Author: Drew Jaffe
Occidental College has hired recent graduate Emma Sorrell ’13 as its first-ever Sustainability Coordinator. This action came as a response to student efforts encouraging cohesive campus sustainability.
Her goals include reducing water and power consumption on campus; expanding public transportation opportunities for students, faculty and staff; and providing sustainability advice on any projects that involve updating campus buildings and facilities. Other students, faculty and staff shared her belief that Occidental needed greater coordination.
Urban and Environmental Policy major Lila Singer-Berk (senior) is the founder of Oxy Green Tours, a group on campus that gives campus sustainability tours to incoming first years and alumni. The push to create the position started when students from Oxy Green Tours attended an Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) conference last October that focused on improving sustainability on college campuses across the nation.
“We heard a lot of stuff about what other schools were doing, and I just kept thinking how Oxy needed to have better organization of sustainability work,” Singer-Berk said.
The growing belief among the community prompted various student groups on campus, including the Sustainability Council and the Task Force on Environmental Stewardship, to petition the administration for the creation of a Sustainability Coordinator position.
“Obviously there was some fear [to add the position] because it was a new cost,” Urban and Environmental Policy professor Mark Vallianatos said. Vaillianatos, who is a member of the Task Force on Environmental Stewardship, understood the administration’s hesitancy to increase expenses in an already tight budget.
However, research done this past summer by Bender and Singer-Berk helped alleviate fiscal fears, and the administration ultimately agreed to hire Sorrell as coordinator.
The research focused on current sustainability efforts on Occidental’s campus as well as the efforts of peer institutions like Macalester and the Claremont Colleges. Singer-Berk’s findings showed that over 80 percent of peer institutions had a Sustainability Coordinator on campus.
Furthermore, the researchers concluded that Occidental needed to take greater steps to make the campus greener, and the best way to start was to hire someone who could specifically organize efforts.
The research illuminated other incentives for the creation of this role. According to Singer-Berk, the projects undertaken by the new coordinator would offset the costs of hiring a new staff member. More cohesive efforts would also make the school more competitive in admissions. A 2010 Princeton Review survey showed that 66 percent of prospective college students consider how sustainable colleges are during their selection process.
That is not to say that Occidental has not already taken steps to make the campus more sustainable in recent years. The Urban and Environmental Policy department offers environmental problem-solving courses; many courses allow students to engage in their own green projects around campus. Perhaps most visible, though, is the vast solar array perched on the side of Mount Fiji. So far, public reaction to this green addition has been positive.
“I think the solar array is fantastic and really demonstrates a commitment [to sustainability] and [that] this is something we’re taking seriously,” Sorrell said.
Sorrell hopes to increase the success of this development with projects of her own. Given that the administration dubbed this year as the “water year,” it is likely that her first projects will focus on reducing Occidental’s overall consumption of water on campus. Given budget constraints, more research will need to be done to figure out the most effective course of action to accomplish this goal.
“Since we only have a limited amount of money, we’re trying to choose the project that will make the largest impact for the money we use. So we need to research to find this before jumping into a project,” Sorrell said.
Although she has been on the job for barely a week, Sorrell is excited about the changes she will bring to campus that she hopes will catapult Occidental College to the forefront of the sustainability movement in higher education.
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