Wisconsin Dells, WI to Worthington, MI

I'm sure that Wisconsin Dells could easily lay claim to the Water Theme Park capital of the world. There are so many of them. And they have rousing names. Why not spend a few days at Mount Olympus? You can slide and slosh to your heart's content. Or maybe imagine yourself as a carbon molecule trapped in an infinite loop of circulating water park water. 

I ambled in to a small cafe/diner in downtown Baraboo, Wisconsin. It was one of the nicest small town eating establishments I'd ever seen. Wooden booths with lovely lamps. Very cozy. Breakfast was excellent, too.

The Wisconsin Dells reflect the confluence of three geomorphological regimes. Devil's Lake State Park (see below) is a relic mountain range, older than the Appalachians. It's covered with glacial debris. Just north is the drumlin, moraine, glacial physiography. Just south is the flatter glacial flood plain. Maybe this is geomorphogical physiotherapy!

Buddy Haffaker, the executive director of the Aldo Leopold Foundation told me this. I had a terrific one hour meeting with Buddy who described the mission, history, and strategic approach of the organization. The facility is LEED Platinum. So now if someone asks you what Sweetwater Music and the Aldo Leopold Foundation have in common, you'll know what to tell them. Buddy is pictured below along with some of the fittingly attractive buildings.

I got on the bicycle and cruised around the road that runs through the heart of the sanctuary. Rose breasted grosbeaks flitted around, along with numerous sparrows and yellow throats. This is an amazingly diverse and intriguing landscape. From Leopold's preserved shack, depending on which way you look, you'll see sandy wetlands, forests, and streams. The landscape is rich with mystery and beauty and a haven for wildlife. It looks like a place that would inspire one of our greatest conservationists. It also looks like a place that should be almost smack in the middle of a continent. I will take Meine's biography of Leopold off the shelf when I return home. It's sat there for far too long. The photos below are a small sample of the extraordinary variety of habitats. Check out the shack, too.

The temperature was cool and pleasant (mid 50's). By the time I reached the western edge of Wisconsin, it turned muggy and very warm, a balmy 82. Wisconsin is replete with long bicycle trails. You can spend an entire summer cruising the Wisconsin landscape on your bicycle. I thought at least I should spend an hour on one of the state trails. There are signposts for these trails on I90. I exited the interstate near LaCrosse and followed the LaCrosse River for five miles, observing the coulees and bluffs. Midwest topography is way more interesting when you get off the Interstate.

I crossed the Missisippi at LaCrosse (Der!). What a magnificent crossing. The river is so wide. The bluffs are majestic. The islands are intricate. I'll have to get Twain's Life on the Mississippi off the shelf as well. Glad I remembered that little ditty that helped me spell Mississippi without looking it up!

NPR Minnesota warned of severe thunderstorms with the possibility of tornados and they were coming my way. Yikes! For the rest of the afternoon I listened to storm reports and kept an eye on my Ipad Weather App with the radar maps. Amazingly, I completely dodged the storms (sheer luck) except for one three minute downpour. I was totally engrossed in watching the sky, anticipating my route, listening to storm reports, while weaving my way through and around the precipitation. By the time I reached Albert Lea, Minnesota the storm threat had passed. At twilight I observed misty, feathery, shadowy clouds, floating through some huge cumulus to my north, catching the last glows of a dipping and darting setting sun. It was a soft, soothing, yet ominous light. Huge wind installations punctuated the landscape, appearing as if alien life forms getting ready to settle the planet. 

By Worthington, Minnesota, I decided I had enough startling beauty. I studied the map of South Dakota and then fell asleep to the Portland Trailblazers and San Antonio Spurs.

Grand Haven, MI to Wisconsin Dells, WI

It was a cool, cloudy, and dynamic morning on the shores of Lake Michigan. We had a short window in between showers so Mark Van Putten and I seized the opportunity for a morning bike ride. I followed Mark on one of his daily loops, a neat little run through iconic Michigan backyards, river channels, old industrial artifacts, and farmlands. I never knew that flat could be so lovely. And flat it will be (mainly) for the next thousand miles. 

I was pleased to see a mural on the outskirts of Grand Haven. 

I imagined how much fun it would be if graffiti art became ubiquitous on silos, barns, and tractors across America. Maybe some day.

If graffiti art represents the twenty first century, then surely old railway structures represent the nineteenth century. Here's an industrial gothic railroad storage facility.

Jim Harrison's novella "The River Swimmer" describes a young man who essentially lives with fish and swims very, very long distances. It takes place on a river in Michigan. I wondered if it might have been upstream from here.

Near the end of the novella, the river swimmer swims to Chicago!! To do so, he would have to swim across Stupendous Lake Michigan, the remarkable fresh water sea. I'm still in awe of the size of the lake. In my parochial Northeastern mentality, all I can think to say when I stand on the shore (using my best Yiddish accent) is "Who Knew?" It's one thing to see the lake on a map, or to fly over it. It's another to stand on the shore. I booked a ferry from Muskegon to Milwaukee, so I could experience the great expanse of the inland sea, but midway through our bike ride I received an automated call notifying me that the trip was cancelled due to predicted high seas and winds.

Wherever you ride, you encounter modest industrial activity. You need some crushed limestone?

Juxtapose this with the new sustainability industries. Just a few miles from here there's a green roofing company.

And just another reminder of how flat it all is!

With the ferry cancelled, I had to rearrange my route. I wanted to avoid Chicago traffic as much as possible so I headed south, picked up I80 (ugh!) just east of Gary, battled trucks and aggressive drivers until Joliet where the road thinned out a bit. I turned north near LaSalle, Illinois and travelled the straight highway to Wisconsin.

I love moving through weather fronts. There's a big High in the Southern Plains pumping warm air northward. Michigan hadn't gotten the memo as it was on the northern edge of the warm air mass. That explains the cool showers. By the time I reached Gary, Indiana, Gary, Indiana, Gary Indiana, the temperature rose to 86. It felt great!

And then somewhere north of Rockford, Illinois the temperature plunged to 64 in the space of two miles.  

I pushed on to the Wisconsin Dells where I found an out of the way river lodge, enjoyed the Wednesday special dinner at a local pub (Perch, Baked Potato, and Cole Slaw) with an Amber Ale, and fell asleep to the Los Angeles Clippers and Oklahoma Thunder. 

I woke up on the Wisconsin River. I'll study it for awhile before driving over to Aldo Leopold's shack.

Van Wert, OH to Grand Haven, MI

Driving west from Van Wert, I observed hundreds of wind power installations. I'm curious to know how much energy they produce. Once you reach the state line of Indiana, there is no more wind power. Is Ohio more windy than Indiana? Hmmmmmmm.

My first destination was Sweetwater music on the outskirts of Fort Wayne. They are a huge mail order firm and I've bought many musical instruments and paraphernalia from them over the years. I was hoping to try out some keyboards in their showroom. I did so and that was great fun. However, the highlight of the trip was completely unexpected. It turns out that their facility is LEED PLATINUM, the highest such green designation of the USGBC (United States Green Building Council). It is the only such commercial building in Indiana. 

Delvin Wolf, my sales rep there for many years gave me a terrific tour. The campus features Google style recreation facilities, a huge automated warehouse, music studios, showrooms, an excellent cafeteria, a place where you can get haircuts, a fitness center, and a spectacular, state of the art theatre, as well as meeting rooms for workshops, company trainings, and other educational possibilities. Plus, they are expanding and will have a huge new addition ready to roll in a few weeks. The CEO, Chuck Surack, is clearly a very innovative and progressive business man.

The green features are impressive. They include a very interesting cooling system that involves making ice, storing it, and then using it to cool the building. The materials are all non-toxic, recycled, and mainly locally sourced. The air and light flow is outstanding. I was similarly impressed with all of the building signage. There are numerous interpretive displays that clearly and attractively explain how and why the building is green. A building tour is an education in sustainability. Congratulations to the Sweetwater folks for helping to lead the way!

I departed Sweetwater and departed North to Grand Haven, Michigan where I am visiting my friend Mark Van Putten, the former CEO of the National Wildlife Federation and now the principal of Conservation Strategy. We took a short bike ride around town and out on a few jetties, a great introduction to Stupendous Lake Michigan. We plan a longer ride this morning and pictures will follow in tomorrow's posting.  

See below for a few pictures of Sweetwater. First comes the automated warehouse.

Lots of boxes moving around conveyor belts, all carrying musical equipment!

Green signage.

The showroom area comes next.

And finally the theater.

Alfred, NY to Van Wert, OH

The Alleghenies are surely the most underrated hills in the Appalachians. I drove through their Northern flank while listening to "On Being" interviews with Brian Greene and then Janna Levin. I enjoy listening to these great minds discuss the insignificance and elegance of human existence. If the Alleghenies are a backwater, than surely so is the Earth. There are much busier places in the galaxy.

I stopped at Presque Isle State Park for a morning spin. From this peninsula you can look back on the bay side and see Erie, PA, explore lagoons in the middle of this narrow crescent, or walk the beach on the Lake Erie side. I've spent very little time on any of the Great Lakes. I must say they are more than Great, but rather stupendous inland oceans. North America once had a great internal sea. So many permutations of landmasses and water. Erie, PA is at the confluence of old Pennsylvania oil, canals, railroads, and Great Lakes shipping. It was a terminus for the original American West. 

The bike path traverses the peninsula. There were lots of people out on this sunny but brisk morning.  The first photo looks back on Erie. The second is a lagoon. And a third is a glimpse of the Great, rather Stupendous Lake.

An hour later I arrived at Austinberg, Ohio where there is a parking place for the Western Reserve Greenway, a forty mile path, straight as an arrow, that cuts through forest, farmland, and small towns. It was cloudy and cool with an increasing threat of rain. I rode for an hour. The same landscape would have seemed so dull in a car. But on the bicycle it was interesting and compelling. The bicycle provides a perfectly scaled pace for getting to know a place. I feel as if I can stop almost anywhere, get on the bike, and enjoy a ride. 

The parking lot in Austinberg adjoins a mini-mart, a greasy sandwich shop and a dance hall!

It is an awfully straight ride, isn't it?

And thanks so much to Ohio Parks and all the people who had the vision to develop this bike path.

The path is notable, too, as crucial to the Underground Railway. There are numerous plaques along the way, turning the bike path into a hands-on historical museum. Jeffersonville, Ohio was a bastion of abolitionists. Hooray for good interpretation!

After these two rides, I headed south and picked up US 30 across Central Ohio. After weaving through some shallow hills and meandering rivers, I arrived at flag as a pancake, bigger sky farm country, finally stopping amidst a grouping of windmills in Van Wert, Ohio where I stopped for the night. 

On the radio, I've been alternating between NPR, sports talk, and surfing local college stations. As for my own music selections, I've wanted road music, and thus far I've played Springsteen's new album, the Byrds sing Dylan, and the Dixie Chicks. Pistol Annie's are up next. I'm typically more of a jazz listener. On the road, I'm compelled to listen to songs about and from America. But there are many days of travel ahead. So who knows what music will enter the field?

As for music, my first destination this morning is Sweetwater Music. I've gotten a lot of musical equipment from them over the years and I'm thrilled with anticipation to visit their showrooms in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Older NBA Basketball fans will know that the Detroit Pistons moved from Fort Wayne. I have a childhood memory of watching the Fort Wayne Pistons playing the Rochester Royals.

Dublin, NH to Alfred, NY

In his novel The English Major, Jim Harrison describes a character who departs for a cross country road trip. He brings with him a fifty piece wooden jigsaw puzzle featuring the United States. Whenever he crosses a state border, he tosses the piece for that state out the window. I have no such puzzle, but today I viscerally tossed New Hampshire and Vermont. I left home early Sunday morning. It was a soft and clear sunrise. It's difficult to leave when each Spring day brings a new landscape surprise. 

Every fifteen minutes I'd wonder about something I might have left behind. There are so many ways to manifest separation anxiety! 

However I was soothed by a wonderful radio interview on the NPR show "On Being" between Krista Tippett and the physicist, Leonard Mlodinow. They were discussing "randomness and choice" a subject I think about regularly. There are so many twists of fate that contribute to your present actions and future outcomes. I've always taken a Taoist view on this. There are waves of events that are mainly out of your control. The challenge is in knowing how to ride the wave. Strange advice from someone who has never ridden a surfboard.

Within an hour and a half I was high in the Vermont hills. I got out of the car briefly during a cold front squall, a vigorous atmposheric wave. I was pelted by small balls of ice. The hills are still surprisingly bare, but the first signs of vernal photosynthetic wildflowers are beginning to show. I love the concept of vernal photosynthetics, the Spring wildflowers that appear before the canopy shades the I forest understory.

My inclination was to stop at Little Falls, New York where I would ride the Eric Canalway, a long bike path that is mainly complete between Albany and Buffalo. However I was deterred by a driving rain. Once the shower passed I began checking my maps for another likely place to ride. I chose the section between Weedsport and Jordan, a nondescript, but interesting section of the trail. I was delighted to discover several fields of white trilliums, interspersed with pockets of skunk cabbage.

I stopped at a sign post. It turns out that Jordan, New York prior to 1910 was a bustling town. Barges would line up on the way through the canal. But the canal traffic demanded a deeper and bigger channel, so the canal was rebuilt several miles north of here, and the town of Jordan lost it's mojo. The bike path runs parallel to the old canal and you can see the beautiful and ambitious stone walls that line the canal, and the abandoned channel is filled alternately with grassy parkland, swampy wetlands, and cultivated gardens. I can see how much fun it would be to bike the length of the Canalway, as there is such an interesting mix of old towns, ecology, and history.

I continued my drive and decided to stop in Alfred, New York for the night. Alfred is a pleasant university town with two colleges, Alfred University, a statuesque campus with exceptional brick building and several small castle like structures, and SUNY Alfred, with sufficient brick, but built in the 1960's SUNY style. Does anyone like 1960's architecture? 

I gave a talk at SUNY Alfred two summers ago. It was a sustainability conference that attracted folks from all over New York and Pennsylvania.  

Alfred is in the Allegheny foothills, with long sweeping plateau-like hills, converging around plush valleys. 

I watched the last few innings of the New York Mets and Colorado Rockies (Let's Go Mets) and then began reading Wallace Stegner's 1953 classic, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, the story of John Wesley Powell and the "second opening" of the American West. I'll be in the west soon and there can be no better guide than Wallace Stegner.

On the Road

Early tomorrow morning, I'm driving to Seattle. I haven't driven across the country since 1977. Why am I doing this? My wife, Cindy just took a wonderful job in Seattle. She's the founding director of a new Masters program in Urban Learning. As our daughter and granddaughter live there, it's a terrific move for our family. We'll eventually return to New Hampshire. We rented a small, lovely "green" apartment in Belltown. I'll be going back and forth until October.

Cindy wants her car, I'd like to have one of my two bicycles in Seattle, and I'd like to have my guitar there as well. I have some open space in my schedule and I have to be in San Francisco for a Commonwealth Club event later in the month. So I figured that I would drive to Seattle. I mean, why the heck not? 

I plan to drive 8 hours a day, do some work for a few hours, and take a daily two hour bicycle ride. I am, thrilled to explore the country this way. And I'll be visiting a few friends and college campuses on route. 

I'll be writing daily posts about the trip, mainly reporting on the bicycling. Tomorrow my goal is to ride for a few hours on the Erie Canal bike path.

I can't think of a better way too celebrate turning 64.

Stickball

My favorite baseball variant was stickball. Here’s the version we played. You found a suitable schoolyard wall. You drew a batter’s box on the wall. You marked off a distance from the pitcher to the batter, measured so that the pitcher had a reasonable advantage, more closely resembling what we imagined to be a major league batting situation. The pitcher threw a tennis ball. The batter used a broomstick, although by the mid-1960’s you could buy manufactured stick ball bats. The game was best played as a 2 on 2 or 3 on 3 matchup.

Depending on who you played with and where you played, there were different rules for hits and outs. Typically a ground ball hit past the pitcher was a single. A hard ground ball fielded cleanly by the pitcher was an out (a double play if hard hit with men in base). Fly balls caught by the outfielder were outs.

The most intriguing aspect of the game was delineating the foul lines and the extra-base hit boundaries. We searched for schoolyards that were appropriately scaled. The ideal schoolyard had a tall fence or wall in the outfield, simulating the grandeur of hitting a home run out of the ball park. Every schoolyard had unique dimensionality and boundaries which in turn determined the rules of the game.

Stickball wasn’t as benign as softball, but less dangerous than hardball. Some kids could throw the ball with blinding speed, and if it hit you, it hurt! There was a dose of fear when facing a fastball pitcher. To be a good hitter you had to overcome that fear.  My strengths in stickball (and in every athletic endeavor) were good eye-hand coordination and excellent game playing intelligence. I could always read situations well and then figure out with my totally average running, speed, strength, and quickness, how to accomplish what I was most capable of achieving.  I was a contact hitter with modest power. As a pitcher I had sneaky side-arm speed, good control, a slow curve, an ability to assess my opponents strengths and weaknesses, the foresight to change speed and location and to never throw the ball right over the plate. 

When I was in high school I used to love to get in the car with three other friends, drive to a schoolyard (I especially liked number 3 school in Cedarhurst) and play stickball. Number 3 had perfect dimensions—a high fence, a reasonable distance from home plate to the fence, all neatly framed by a peaceful, tree-lined street. There were fences all around the yard so you’d never have to go to far to retrieve a ball unless you hit a home run in which case you didn’t care. We literally played inside a cage yet we felt incredibly free.

Pickup Games

I’ve always been a pick-up player. I went to a big high school and a big university. I wasn’t athletically talented enough to compete on a varsity level. In the late 1950’s and 1960’s, with the exception of little league, there weren’t multiple levels of organized sports for kids. Only the very best players had the opportunity to compete in more formal settings. 

For the rest of us, through all levels of schooling, there were intra-mural sports, or whatever you could organize on your own. I found intra-mural competition entirely unsatisfactory. Games were almost always too short, the reffing was a joke, and the schedules were limited.

In the fifth grade I played one year of little league. I was the best player on a weak team. I was shocked at the level of interference from parents who cared way more about their own kids playing time than they did about the good of the team or the development of the players. I watched a parade of horrible pitchers (placed on the mound by bullying parents) sabotage all of our games. I didn’t feel sorry for the gullible, intimidated, and misguided coach who gave in to the parents. They were autonomous adults, weren’t they? Our team was 1-11 that year and I was so disgusted by the experience that I never played Little League again.

My favorite childhood team was Mrs. Kirschenbaum’s class in our self-organized fifth grade softball league. I organized a Friday afternoon league in which each of the four fifth grade classes played a twelve game schedule. We played our games between April and June. I kept the standings and posted them on the fifth grade bulletin board. We formed an all-star team that played another school in a neighboring town. This league was organized by and for kids. There were no parents or teachers involved. We did ask several parents to serve as umpires. We made the rules and even devised our own playoff system. The games were fun and competitive.

With basketball it was less necessary to organize a league because there were so many ways you could play the game. All you needed was two players per side for a good pick up game. On any given weekday or weekend, almost twelve months of the year, barring extreme heat or cold, all of the schoolyards and parks were filled with kids of all ages playing hoops. Typically a playground would contain about a dozen hoops and you’d find a different game at each one. It was too much of a luxury to play full court. There were too many players and not enough baskets.

When you arrived at the courts you would survey the scene and find both your age group and skill level. Most of the games were 3 on 3, winner stays on. As your game improved you could move up the hierarchy and play with the better players. You would have to earn this right as a lost game meant the whole team would sit. You could trace your improvement over a season by determining whether you improved your level. 

Again, there were no parents, teachers, or refs. You got on your bike, rode to the courts, played for a few hours, and went home. I don’t wish to overly romanticize this play landscape. Of course there were fights, interminable arguments, bullying, intimidation, and nastiness. But there was much more camaraderie, teamwork, laughter, competition, and joy. I learned to avoid the nasty courts. If you wanted to play basketball, you went to the playground and found, or even co-created your game.

Sometimes I regret not having played a varsity sport. I wish I would have had the skill, confidence, and intensity to try out for and make a team. I would have gained from the coaching, the toughness, and the discipline of a varsity sports setting.  But I do not regret the pressure, exploitation, and manipulation that is inevitably involved in playing environments that urge victory in front of demanding spectators. I remain ambivalent about organized sports. I love the spectacle, the spirit, the heroism and greatness, and even the regalia, just as I detest the ruthlessness and obsessiveness that form its dark side. I’ve seen these darker qualities emerge in myself as player (in city league softball and basketball as an adult) as coach (of a fifth and sixth grade team), and as a parent of a high school and college varsity basketball player. I always had the self-awareness to step back from the dark side, but it always lurked just beneath the surface.

A Visit to Clarkson University

Clarkson University is located in the far reaches of Northern New York State, beyond the Adirondacks on the southern flank of the St. Lawrence River Valley. It's surrounded by rolling hills, expansive landscapes, and lush wetlands, fields, and forests. The small towns in upstate New York have their ubiquitous strips, but they have downtowns reminiscent of the mid -twentieth century. It's a very interesting place.

In the midst of these fields are the towns of Potsdam and Canton, the locations of four universities—Clarkson, St. Lawrence, SUNY Postdam, and SUNY Canton. Last week I was hosted by Clarkson University, but I met with and visited all four campuses in an effort to consult with their sustainability directors. As I spent most of my time at Clarkson, I'd like to report briefly on my visit. Clarkson signed the Presidents Climate Commitment, and to celebrate the accomplishment, I met with President Tony Collins and other campus leaders. I also delivered a plenary address, The Nine Elements of a Sustainable Campus.

I derive inspiration and enjoyment from these visit because I get to see so many people doing great work. With each visit, I learn something new about the possibilities and potentials for a sustainable campus. Clarkson University has a great deal to offer. Their Institute for a Sustainable Environment offers undergraduate degree programs in Environmental Health Science and Environmental Science and Policy as well as Minors in Sustainable Energy Systems Engineering and Sustainable Solutions for the Developing World. Along with their Environmental Engineering program, the offerings in the School of Business, the support from the School of Arts and Sciences, and interdisciplinary graduate programs in Environmental Science and Engineering and Environmental Politics and Governance, there's an impressive portfolio of opportunities. Particularly impressive is the hands-on, applied research approach of these programs. Clarkson has five ongoing research initiatives that provide regional economic  and ecological opportunities—the Center for Air Resources Engineering and Science, the Center for Sustainable Energy Systems, the Clarkson BioMass Group, the Great Rivers Center, and the Rivers and Estuary Observatory Network. That's a lot of programs for a small university!

The Institute for a Sustainable Environment is housed in an open concept, green building that epitomizes the research and teaching orientation of the school. I was very pleased to see the impressive first floor signage that explains the basic elements of building design and how Clarkson University research was instrumental in important aspects of the design process. The various bulletin boards demonstrate the vitality and relevance of student and faculty research.

In The Nine Elements of a Sustainable Campus, I describe the necessity of integrating all aspects of sustainability thinking. Clarkson's most important contribution is the close integration between research and infrastructure, and the application of that integration to community regional development. Accordingly, Clarkson is investing the sustainable future of the entire St. Lawrence region. I highly recommend that readers of this commentary visit the Clarkson website, and peruse the interesting initiatives of the Institute for a Sustainable Environment. 

Backyards and Rooms

As an eleven year old child I was most happy while deeply engaged in delightful moments of outdoor play. Mainly I organized those moments around various ways to explore balls and bicycles, although any sport or game captured my attention. Any outdoor (and even indoor) environment contained the potential for a ball game. I scoped the possibilities wherever I happened to be. 

I will explore the full range and variability of these games, organizing my memories according to places (or fields) of play, noting the cognitive and ecological significance in each venue. There were games of city, town, house, room, attic, backyard, neighborhood, schoolyard, park, and trail. Cross this geographic and spatial scheme with games that ranged from wildly improvisational to rules-based order, or from physical to cerebral, and you have a three fold axis of possibility.

House and neighborhood were the safest places to play. They provided a regularity of seasonal variety, a stable group of players, and a secure, bounded field. The exterior of our suburban house could serve as right field wall, basketball backboard, and provided the means and backdrop for any game that allowed us to throw a ball against a solid surface. Our yard was small and contained, big enough to have a catch, or to play wiffle ball, but not really large enough for more than two kids to run around in. We could play one on one wiffle ball (a game I continued to play well into my teenage years), one on one basketball (although there was barely any lateral flexibility), one on one tackle football, and a variety of solo games including stoop ball (throw a tennis ball off a stoop), roof ball (throw a ball onto the roof and catch it as it falls), and other games for sidewalks and driveways.

Our father suggested some of these games, always happy to share his own street ball memories from Brooklyn. Sometimes his memories would spark an idea for us, but we were much less interested in his games and mainly wanted to devise our own. Indeed my brother and I invented different solo games for our own purposes. We had different versions of stoopball. However, we would find ways to invoke common rules when we managed to play together. 

There were all kinds of neighborhood street games. We played them on a nearby dead-end “court” road, a three minute stroll from the house. We had a terrific four on four softball game, highlighted by self-service batting, a neatly laid out stadium, with appropriately scaled distances proportioned for doubles, triples, and home runs. I’m not sure how we invented these games. The first time we’d play we’d figure out some rules. If the game was fun and we could attract a regular group of players, we’d continue to play it, make up some more rules, and somehow we’d have a consensually derived tradition of play. 

Each room in our house presented a different rule-making challenge. My small room had a desk and drawer alignment that was symmetrical enough to resemble a baseball stadium. I invented “card baseball.” I organized an arrangement of baseball cards on the floor according to players positions on the field. The batting team used a baseball card as a bat. I would toss a small piece of rolled up cardboard, made with paper and spit, hit the little cardboard ball with the baseball card, and depending on where the ball landed, there were a series of rules allowing the cards on the field to retrieve it, while the batting card ran the bases. It was a decent game, but much more fun in its conception than execution, as I spent far too much time crawling around the floor. 

Far better was block baseball, a game we played in our “finished” attic. I would build a stadium with blocks and use smaller blocks to represent the players on the field. In this two player game, the pitcher rolled a marble. The batter hit the marble with a pencil and if the marble hit one of the player blocks on the field the batter was out. Block baseball could get very raucous and it was also more interesting in theory then practice. It was great fun to build the stadiums and even more fun to destroy them. 

My brother (Peter) and I also played hockey in the attic. We set up two chairs about thirty feet apart in a room of 30x15 dimensions. We had “real” hockey sticks that we used to knock around a tennis ball with the object of knocking the ball between the legs of the chair. This was a great game as we bounced the balls and each other off the attic walls.

Peter perfected “door basketball.” You would shoot a tennis ball at the molding on top of the door and score a basket if the ball caught the angle of the molding. We played this competitively, but mainly this was a game that my brother engaged in. He invented elaborate fantasy players on teams that combined real basketball stars with both real and imaginary friends. I preferred to stack chairs in our “den,” leaning them against the brick wall of a fireplace, stick a garbage pail on top, and shoot the tennis ball into the pail. The trick was to place the pail high enough that the game was a challenge, but not so high that it was too hard to retrieve the ball. I would play this in Saturday afternoon while watching the NBA game of the week (early 1960’s). This was when the game of the week was a big deal as television coverage of professional sports was much more limited than it is today.

I spent thousands of hours playing more cerebral board games both of the commercial variety and games of my own design. I invented dice baseball games that I played with my baseball cards. I ran countless tournaments and leagues while keeping notebooks of statistics and standings. My cousin Byron and I played a commercial game called Red Barber baseball. It was a game of pure luck but we invented variants that allowed it to more realistically reflect major league performances. We each kept our own notebooks of statistics and after a month or so we would exchange them and continue with each others leagues. Of course we had the most fun when we got to play these games together.

I invented numerous versions of dice baseball, dice basketball, dice football, and dice hockey, games of pure luck that somehow seemed skillful. For some of these games I would regularly write down the results. Other times I would keep it all in my head. As a result, I became so adept with numbers that I could go to the supermarket and tell my mother the total cost of her shopping more quickly than the cashier could ring it up on the cash register.

In my teenage years when I discovered the Strat-O-Matic series of games, I was absolutely overjoyed that there were games of so much realism in which players would perform so accurately. Yet the dice assured enough mystery and randomness to keep these games interesting, thus fueling my imagination about the seemingly unlimited ways the games could unfold.

The Deeper Meaning of Sustainable Investment

This article appeared this morning (April 3rd) on the Green Biz website. (Adapted from The Nine Elements of a Sustainable Campus (The MIT Press, 2014)

Green Biz has an outstanding newsletter. I follow it to see what progressive-minded businesses are doing in regard to sustainability. 

There are two crucial obstacles that limit sustainability initiatives on college and university campuses. The first is financing and capital investment. The second is organizational process. I experienced these issues first hand when I was the president of Unity College from 2006-2011. Since then, in my capacity as the Director of the Presidential Fellows Program at Second Nature, I have visited several dozen campuses and spoken with many several hundred senior leaders on other campuses. I am convinced that these challenges are ubiquitous.

Almost every campus I visit is legitimately concerned about its finances.  In this report, I’ll focus on capital investment and suggest that if more campuses broadened how they conceive of wealth they might find that their resources are not as limited as they think.

Let’s start by reconsidering the meaning of sustainable investment. From a strictly financial perspective, it suggests that the campus endowment will be more oriented toward ecologically and socially responsible equities. Or that campus budgeting will give priority to energy efficiency and conservation. Campus leadership will investigate and implement financial incentives to stimulate comprehensive, ecologically sound approaches to energy, materials, and food infrastructure. The campus will work with the regional community to develop sustainability markets, serving as a dynamic economic multiplier for sustainable businesses. More broadly, campus sustainable investment implies ways of reconsidering all of the institution’s capital assets.

We often conceive of investment as a financial term implying the exchange of current income for future assets. However, in common parlance “investment” has a broader meaning. We use it to convey the amount of time we are willing to spend doing something in the hope of a future reward. As individuals, we think about the resources we are willing to commit to a project or process. These resources might include time, money, knowledge, talent, and effort—a range of abstracted or tangible qualities that coordinate our personal assets. Surely the cost-benefit analysis of an investment goes way beyond a simple financial assessment.

The concept of investment can be similarly expanded for institutions, especially colleges and universities. The endowment is the repository of the system’s financial capital, reduced to an investment portfolio. The assets (time, money, knowledge, talent, effort) of a system transcend this financial reduction, although a financial equivalence is always presumed. When institutions engage in planning and thereby balance present needs with their anticipation of the future, they have comprehensive discussions about the deeper meaning of investment. On which projects should we spend time? In what ways will our present efforts be rewarded tomorrow? How do our knowledge contributions manifest themselves in future outcomes? How should we be spending our money?

But there are other ways to assess an institution’s capital assets if we broaden the meaning of capital. For example, several prominent ecological economists use the term natural capital to signify “the goods and services from nature which are essential to human life.” Robert Costanza elaborates:

“Natural capital is the extension of the economic notion of capital (manufactured means of production) to environmental goods and services. A functional definition of capital in general is “a stock that yields a flow of valuable goods or services into the future.”

Similarly, we can distinguish social capital as an important campus asset. Lew Feldstein and Robert Putnam describe social capital as “the collective value of all ‘social networks’ (who people know) and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other.” Campuses also have significant     intellectual capital in the form of the collective knowledge of their students, staff, and faculty.  

How might a campus assess, organize, project and even measure sustainable investment by considering wealth and capital in these terms? When you consider this broadened approach to capital (natural, social, intellectual, and financial), you realize that college and university campuses have an extraordinary variety of assets. If you measure a campus’s capital assets in exclusively financial terms, you overlook other forms of wealth that are additional prospects for sustainable investment.

Financial capital is the standard measure of a campus’s financial health. A package of comprehensive ratios serves as the foundation of best-practices financial assessment—viability ratio, primary reserve ratio, and net income ratio as calculated through expendable net assets, plant debt, total revenues, total operating expenses, total non-operating expenses, and change in total net assets. These ratios reflect an assumption that wealth is best measured through its representation as money.

What happens when we assess a campus’s wealth by considering the other forms of capital? Although there have been several attempts to measure intellectual capital as a campus’s asset, these mainly focus on standard academic productivity criteria—publications, collaborations, research grants, credits, courses, and other ways of verifying knowledge production. A similar approach could be used to organize, catalog, and understand campus sustainability initiatives—sustainability as knowledge production. The most conventional way to do this would be to use the proposed knowledge production as a base layer of measurement, and then apply knowledge production to all academic projects that are oriented around sustainability research, teaching, and service. This is an asset in the sense that it adds value to the institution’s prestige and research, leveraging its potential to develop conceptual breakthroughs in the sustainability field.

Colleges and universities rely heavily on promoting social capital as a means to enrich campus life, stature, influence, and effectiveness. Campus life is typically rich with affiliations, clubs, networks, and associations. The desire to increase one’s social capital is a primary reason for attending a college. Sustainability advocates often promote social capital by emphasizing community partnerships. Most of the sustainability initiatives on a campus, including food growing, recycling, energy efficiency, collaborative research efforts, and service projects, typically involve people working together to improve campus life. Pick up just about any college’s catalog (or peruse just about any college’s website) and you are likely to see photos of happy and engaged people working together on sustainability projects or in sustainability programs. The social capital accrued through campus sustainability adds to a campus’s wealth.

All campuses have natural capital assets. Natural capital is typically interpreted as the visual appeal of a campus’s landscape (“please visit our beautiful campus”) or as a campus’s exceptional location (“our campus has easy access to the diverse cultural resources of our city”). Campuses are built environments in natural places. They may be “endowed” with energy assets (solar gain, wind, geothermal), ecological assets (habitat, farmland, wetlands, watercourses), wildlife, and all of the intrinsic values and services of the ecosystem. Ecological economists refer to these assets and functions as ecosystem services. These include services related to provisioning (food, water, minerals, energy), regulating (carbon sequestration, waste decomposition, air and water purification, crop pollination), supporting (nutrient dispersal and cycling, seed dispersal, primary production), and culture (inspiration, recreation, scientific discovery).    

What I wish to convey here and what I often suggest to campus leaders is that sustainable investment entails an understanding that wealth, assets, and capital come in many forms. There are diverse ways for a campus to invest in a sustainable future and it can do so more effectively by broadening its understanding of value. By doing so, it more comprehensively coordinates its approach to wealth, helps the entire campus understand how it contributes to that wealth, and builds a renewed sense of optimism in the value of sustainability, one that goes beyond mere finances alone.

Place Over Victory

I have few memories of personal athletic heroism mainly because I was a good player and not a great one. Between fifth grade softball, intramural games, pick-up ball, and city leagues, I don’t think there are more than a dozen circumstances when I made a last second basket or smacked a game-winning hit. Given the venues, I’m not sure I ever achieved this in front of a crowd of more than one hundred fans.

And of the dozens of teams I played on, there have only been three championships, countless runner-ups, and scores of ho-hum seasons. I have a modest collection of second place trophies that for many years sat on an unseen shelf in an unused basement. I’ve never known what to do with them, thinking that they might be more useful as bird feeders. Far more useful as a means of displaying modest prowess I have quite a few award t-shirts, some commemorative, and others announcing an accomplishment. I still have my twelfth grade intra-mural softball championship t-shirt which I won well over forty years ago. It no longer comes close to fitting me (I believe seeing my then teenage daughter once wearing it), and it now sits on a shelf next to my old teddy bear. I have several well worn t-shirts from three on three basketball leagues, two championships and lots of runner ups (we only once managed to beat Dave Goldsmith’s team).

Three on three basketball is my most skillful game as I have an accurate, sometimes deadly, very long range three point shot, and on a good passing team I can score a lot of points very quickly, especially when there’s a good big man who the defense is worried about. Still, a lemon yellow shirt that reads Keene Family Y 3 on 3 champions, 1982, wasn’t very imposing. Yet I wore it with great pride, both as a measure of my affiliation with basketball, my pleasure at living in southwest New Hampshire, and as a tangible link to childhood dreams of glory.

These jerseys represent more than nostalgia, conviviality, and community, all qualities potentially intrinsic to memorabilia. More importantly, and transcending and incorporating these qualities, is how they bind me to a place that I love, engaged in one of my favorite things to do. My sense of place and my territorial affiliations are linked to the teams I play on and the teams I route for.

I knew I belonged to the Monadnock Region of southwest New Hampshire when I was playing softball on a field in Troy, NH, early in May, with snow on the hillsides, and the temperature for our late night D league game was 39 degrees. Our Antioch New England Graduate School team (made up of a few Antioch folks but many community members) was playing a road game against a blue collar team. Antioch professors, staff, and their friends never really gained respect in Keene until they proved they could play softball. I stood on the field, knees crouched, playing second base, looking up at the night sky, hoping a ground ball would be hit my way. The ambiance of the game—professors competing against mill workers—the respect for sportsmanship, our common endurance, the respect we generated just by playing ball in these wintry conditions, generated all kinds of unprintable, yet oddly friendly banter. These are my lasting memories, far surpassing the actual game result. I have no idea who won the game or how I performed. Rather I recall the settings, the feelings, and the place. I could spend the next few pages providing you with vivid descriptions of a dozen softball fields scattered around the city of Keene and its environs, writing about the weather conditions, the light of the sky, the vegetation, but I can remember few game scores, who won or lost the games, or how many hits I might have gotten. I remember playing a double header against Hubbard Farms in Walpole, NH, on a beautiful grassy field on a mild but cloudy July day. For some reason I played the outfield that day. The grass was covered with thick white clover. It looked like a green and white sea. The air was fragrant and the valley was calm. I know we played two great games but I can’t tell you who won.

What I am suggesting is that for me, and I think for others too, the place as the field of play is as important as the game itself. At the time of play I’m fully engaged in the game situation and potential outcome (I really like to win). I am very attentive to batting orders, counts, the condition of the field, who’s fast and who’s slow, and all the things that an aware ballplayer should be observing. Most good and heady players can describe all of these situations to you in detail, as complex as they might be. As a player you must respond to those conditions if you are going to accomplish your objective—pitching, hitting, or catching the ball. However, many years later, I can only provide details of absolutely seminal game moments, but I can fully describe the setting in which I played. It was the intense focus on the game that allowed me to observe the landscape in such vivid detail. It was the field of play that planted itself in my memory.

Sustainability, Character, and Life Practice

An excerpt from The Nine Elements of a Sustainable Campus  (The MIT Press, 2014)

“Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the early 1990’s, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist presented a series of meditation workshops oriented to the specific challenges of environmental professionals. I had the good fortune to attend one of those workshops. In my experience during the program and in the twenty years since then the reverberating mantra “you can’t take care of the environment if you don’t take care of the environmentalist” resided in my awareness. I used it as a way to balance the challenging demands of professional life, to serve as a way to place aspiration and accomplishment in the deeper perspective of a whole life.

Much of the sustainability ethos has its origins in the virtues of simplicity, a vision of a “good life” that has Thoreauvian roots, including as described by Philip Cafaro in Thoreau’s Living Ethics, “health, freedom, pleasure, friendship, a rich experience, knowledge (of self, nature, and God), reverence, self-culture, and personal achievement.” Simplicity reflects an enduring tradition in American history. David Shi, a historian (who became a college president) in his wonderful book The Simple Life reveals the origins and practice of this sensibility. He describes how the simple life was intrinsic to the progressive movement, including “a cluster of practices and values that have since remained associated with the concept: discriminating consumption, uncluttered living, personal contentment, aesthetic simplicity (including an emphasis on handicrafts), civic virtue, social service, and renewed contact with nature in one form or another.”

Sustainability advocates typically support such Thoreauvian values in principle, yet their campus work environments are exceedingly demanding. The sustainability ethos promotes “the good life” but the urgency of the “planetary challenge” coupled with the various stresses of contemporary higher education often creates pressured and tense work environments. Most campus sustainability professionals I encounter, including staffers, faculty, and managers, all the way up to the senior leadership are challenged by a seemingly unlimited portfolio of urgent and demanding tasks and requests. They are compelled to respond for three main reasons—the perceived importance of the sustainability mission, the motivation to accomplish tangible results, and their desire to uphold standards of personal achievement. This is stimulated and reinforced by the presumed ubiquity of work, an implicit work ethic, and the assumption that individual and organizational success depends on the exemplary accomplishment of that work. It is relatively rare to find people on college campuses who proclaim that they’ve achieved a “balanced” work life. Rather people complain, proclaim, or take pride in how busy they are.

We have a profound contradiction. The sustainability ethos deeply values a “good life” informed by simplicity, communion with nature, and reverence. But the provision of that good life seems to obviate its realization. Of course many people find great satisfaction in sustainability work and find that the work itself is sufficient reward. And how people choose to spend their time and balance their life is an individual matter. Still, my impression, informed by hundreds of conversations with higher education sustainability professionals is that for most of these people (regardless of their place and position) there’s a fundamental imbalance between the promise of the “good life” and its realization.

What I wish to convey is the inevitable link between sustainability, character, and life practice. Sustainability practitioners are ultimately interested in human flourishing, and serve as the campus conscience for personal health and fitness, community purpose and vitality, and ecological resilience. They are inevitably scrutinized because they are espousing ways of thinking, living, and acting. They are expected to model the very behaviors they espouse. As Emerson suggests, how they live and act is as important as what they say.

During my tenure as a college president I directly confronted this issue. In my role as “supervisor in chief” I had to learn how to create high expectations for the college while espousing a balanced work life. Unless I found the same balance in my own life I wouldn’t be taken seriously in that regard. There was a stunning parallel between how I conducted myself publicly and the tone I set for the whole campus. As I lived on campus, this was an inescapable reality. Indeed, we constructed a modest LEED platinum, zero carbon presidential residence to set a public standard for sustainable living. The house functioned simultaneously as our private living quarters and an educational venue for campus sustainability. Our lives were on display. Further, as a college president, people inevitably scrutinize everything you do and say. You aspire to maximize the educational value of that scrutiny.

I won’t say that I achieved the balance between high-level professional accomplishment and the sustainable “good life.” But I did publicly pronounce my desire to do so and attempted transparency in my successes and failures accordingly. I also emphasized the importance of a balanced life for my direct reports and instructed them to do the same in their departments. At a small college (in a small town), almost every work-related dissatisfaction eventually arrives on your desk. The “well-being” of your constituents is always on your mind. There is no solace in knowing that you can’t please everyone or that some people just find trouble. And the more accessible and transparent you are, the more likely it is that people will come to you with their issues. In many respects, the daily challenge of maintaing high morale at a college that espoused the sustainability ethos was the most stressful element of the job.

I had to balance the psychological demands of the job, my expectations for achieving a sustainable campus, with my aspirations to live and lead “a good life.” I suggest that this balance is crucial for any sustainability practitioner, although considerably magnified for a chief executive. Mileage varies according to the culture of each campus, the personal style of the practitioner, and the level of leadership responsibility intrinsic to your position. Here are some behavioral “rules of thumb” for implementing that balance. These reflect approaches I use (not always successfully) to promote “a good life” in an organization.

(1) Accept that You’re a Role Model

If you espouse sustainability, people will expect you to live according to your ideals. You can’t practice an energy guzzling lifestyle. It just won’t work. Similarly, if you espouse campus wellness, you should probably eat well, pursue physical fitness, and balance work and play. If you can’t do so, then how can you promote it for others? When I was the president of Unity College, I organized a noon-time bicycle ride for senior staff and invited any students and faculty to join us. I was always on my bicycle. I encouraged the Dean of Student Life to develop comprehensive wellness programs for students, staff, and faculty. We created a spirit of wellness for the entire campus, and we knew that if we took the lead in our own lives, it would have much more impact. I would take the lead in encouraging everyone on campus to alleviate stress, practice fitness and relaxation, and engage in both work and play.

(2) Provide a Sense of Proportion and Scale

It’s often difficult for people to distinguish between working hard and working well. Throughout my career people have questioned me as to how I’m able to take breaks during the day for exercise, or find time to pursue my many interests. People often misappropriate their time. I spend much of my supervisory time working with people to help them align their priorities accordingly. When you are the chief executive, you are more able to do this. The first question I ask direct reports is to tell me how they spend their time, what rationale they use for making their time management decisions, and whether they feel that their work is important. Just about everyone I encounter requires such conversations. Similarly (from an institutional perspective), people often worry about the wrong things. Often, this is the reason for misappropriating time—working and worrying about issues that aren’t really that important. Surprisingly, providing this kind of counsel can be the key to promoting campus wellness. You can’t have a balanced working life unless you can figure out how to manage your time.

(3) Emphasize Clarity and Accountability

Any campus with high aspirations must create a challenging and demanding work environment. How can campus wellness coexist with such aspiration? The key to this balance is requiring clear accountability and expectations. People must know what they can and should expect from each other. The most egregious miscommunications often can be traced to a misunderstanding of who is accountable and what is expected of them. When there is lack of clarity, the stress level in an organization becomes inordinately high. Then you have to spend far too much time (see point 2 above) trying to figure out who was supposed to do what or what people meant when they said something.

(4) Emphasize Politeness and Respect

This is an incredibly simple way to promote a sense of campus well-being. When people treat each other with politeness and respect, they insure better communication, they are more likely to speak and listen well, and they will come to every encounter with more confidence and integrity. In contrast, an environment of intimidation, bullying, sarcasm, and condescension promotes anxiety and defensiveness. I have spent hours of supervisory time mediating such bad behavior. I have always placed a huge emphasis on creating conditions of conviviality and good interpersonal manners. However, it’s crucial that people don’t mistake conviviality for a lack of discipline or an unwillingness to set limits. Conflict is inevitable and different perspectives will always emerge. The manner in which conflicts are resolved reflects volumes about campus morale and community vitality.

(5) Create an Improvisational Flow of Creative Imagination

I always try to stimulate a creative, improvisational working environment that rewards innovation and imagination. This attitude is absolutely necessary in demanding working environments. It provides an outlet for stress, encourages participation, and demonstrates open-mindedness. Sometimes there are multiple solutions to vexing problems. An improvisational flow doesn’t necessarily mitigate a stressful challenge, but it can create more stimulating and rewarding conditions for taking on the challenge. People are most fully engaged in campus life when they are using their imagination to solve challenging problems. An improvisational attitude also suggests there is a willingness to experiment and explore as a way to adapt to changing circumstances.

(6) Purity is the End of Potential

In the introduction to The Collected Works of Gary Snyder, the poet Jim Dodge tells a wonderful story. He describes a group of students who were visiting Snyder to discuss various environmental issues. Snyder served a meal of “road-kill stew” in bowls without silverware. Dodge wonders whether Snyder has gone zen pure. Then Snyder goes to the kitchen to fetch dessert. He comes back to the dining area and tosses Hostess Twinkies to all of the seminar participants. Jim Dodge suggests that purity is the end of potential.

I recount this story on numerous occasions as a reminder that we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously. Our important work requires comedy and lightness.

Why is Thoreauvian simplicity such an enduring aspiration? For starters, it cuts against the complicated intricacies of contemporary life. In the early nineteenth century, Thoreau conceived a counter to what he considered to be the ubiquitous monotony of daily work life, especially as informed by the routines of commerce. Those routines prevented people from living a full life, mainly by distracting them from direct experience of the natural world. Thoreau’s many projects entailed deep immersion in the extraordinary mysteries and intricacies of the immediate landscape, He aspired to shed the shackles of commerce, to roam freely through the fields and forests, and to commit himself to the daily practice of observing nature. Philip Cafaro neatly encapsulates the essence of this daily practice:

“It is striking how often Thoreau, in discussing the good life, specifies human flourishing and excellence in relation to nature. Some of this is quite basic. The simplest messages in Walden are to get outside, use your limbs, and delight in your senses. Run, walk, swim, sweat. Taste the sweetness of the year’s first huckleberries and feel the juice dribble down your chin. It feels good to plunge into a pond first thing in the morning and WAKE UP, or to float lazily in a boat along its surface, wafted we know not where by the breeze, gazing up at the clouds….What we need to know in order to live better lives may indeed be very simple.”

Nearly two hundred years have passed since Thoreau’s time. The routines of commerce, the schedules of daily life, the intervening layers of technology, and the expectations of productivity remain considerable. The fields, forests, and ponds are not nearly as accessible. Yet Thoreau’s aspirations remain vibrant and his concept of human flourishing (which also includes the pursuit of knowledge and creative expression) is absolutely relevant. How can it be justified in a time of ecological urgency?

As a college president, I would often address prospective students and families. Why should they consider the environmental field as their educational foundation and a possible career? And in other circumstances (with colleagues, friends, or in public settings) I find myself explaining the virtues of an environmental career and life, or how to incorporate a sustainability ethos into one’s life practice. The essence of my appeal is twofold. I explain that environmental sustainability is the ultimate service profession. Wherever you are, however you work, you are engaged in activity that serves your neighborhood, community, and planet. Service is rewarding, engaging, and meaningful. Second, by studying sustainability and the natural world, you are gaining a deeper understanding of life processes. In so doing, you are constantly reminded of the mystery and wonder of the biosphere. As you do so, you gain an appreciation for the sanctity of life. I can think of no better way to integrate personal growth and the pursuit of a career.

The justification is embedded in this appeal. Thoreau’s daily practice of observing nature was far more than a testimony to direct experience. It was a way to build appreciation for the very circumstances of his life. Rather than taking the natural world for granted, he chose to probe its intricacies. In deepening appreciation, he summoned gratitude. The good life beckons gratitude. For Thoreau, this is the very essence of human flourishing.

How can this sensibility be relevant to the 24/7 world of contemporary higher education? It’s not easy. Expressions of gratitude can be washed away in cynicism, sarcasm, anxiety, and stress. Or they may be perceived as sanctimonious. How can I express gratitude when you’ve just slashed my budget?  The budget-cutting mentality, the trappings of accountability and assessment, the constant need to justify higher learning beyond sheer productivity and career building—these pressures can shatter gratitude into the scattered fragments of spare change. Where does Thoreauvian simplicity belong here?

Perhaps the most vivid reminder of gratitude is to call attention to the great privilege of education itself. Just as we often feel entitled to the earth’s bounty, so do we expect that education is entitled. Yet the great majority of the world’s population have no access to either. These two fundamental expectations—the fruits of the earth and the gifts of higher learning—are indeed the culmination of the good life, and taking them for granted leads to their squander. Budget cutting is so threatening because it ultimately implies less access to both prospects. Let us be thankful for what we have and conserve its best use.

Thoreauvian simplicity is the essence of the sustainability ethos because it teaches that the culmination of gratitude is reciprocation.  Reciprocation implies giving back what you have received. It involves an exchange, transformation, and acknowledgment. Reciprocation is a circulation from the biosphere through human awareness and back again, passing through social networks, educational venues, creative expression, and community service. It is the very foundation of human flourishing. If reciprocation and gratitude are so essential to the good life, how can such qualities become intrinsic to the curriculum of higher education?

Hawaii and Sustainability: First Impressions

I just returned from an exceptional visit to Hawaii. I spent a week meeting chancellors, faculty, sustainability coordinators, students, and all manner of people who care about the future of our planet! I addressed the Pacific Island Post-Seconday Commission. Talk about being on the front lines of climate change—sea level rise is tangible and threatening on those islands. I gave the plenary address at the Hawaii Sustainability Summit. I met dozens and dozens of interesting people. I came away with the distinct impression that the University of Hawaii system and all of its stakeholders will make a major contribution to how we think about and implement sustainability initiatives. To understand the seeds of this potential, I'd like to share a few ecological and cultural impressions.

This was my first trip to Hawaii. After recovering from the relative shock of Honolulu (it's very congested and the automobile rules), I began to appreciate Oahu as a fascinating crossroads for globalization. There are layers and layers of multicultural depth and richness, splayed over a post-colonial tradition, and now at the geographic nexus of Asia and the Americas. This cosmopolitan richness is enhanced by the complicated and intriguing ecological circumstances. Although the islands differ based on their unique geological sequence in time and space, they all share a common biogeographical challenge. The initial successional sequence (tracing the migrations of species to new lands) is superimposed by various waves of human settlement, including the first Polynesian people and species, and then the colonial histories. Invasive and indigenous species mingle in a dynamic matrix of habitats and climates. The ecological and cultural complexities are a stunning microcosm for many other places around the planet.

Amazingly, over 80% of Hawaii's food and energy is imported. Yet the islands could easily become relatively self-sufficient through local organic agriculture, wind and solar power, and other sustainability initiatives. Similar to many college and universities, The University of Hawaii (Manoa) has major infrastructure challenges. With imaginative and determined leadership, it could easily develop sustainability programs that address these questions not just for the university, but for all Hawaiians. Blended with the inspiring revival of traditional Hawaiian knowledge, all kinds of partnerships are possible. Despite all of the daunting political challenges they entail, and all of the difficulties that serge with multiple stakeholders, there are scores of interesting initiatives scattered throughout the campuses in the University of Hawaii system.

I was particularly taken by some of the efforts I observed at some of the community colleges, specifically Kapi'olani and Kauai. I had the good fortune to visit those campuses, but through conversations with people at the other campuses, I realized that sustainability seeds are scattered throughout the system. 

In just a week you can only pick up fragments of activities, and it's impossible to make too many judgments. But I left Hawaii with the distinct impression that its island geography, its ecological and cultural richness, and it's beautiful and deep notions of Aloha and Mahalo, are an inspirational blend for future sustainability excellence.

Eric Knutzen gave us a great tour of the Aquaponics facility at Kauai Community College.