovoltaic cells on a rooftop, [the money] gets eaten up very quickly for not much payback.”

Feasible project ideas featured on the Sustainability Committee’s website include implementing technology that allows students to monitor their own energy usage; increasing the college’s usage of cleaner-burning natural gas while decreasing the usage of dense, thick #6 fuel; and motivating students to conserve water and other scarce resources.

“Our environmental predicament is one of the largest trials of social justice the globe has faced in a long time,” said Zein Nakhoda ’12, one of the leaders of the environmental activism group Earthlust. “It only seems right that [Swarthmore] should adopt not just environmentalism but environmental justice and consciousness.”

Though the fund is still in the final planning stages, members of campus activism groups, the Sustainability Committee and the Student Council have all expressed excitement about the importance of student involvement.

“We hope that this year there will be an exchangeable dialogue where we keep each other up to date on things and collaborate,” Nakhoda said. Earthlust played a crucial role in “promoting and approving the creation of the fund” last spring through the distribution of flyers and campus-wide discussions.

The positive feelings, however, are not unanimous.

Blaine O’Neill ’11, one of last year’s Earthlust leaders, expressed some “disappointment” concerning the Student Council’s decision to let the Sustainability Committee oversee the fund.

“The lack of transparency within the committee is extremely troubling to me,” O’Neill said in a letter to the Student Council about the issue.

According to Nate Erskine ’10, vice Ppresident of the Student Council, both transparency and student input are crucial to the fund’s success. “We want to give students a sense of ownership,” he said.

The Sustainability Committee, in response, has made the student body a priority.
Individual students are invited to contribute thoughts and opinions through the “greenbox” located on the Student Dashboard or via greenbox@swarthmore.edu. All submissions are then posted to the Sustainability Committee’s website and viewed by a member of the Sustainability Committee.

“We try to make as much happen as we can, [though] sometimes ideals and ideas clash,” Ringle said. Since the box’s creation in September 2008, over 150 student suggestions have been posted to the web page.

Environmental activism groups like Earthlust are also invited to become a part of the conversation through written proposals or contact with committee members. The Sustainability Committee is currently discussing an idea from the Good Food Project that involves raising chickens on the Swarthmore campus to provide eggs for meals in Sharples.

Ringle has also developed a Green Student Committee to unite leaders from the various environmental activism groups on campus and directly discuss new project ideas as well as individual group “frustrations and triumphs” in environmental advocacy.

The Student Council also plans to remain involved by working with the Sustainability Committee and Earthlust to promote the fund and “encourage students to participate in any way they can,” Erskine said.

Ultimately, it is the Sustainability Committee who has the final say over how the money is spent, but according to Ringle the committee will not take any actions to which the student body would be adamantly opposed.

“We want to do this together, and it is great when we have the support of everyone on campus,” Ringle said.