The Council for Sustainability at SCAD

There are a wide range of things an organization can do to make itself greener. Many revolve around the concept of decreasing the institutional carbon footprint. This is the first in a series of posts on such measures. I’d like to think of them as conversation starters. We often hear about stuff like using mass transit, riding one’s bike, getting a more fuel-efficient vehicle, using compact florescent bulbs, and the like. These are all important steps one can and should take (within the limits of reason and finances, of course). However, one option I rarely hear about in the context of becoming greener is telecommuting. Telecommuting seems to come up most often in the context of flex time, allowing parents time to care for their young children, for example. But, what has it got to do with going green? Well, I think a moment’s reflection makes this obvious. When people work part of the week from home, they don’t drive their cars to work, thus conserving gas and reducing traffic congestion and air pollution. According to the Green Living Ideas Web site:

Seeing as the typical U.S. household spends 18% of its income on driving costs– more, even, than it spends on food– telecommuting offers a viable way to offset the steep expenses of gas and automobile maintenance. One study reports that we could save about 1.35 billion gallons of fuel a year if everyone who was able to telecommute, did so just 1.6 days a week.

The implications for a greener planet are clear, but there is an important corollary here that should not be overlooked. If one didn’t have to spend 18% of his or her income on transportation, that would make one’s salary go a lot longer. Many are not easily convinced of the necessity or desirability of a greener planet, but some of these very same people change their tunes when they realize the economic benefits, especially to those in the middle class struggling in an economy on the brink of recession. And the one sector in the economy we don’t have to worry about is the energy sector; they are still making record profits even today. A little telecommuting won’t hurt their bottom line that much. And, based upon the law of supply and demand, it could very well bring prices down on oil for those times and things we would still need it for. Less demand means more supply means lower prices.

Telecommuters also do not use campus resources like electricity, water, heat/ac, etc. According to this article on “The Many Benefits of Telecommuting“:

More and more green businesses are encouraging telecommuting and there are a great many reasons why. Telecommuting not only saves the earth by decreasing transportation-based greenhouse gases, but also provides employees a peaceful place to complete key projects without interruption. Productivity increases of up to 40 percent have been reported through telework programs. Not only does telework reduce transportation-based emissions, it also reduces total energy consumption at the work place. Smaller businesses can inhabit smaller premises by rotating telework days amongst employees.

Now, of course, some jobs just must be done on campus. Faculty must be present to teach ground courses, and physical resources can’t be serviced from a distance, to name a couple that come to mind. However, other jobs could easily be done from home, at least part of the time. Personally, I would not advocate that positions typically be 100% telecommuting. I may be old-fashioned, but I still think there is significant benefit to the office experience, especially in areas where inter-staff collaboration is common and crucial. You can certainly accomplish a lot through modern communications technology, but some times nothing beats a face-to-face brainstorming session. There are obviously a lot of variables to consider with regard to who and how and such things. However, if there could truly be increases in productivity that are concurrent with decreases in energy consumption, it seems like a potential win-win-win situation (worker, organization, and environment).

The SCAD Sustainability Council reminds the SCAD community that Tuesday, April 22 is Earth Day, and encourages participation through one or more of the following activities.

What you can do to make a difference:

• Practice a paperless teaching day
• Ride your bike to class or carpool
• Reduce energy use by turning off lights and computers, and using natural light when permitted
• Do not buy bottled drinks or use takeout containers
• Eat locally and buy locally, particularly in your neighborhood

The 12th consecutive annual celebration in Savannah Earth Day will begin at 11 a.m. on Saturday, April 19th at Forsyth Park. Events include:

RecycleRama (8 - 11 a.m.),
Earth Day 5K Run (9 a.m.)
Earth Day Festival (11 a.m. - 3 p.m.).
Savannah Wheelie Earth Day Bike Ride (3 p.m.)

Attractions include:

• Live Oak Exhibition Alley with information and giveaways to make households more energy and water efficient.
• Green Bistro: more than 15 food vendors preparing tasty delights using local produce.
• Frees classes on Kitchen Composting, Rain Barrel assembly, and Native Landscaping
• Live Reptile and Bird Exhibit
• Coast Guard Helicopter
• Music and Entertainment featuring the Cajun band Feufollet from Louisiana.

For more information, visit the Earth Day Savannah Web site.

By Verena Paepcke

(Originally published on Friday, Jan. 4, 2008 in The Chronicle)

Sustainability and green design are hot topics at the Savannah College of Art and Design and throughout the United States. In fact, the college has a new faculty council — the Sustainability and Eco Practices at SCAD Council — that formed in Fall 2007 to focus on SCAD’s environmental stewardship. The council is made up of faculty and staff from the schools of Building Arts, Communication, Design and Liberal Arts, as well as from the SCAD communications and student media departments. The council’s mission is to support SCAD’s sustainability practices and goals to green the curriculum and the college’s institutional activities by channeling the efforts and expertise of faculty and staff.

Beginning with this issue, The Chronicle will feature a weekly column titled The Green Scene that will inform the SCAD community about activities on and around campus that are focusing on sustainability practices from the micro level to the macro. The column will highlight activities in the classroom, initiatives on campus, projects in Savannah and more. Several groups already exist at SCAD and in Savannah with the same goals, and this column will be one of the platforms where we can combine efforts to inform the community. Student groups already in existence are Project Green, led by Brian Bessenaire; the Student Vegetarian Association; Students for a Better Environment and the student group with the U.S. Green Building Council.

One of the newest initiatives is a “teach-in” that SCAD will host Jan. 31, coordinated by FOCUS THE NATION. For more information, e-mail or check out the Web site. Additionally, the council changed requirements for the campus printing service that made double-sided printing a standard procedure at the college. Also, an interdisciplinary major, design for sustainability, is in the development process.

Council members are open to ideas. Members include School of Building Arts professors LaRaine Montgomery and Deborah Brooks; School of Communication Arts professor Scott Boylston; School of Design professors Robert Fee, Peter Fossick, Christine Miller, Verena Paepcke and Pamela Wiley; Faculty Ombudsman Daniel Levine; Assistant Director of Internal Communications Seth Michalak; and Director of Student Media John Bennett.

By Scott Boylston

(Originally published on Friday, Feb. 22, 2008 in The Chronicle)

As I sit in the Melbourne (Australia) Airport writing this, I can feel somewhat sanguine knowing that the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from my air travel to Australia for a conference on sustainable urban development were “neutralized” by the conference’s offsetting of all carbon emissions from their guest speakers’ travel. Judging from the variety of the speakers’ countries of origin — China, Norway, Germany, Colombia, India, Denmark, Lebanon, Kenya and Holland, to name a few — the offsets must have been substantial.

EcoEdge2: The Urgent Design Challenge in Building Sustainable Cities featured some of the world’s most innovative green architects and urban planners, including James Brearley, Bernard Khoury and Stefan Behnisch. They spoke of heroic endeavors, such as building entire green cities in China from the riverbed up, creating meaningful architecture in post-war Beirut and developing impressive green architecture portfolios. I talked about Savannah.

Over the last eight months I’ve investigated the emerging sustainable attributes of the city, interviewing urban planners, city officials, architects, nonprofit directors, organic farmers, environmentalists and many other individuals interested in creating a greener Savannah. And while Savannah still faces a host of challenges in terms of environmental sustainability, it also possesses a rapidly crystallizing promise for a much greener future. What had long been a personal hunch before my interviews and research soon transformed itself into an intriguing mosaic of efforts by many individuals to make use of the city’s embodied “green wealth.” The dynamic interplay of Savannah’s historic patterns of organization, coupled with its varied yet increasingly harmonized, emergent sustainable properties, has created an urban landscape that hints at what a sustainable city for the 21st century might look like during its nascent stages.

Make no mistake: We are a long way from realizing that promise. But rather than delving into the shortcomings here, I’d like to highlight the need for individuals who are interested in contributing to positive change to step forward, to actively involve themselves, and to seek out sources that can help them become founts of information and inspiration in their own right. The EcoEdge conference wasn’t filled with people bemoaning the slow rate of change with tirades against the problems of the world. It was filled with individuals who are doing something about it. They are all creative to their very bones, but their creativity is not trapped in some isolated notion of what their particular discipline demands of them. Instead, their creativity is applied to their disciplines in relation to a much broader context — the struggle of humankind to carve out an existence that isn’t, at its core, destructive to the rest of the living systems on Earth.

Savannah’s best hope for a green future is not Oglethorpe’s human-scaled city grid — that’s already done its job by getting us to this particular point. Neither is it SCAD’s impressive adaptive re-use of historic buildings throughout the city — that, too, is firmly established as a part of the important foundation. Savannah’s best hope is now in the hands of the creative individuals who reside within its city limits, and in the city’s willingness to look outward for its inspiration even as it looks inward for its opportunities.