To be greener, we must want to do more than sign a pledge.
At face value, the commitment to be carbon-neutral seems like a no-brainer. Reduce your emissions here, balance them out there, live a more eco-friendly life and, in just a bit of time, you’ve achieved it.
But for a sprawling campus like UW-Madison, where half a million emails — each with their own little carbon footprint — can be sent on any given day, that commitment can get complicated quickly. Who’s responsible for the effort? Does it rely mostly on structural changes, like replacing light bulbs in professors’ offices? And who pays for it?
Our Faculty Senate offered their share of answers in a Nov. 6 resolution calling for the university to commit to going fully carbon-neutral by 2050 or sooner, meaning that any carbon emissions would be balanced out by efforts to reduce or offset them.
The resolution also asks administrators to “fund, create, and implement a campus-wide climate action plan” to prepare for such a goal, as well as joining hundreds of schools across the nation in signing a climate commitment that underscores the neutrality pledge and encourages work on climate resiliency.
The resolution appears to be a strong step toward carbon neutrality. But should it be our first step?
Kate Nelson, chief sustainability officer at UW-Milwaukee, said her campus put in work for years before officially pledging to go neutral. UWM is the latest of eight UW System schools, including Stevens Point, Whitewater and Eau Claire, to sign onto the commitment.
“We were doing a lot of things without being a signatory,” Nelson explained. “The signatory was not what we needed to catalyze a program.”
She said adding UWM’s name to the list was an acknowledgement of how much their sustainability program had grown.
UW-Madison, too, has come a long way in its sustainability efforts. The university created an office for it on campus, it is researching alternative ways to generate renewable fuels, it has put green roofs on campus buildings and is reducing our energy footprint by about 25 percent per square foot. But making the decision to go carbon-neutral without holistically assessing how it would be accomplished would be a hasty move.
“It’s not just a question of can you do it, but can you afford to do it,” said Cathy Middlecamp, UW-Madison’s interim director of sustainability research and education and a professor in environmental chemistry.
Reduced funding from the state for campus building and maintenance projects would slow progress on the conservatively estimated tens of millions of dollars it would take to go carbon-neutral.
It’s easy to look at challenges of that nature and grow frustrated with or disappointed in institutional forces. But there is another part to the equation of being more sustainable which doesn’t rest on state approvals, campus funding or pledge-signing — it rests on us.
Where can the campus community, personally, reduce our own carbon emissions on this campus? Maybe it’s picking more meals from the dining halls that don’t involve red meat. Maybe it’s committing to not using throwaway plastic water bottles. Maybe it’s cutting down on the amount of t-shirts made for a student organization. These kinds of efforts coupled with a charge to the university will be the strongest argument we can make for a more sustainable campus.
“People can start doing things that they are empowered to do now, and not just wait for us to sign something,” Middlecamp said. “Signing something has its place, it’s important, but it’s a different type of action than the personal ones. The personal ones … add up.”
Calling for a structural fix is important. We stand with the faculty and students who want to see a public plan from UW-Madison on specific actions the university needs to move toward carbon neutrality. But such a demand must incorporate our individual responsibilities — not just those of students on the sustainability committee or faculty from the Nelson Institute, but every citizen on campus — into the equation.
And when the university signs a pledge to be carbon-neutral, it must represent the readiness of the entire UW-Madison community to accomplish such an effort. We all must be just as committed to making better everyday choices as we are to calling for sweeping campus changes. When those responsibilities merge, we’ll be truly ready to take a bigger step toward a smaller carbon footprint.
Cardinal View editorials represent The Daily Cardinal’s organizational opinion. Each editorial is crafted independent of news coverage. Are you striving to be more green? What do you think of the university’s decision? Send any and all of your comments to editorialboard@dailycardinal.com.
