When Amy wrote about green magazines, she mentioned GOOD as being one of her favorites. I, too, a self-described magazine junkie, am a big fan of GOOD since it’s inception last year. With all the depressing news out there on any given day, GOOD always reaffirms my faith in humanity. Its focus is, like its name implies, good stuff: those things that are making our world a little bit better, and when I’m feeling down about what’s going on around me, GOOD usually perks me up. It’s a rare magazine that doesn’t need an annual "green" issue: sustainability has been a priority since the magazine was founded.

The latest issue (Sept/Oct 07) is no exception. The issue, which commemorates their one-year anniversary, focuses on design solutions. A topic I covered a while back, green schools, gets a feature nod from Eva Steele-Saccio. Steele-Saccio highlights different schools’ efforts to reduce their footprint and become more energy efficient, and acknowledges that there are benefits beyond energy savings: "Green schools create a healthy atmosphere for learning that has measurable results. The combination of natural light, fresh air, open plans, and multi-use facilities that encourage community involvement has helped student test scores rise by 20% and reduced asthma rates by 39%."

There’s also a feature about a village in England that launched a community effort to reduce their carbon footprint, with the ultimate goal of becoming the first carbon-neutral village in the U.K. GOOD’s product reviews almost always include items produced with sustainability in mind, and in this issue, they create a proposal for better CFL packaging: create a package that can be used to ship burned-out bulbs back to the producer for proper disposal. There’s also a profile of Rogan Gregory, founder of clothing company Loomstate, who was virtually responsible for bringing organic cotton to the fashion industry though his work with Loomstate, and his other two companies, Rogan and Edun

Even subscribing to GOOD can make you feel good: 100% of your $20 subscription costs goes to your choice of twelve charities, including the World Wildlife Fund and Oceana. Good is printed on 30% recycled post-consumer paper that is EcoLogic certified, and 100% offset by projects Good is actually involved in.

The September/October issue of GOOD is on newsstands now.

The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education announced on Friday four Campus Sustainability Leadership Awards in four different categories. Two other schools were named honorable mention. The awards were given during the 7th biennial Greening of the Campus conference held at Ball State University.

Chandler-Gilbert Community College (Chandler, AZ) won in the community college and other two-year institutions category. Green Mountain College (Poultney, VT) won in the four-year and graduate institution (under 1,000 students) category. Middlebury College (Middlebury, VT) won in the four-year and graduate institution (1,000-7,500 students) category. Michigan State University (East Lansing, MI) won in the four-year and graduate institution (over 7,500 students) category.

Chandler-Gilbert’s president, Maria Hesse, was one of the first presidents to sign the American College & University President’s Climate Committment. The College is part of a city-wide system that uses reclaimed water for irrigation. Two of Chandler-Gilbert’s campuses use energy management systems to ensure energy efficiency, and all new buildings will be built according to LEED standards.

For Green Mountain College, the environment and sustainability are unifying themes on campus. Environmental awareness is infused into every aspect of the curriculum, and all students must take courses in sustainability. Students installed a wind turbine to power the campus greenhouse and solar panels on the student center. The remaining energy needs are met partially by electricity generated from methane from local dairy cow manure.

Middlebury College has pledged to become climate-neutral by the year 2016. Bill McKibben is a scholar-in-residence there, and Step It Up 2007 was largely organized by Middlebury alumni. 25% of Middlebury’s dining budget goes towards locally grown and produced food, and the college recycles 60% of its waste. The campus uses solar and wind-generated power for portions of its energy needs, and has an Environmental Council, a committee of students, staff, and faculty, that advises the president of the college on sustainability policies.

Michigan State University has been a leader in large campus sustainability by committing to a 2% annual reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, along with meeting LEED standards for all new buildings on campus. MSU has an extensive recycling program, sustainability speakers, and funds student-designed sustainability projects. It even hosts a green roofs research program. One look around their extensive "Ecofoot" website tells you that this is a campus that takes its sustainability seriously.

Honorable mentions were awarded to Evergreen State College (Olympia, WA) and University of California, Berkeley.

When giving your kids, "the talk", it always helps to have a book as back-up. It justifies your broaching a sensitive, potentially uncomfortable topic like…global warming. And although conservation and environmentalism is a topic for all ages, those children in pre-adolescence are just about ready to hear about the big guns of climate change. Three recent children’s books broach the topic of climate change to your middle-grades children (ages 9-12); two were penned by celebrities of the green world.

Following on the heels of the successful An Inconvenient Truth of almost the same name, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global Warming (Penguin Young Readers, $23.00), aims to present the same ideas from the documentary to a younger audience. The text of this book is excellent: it simplifies the ideas of the original film without talking down to young readers.

An Inconvenient Truth producer Laurie David and Cambria Gordon’s The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming (Scholastic $15.99) aims to educate kids about why global warming is happening, how it is affecting our planet, and what kids can do to protect our earth. The book is packed with gorgeous photos, graphs and charts, making it accessible to visual learners, and little jokes scattered throughout the pages might be amusing to adults, as well. The Guide is even printed with soy ink on 100% FSC-certified, post-consumer recycled paper.

Finally, Gas Trees and Car Turds (Fulcrum, $16.95), written by Kirk R. Johnson, curator or the Denver Natural History museum, and illustrated by Colorado naturalist Mary Ann Bonnell, is a quick read that breaks down the science behind global warming and carbon dioxide so that children can understand it. While not as high-profile as the other two books, it does focus on explaining carbon dioxide as an invisible something that connects almost everything.

The college years are an exciting transitional time for young people. Many are off on their own for the first time, and they’re faced with responsibility for their own actions and their own well-being. For some teens, college is the first time they experience autonomy, and the variety of choices they’re faced with can be overwhelming, and the pressure of making green choices might just be too much to handle. There are, however, five simple choices they can make in their transition into adulthood that can easily lessen their footprint while in college.

• Walk. Almost all college campuses are designed to be walker-friendly. This might be the easiest time to get rid of your car. However, if being completely car-free isn’t an option, park it and leave it. Campus parking is notoriously frustrating, and keeping your car parked in a lot is a lot easier than futilely circling said lot. Use your feet, a bike, or campus transportation to get from your dorm to class to the library. If your school is in a larger city, most public transit systems offer student discounts on monthly, semester-long, or yearly passes.
• Eat greener. Dining halls have come a long way. Now, they’re catering to student demands, and the variety of food choices is endless. Choosing a diet based in whole-grains, fruits and vegetables, and lean proteins from plants sources, such as beans and nuts, will not only reduce your carbon footprint, but will help fight off the dreaded freshman 15. Many dining halls are getting with the program and offering a wider-variety of meat-free entrees, and partnering with local farms to offer organic and local produce. If yours doesn’t, take advantage of those student dining surveys to express a preference for local, organic, and fair-trade food choices.
• Choose green cleaning products. Hopefully, most college kids helped out around the house at home, but those same kids probably didn’t have a lot of input as to the cleaning products they used. When cleaning in their dorms, whether it be the bathroom, their room, or their laundry, choosing biodegradable cleaning products keeps petroleum use to a minimum and minimizes toxins in their environment. Check out products from Mrs. Meyer’s, Method, Seventh Generation, or make your own.
• Recycle. With the push in the higher-ed community to go green, recycling may be more convenient on college campuses than it is in the general community. "Trash rooms" in dorms, where students dispose of their garbage, almost always have recycling bins for cardboard, plastic, glass, cans, and paper. Furnishing a dorm room with two separate receptacles, one for trash and one for recyclables, makes disposal a breeze.
• Reuse. College students are notorious for tossing away perfectly good stuff. Ever driven by dorms and off-campus housing at the end of the semester? You’ll find furniture, lamps, and appliances that students just don’t want to move. Consider used items when looking for college gear. Check out Gigoit, Craigslist, or Freecycle for free-to-dirt-cheap dorm room essentials. Conversely, use those same networking sites if you absolutely, positively, have to get rid of your old futon. Keeping functional items in use by someone keeps them out of the landfill. The same goes for clothes. One of my favorite thrift spots is located near a college where seemingly-affluent young women sell their perfectly good jeans–at a fraction of what it would cost me retail.

Students make big changes when they take the step from high school to college. That makes this transition the perfect time to take small steps for a greener life.

School started yesterday, and with it came a whole new crop of students in my environmental sustainability class. Although I wish the summer was longer, and getting back into the routine is hard (falling…asleep…now), I love the first few days of the semester, when I first start to see kids reaction to the idea of sustainability.

Teens, by nature, don’t have a ton of impulse control. Parents of teens are thinking to themselves, "Well, duh." But seriously, many lack the frontal lobe development to fully consider how their actions impact others. It’s why many make stupid choices.

However, this doesn’t prevent them from grasping the notion that how most Americans live might not be the best way to live. I started our first full day by having the class go through the Earth Day Foundation’s online eco-footprint calculator. This simple test asks participants questions involving such subjects as the size of their home, their eating habits, and their transportation habits. Though far from comprehensive, it’s quick enough that I can get a whole class through, working in small groups, in enough time to tabulate the class average, and the results, though probably not 100% precise, give students a rough idea of the magnitude of how they live.

Not only does the quiz give students a score of approximately how many acres of resources they use, but it roughly calculates "how many planets" it would take to sustain humanity if everyone lived like them. After each student finished the quiz, they came up to the SmartBoard, where I had an Excel file with everyone’s name, and entered their scores, then calculated a class average. On average, if everyone lived like my class, we would need 3.5 planets to sustain us. When I explained what this number meant, the class guiltily looked at each other, particularly those who had high numbers.

"Why is that number a big deal?" I asked.

"There aren’t 3.5 planets," a student volunteered. "Well, there are, but we can only use one. So…" he sheepishly trailed off. The class laughed.

I asked the kids what questions from the quiz surprised them. Remember, most of them are coming in with little prior knowledge of sustainability other than "recycling=good; global warming=bad." The number one concept they didn’t expect was questions about their diet. Why does it matter how much meat I eat? Why does it matter where my food comes from? I explained the them that a lot of resources go into food production, like water and fossil fuels.

"Wait, so it basically takes gas to make our food?" one student asked cautiously. I smiled slyly because I love watching the synapses fire!

"If it’s Twinkies, there might be actual petroleum in your food itself," I countered.

"So what are we gonna do?" another student asked panickedly.

"Well, that’s what this class is about. Getting the number down to one," I said Like a television show, the bell rang.

So we know that bottled water is bad for our planet. We also know that cities are refusing to purchase bottled water for employees. Now, a school is joining that fight. Nerinx Hall, an all-women Catholic high school for girls here in the St Louis area, is taking bottled water out of its vending machines and giving the student body reusable bottles to stay hydrated. I applauded this decision, but apparently some people think the Constitution is going down with the Aquafina. In fact, I heard a friend’s parent (who has a daughter at the school) exclaiming what an outrage the ban was. Since Nerinx Hall is not so far from the school where I teach, I wondered if my school could do the same. Many states and schools have banned full-sugared sodas in schools, and water sales have increased as it replaces soda in vending machines. It’s become widely available, so how do you encourage both students and staff to give up the bottled water habit?

My first thought was, "Why is this such a big deal in the first place?" It wasn’t long ago that most people scoffed at paying a premium for what they can get for pennies at home. Remember that old joke that "Evian" was just "naive" spelled backwards? It’s been less than ten years since bottled water rose from a luxury product to a ubiquitous beverage of choice, yet mention banning bottled water, and "from my cold dead hands" cries ring out everywhere. When did we grow so attached to bottled water?

First off: provide an alternative. Nerinx Hall provided water bottles to its students, but it’s a private school, and I’m sure tuition could be adjusted to allow for Nalgene for every students. Public schools may have that option. See if your school store will sell reusable bottles with your school logo printed on it. If you don’t have a school store, maybe a student group could sell them for a fundraiser. I found them for just a few bucks here. Still better might be a school-wide incentive program for those willing to pledge to curb the bottled water habit–with the reusable bottles as the incentive.

Second: educate. Many people don’t realize that there’s a price to pay for that convenience: plastic bottles are made with petroleum. The light bulb goes off once people realize that the same stuff that causes climate change produces the bottles they throw away with little thought. Here’s a few articles that highlight just how harmful that seemingly-innocent bottle can be.

Third: check out the contracts you school has with vending machines. Do you have to have water in them? If not, get rid of it.

Four: point out the price factor. Most schools are pinching pennies. So why, at almost every meeting or professional development session, are we offered cold bottles of water (and, even worse, the tiny 8 oz, encouraging people to take more than one!). Why are we paying for this? We’ve got gorgeous refrigerated drinking fountains–get your school administration to purchase a few filtered-water pitchers for the teachers’ lounge instead.

Five: get students involved. I’ve blogged before about the impact of visiting a landfill or doing a waste audit of your school. Once they see the magnitude of the problem, they’ll be motivated to act. Who better than other kids to get students to say no to bottled water? Can your student council do an awareness campaign? Students and staff alike are more easily persuaded by student activism than teachers getting preachy.

I start school again tomorrow, and the kids don’t come back for another week, but I’ve already met with my Student Council: they want to continue to lead the way in creating a more environmentally sustainable learning environment. I can’t wait to see what they’ve come up with to tackle this problem!

For many families, it’s the time of year when back to school is growing closer and closer. When shopping for school supplies, it’s important to keep greener options in mind. From paper to pencils, from lunch bags to book bags, there are products out there that leave a lighter footprint on the earth.

The first things to remember is to reuse items you already own that are still good. If last year’s backpack is in good shape, choose to reuse instead of buying a new one. Same goes for lunch bags, binders, pencil bags, and rulers. If you must buy something new, choose vinyl-free items to eliminate the dioxins involved when using PVC. Companies like Rawganique and Ecolution are producing hemp bags, recycled rubber, and recycled plastic bags. Gecko Traders has fair-trade pencil bags made from recyled rice and feed bags from Asia. And I did a post about waste-free lunches back in February, where I highly recommended LaptopLunches cute bento boxes. ReusableBags has a plethora of awesome reusable lunch bags.

When buying paper goods, always look for recycled notebooks with a high post-consumer waste percentage. For school-aged kids, there is recycled construction paper, and Mead makes recycled-content spiral notebooks, as does Ampad Office Max and Office Depot sell recycled printer paper, and New Leaf Paper company sells a wide variety of recycled printer and notebook paper. For grown-up notebook junkies (like myself) Boulder, Colorado stationary company Vickerey has several gorgeous notebooks made of recycled or tree-free paper. 3-M makes a variety of recycled Post-Its and Rebinder makes recycled binders.

Did you know most crayons are made from petroleum? Fortunately, Prang makes 85% soybean oil crayons. There are also recycled-rubber refillable Wheely’s Pens, recycled plastic pens, pencils made from recycled denim, Paper Mate has recycled pencils, and ForestChoice makes pencils certified by the FSC.

For more green school supplies, check out The Green Office.

Joining multiple established sustainability-focused MBA programs across the US, Colorado State University unveiled its new Global Social and Sustainable Enterprise program this spring. The program, which begins in August and includes 23 students from around the world in its first class, will combine a traditional MBA with core coursework in social, environmental, and economic sustainability. Students will particularly examine the global problems of poverty, environmental degradation, and community health.

The program’s mission, according to it’s website, is to take business to a level "where business innovations lift up the human condition and rebuild our planet’s capital." All students will spend a summer doing fieldwork that involves implementing sustainable business projects created during their time in the program. "At the core though, this program is about studying, creating and leading innovative new organizations that see these great challenges as great opportunities," said Paul Hudnut, director of the program.

Colorado State has a long tradition of addressing needs in developing countries: the Peace Corps has roots there, and engineering and business students more recently collaborated to create new sustainable technology such as a cleaner-burning biomass stove that generates energy stored in a battery for later use, to be implemented in the Philippines, India, and Vietnam. CSU is also the birthplace of EnviroFit’s two-stroke engine retrofit kit, designed to reduce emissions of tricycle taxis in the Philippines.

Looking for an educational and sustainable vacation for your family this summer? Maybe pick up a foreign language while you’re at it? Moorhead, Minnesota’s, Concordia College-sponsored Concordia Language Villages have offered children and families language immersion programs since 1961, and, in 2006, opened Waldsee BioHaus Environmental Learning Center, a camp that combines principles of environmental education, sustainability, and sustainable building with German culture and language.

Waldsee BioHaus is modeled on Germany’s Passivhaus standard, which is similar to, but more extensive than, the LEED standard used here in the US. The BioHaus incorporates cutting-edge green tech, including a green roof, solar panels, vacuum insulation passive solar design, and is the most airtight building in the United States. The building also has transparent siding, allowing visitors to see the building materials. In addition, BioHaus won the Minnesota Environmental Initiative Award for air quality and climate protection, based on their 24-hour air/heat exchange system and 85% efficient heat recovery unit.

Concordia has taken pains to ensure that Waldsee BioHaus is not just German language in a green building. Along with instruction in German language and culture, BioHaus also features an extensive sustainability curriculum focusing on sustainable living practices in Germany and including green roof gardening, energy conservation, fresh-water ecology, and sustainable forestry practices.

For more information on Waldsee BioHaus’s programs, visit their extensive blog or Concordia Language Village’s website.

Ask most educators about No Child Left Behind, the current administration’s education initiative, and a constant complaint would be the de-emphasis on those subjects deemed non-essential: art, music, physical education, etc. Environmental education, outside of the traditional science class, fits into the category of subjects that aren’t assessed by standardized tests and, therefore, not prioritized in many U.S. schools. Fortunately, potential legislation might change that. No Child Left Behind expires this year, and Congress must reauthorize it, allowing room for changes.

On July 12th, Congressman John Sarbanes (D-Md.) introduced the No Child Left Inside Act of 2007. The measure, HR 3606, provides incentives for state educational agencies to create a state environmental literacy plan that will integrate environmental education across disciplines in K-12 curriculum while building an infrastructure for environmental education. It will also provide funding to help states, districts, and non-governmental organizations to implement this plan. The bill is supported by the No Child Left Inside Coalition, which includes the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, the National Audubon Society, and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

Where would the money come from? The bill would include environmental education as a authorized areas for use of The Fund for the Improvement of Education, where many states and districts obtain special funding. The bill also calls for grants that could be used to train teachers as specialists in environmental education.

To ask your representative to co-sponsor the bill, click here.