• How many green roofs does your school have?  (2 points, plus 1 bonus point if you can name the buildings)
• Do the toilets in your student center use grey water?  (1 point)
• Does your dining hall compost food scraps?  (3 points)
• Are there Certified Wildlife Habitats in your community?  (2 points)
• What about solar hot water?  (1 point)
• Solar hot pockets?  (350 calories)

A green roof at Germanna Community College in Virginia. Green roofs are just one of the many features highlighted by Sustainability Walking Tours. Flickr photo by Germanna CC.

Awareness of  renewable energy projects at the St. Clair County Community College in Port Huron, Mich. just increased. The project was sparked by an Innovation grant from the Greenforce Initiative, a partnership of Jobs for the Future and the National Wildlife Federation created to strengthen the capacity of community colleges to green the skills of our modern workforce. Five faculty and staff designed a sign to highlight the various renewable energy and green architecture features found around their 25-acre campus. The sign is the keystone in the grand arch of the college’s upcoming Sustainability Walking Tour, and will be a stop on all future campus tours. More than just a basic informational plaque, a scan-able “quick-response” (QR) code on the sign directs Smartphone users to a webpage where they can access up-to-the minute data on energy usage or the temperatures of the campus’s solar hot air and water systems. From this site, visitors can also find a map with additional information on fifteen green projects, a perfect activity for an afternoon study break! Just be sure not to look at your phone while walking.

Portland State University (PSU) in Portland, Oregon, offers an online guide to their Sustainability Walking Tour, which details fourteen sustainability measures the institution has taken across the board—large and small scale efforts to increase efficiency and decrease PSU’s overall impact on the environment. Unique features across the 50 acres include an electric vehicle charging station (pay for parking but the electricity is free!), electricity-producing exercise bicycles, and a student-run café with local, organic, vegan and vegetarian foods. The ReUse room is a twist on a community swap shop with school and office supplies, and it’s totally free!

Whether it’s your first fall on campus or your fourth, get out and explore in a new way! Download a map, put on your walking shoes, grab a friend and find the hidden and hidden-in-plain-sight places that make your school sustainable.

What’s your favorite campus sustainability feature?  Is it common knowledge, or a hidden gem?

Check out other on-campus environmental education and outreach projects here.

NWF Report Says Climate Change Ruined Summer in the U.S.

August 30 – A new National Wildlife Federation report says climate change made its presence felt in disappointing, dangerous, and destructive ways this summer. From severe heat waves, devastating wildfires, catastrophic floods, serious crop damage, and destructive pests expanding their range; people in most parts of the U.S. suffered the impacts scientists have predicted for years. Those impacts will spill over into next year with higher food prices and damaged ecosystems struggling to rebound.

“This summer has been the season climate change became real to many Americans,” said Joe Mendelson, NWF’s director of climate and energy policy. “From burned houses to parched fields to West Nile virus, it’s time for all political parties to start protecting our homes, families, and communities. We need to get serious about reducing the uncontrolled carbon pollution that is ravaging our country.”

Important Wetland Gains Achieved in Mirasol Settlement near Corkscrew Sanctuary

August 23 – National Wildlife Federation and Florida Wildlife Federation and partner conservation groups achieved hundreds of acres of additional wetland protection and restoration in a landmark settlement over the Mirasol project, a proposed golf course development to be sited in wetlands and wood stork habitat of Florida’s Western Everglades. The groups had opposed and litigated to reduce the damage from this development for almost a decade.

This latest settlement follows on the groups’ 2010 settlement of challenges to the adjacent Saturnia Falls and Parklands developments. All three developments were proposed originally in 1999 in the ecologically sensitive Cocohatchee Slough, a natural wetland flowway emanating from Audubon’s Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary. The Slough plays a vital role in providing foraging habitat for the endangered wood stork, whose largest nesting rookery in the nation is at Corkscrew Swamp. The Cocohatchee Slough also provides vital regional watershed benefits, like water supply and flood protection.

August 28 – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today is set to finalize new fuel efficiency and carbon standards, landmark rules that will double the fuel economy of America’s cars, SUVs and pickups to an average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.

Larry Schweiger, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, said today:

“As a onetime General Motors mechanic, I’m proud to see Americans already proving we have what it takes to lead in a prosperous clean energy future. Taken together, new fuel economy standards for cars and trucks are the biggest step America has ever taken to cut carbon pollution and reduce our oil dependence, critical for wildlife which faces both the global threat of climate change and the direct impacts of oil spills and pollution.”

Make a Play Date with Nature

August 27 – Back to school shouldn’t mean back inside for kids. While busy school schedules, sports and other extra-curricular activities make free time for playing outdoors or a trek to the park more challenging, National Wildlife Federation and the Natural Learning Initiative at North Carolina State University, have developed a guide to creating enticing outdoor play spaces as close as your backyard, patio or balcony.

Nature Play at Home : A Guide for Boosting Children’s Healthy Development and Creativity shows parents and caregivers how they can turn an uninspired outdoor environment into an entertaining and exciting play area that will have kids from 1-12 years welcoming that frequent parental command, “Go outside and play!”

And here are highlights from NWF in the News:

• Climate Wire: Conservative Republicans launch a new group to promote clean energy(subscription required)
• Indian Country Today Media Network: Northwest Tribes Fight for Treaty Rights in Face of Coal-Transport Plan
• Greenwire: Company cancels Pacific Northwest shipping plans(subscription required)
• Metro Times: Hitting the pipe hard: Enbridge’s tar sands oil pipelines dodge oversight

For more, visit www.nwf.org/News

Volunteers with the University of New Hampshire’s Trash 2 Treasure program have been rolling rugs and testing televisions all summer long in preparation for their second annual move-in weekend yard sale.  Throughout the month of May 2012, the T2T team collected furniture, clothing, electronics and more from various drop-off points around the UNH campus, and even made special pick-ups at off-campus apartments in the surrounding towns.  The items were cleaned and stored over the summer and will be displayed for sale at the start of the fall semester.

They estimate that the 2011 T2T cycle diverted 57,000 pounds of perfectly usable items from the waste stream, and expect the numbers to be even higher for the 2012 cycle .  T2T is a self-sustaining program; the money made at the yard sale goes toward the costs of storing and cleaning items and running the following year’s sale, and expanding their program’s specific model to other campuses.  The few leftover items are kept in the community—either donated to local churches for their fall sales or to local secondhand shops.  You can get a feel for the entire process from this video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Northeastern University also has a Trash 2 Treasure program, with item collection in the spring and a sale in the fall.  In a unique twist on engaging the student community, all student organizations that volunteer will receive a portion of the sale’s profits, proportional to the number of volunteer hours its members commit; everything else will go to a local charity.

At the University of Texas, the Campus Environmental Center’s T2T profits go toward campus environmental programming such as recycling and energy conservation initiatives.

This back to school season, consider ways to minimize your resource consumption—borrow items from friends and family, buy used, and if you have to buy new, keep your purchases local—it cuts down on fossil fuels used in production and transportation, and, according to a study by the Maine Center for Economic Policy (MECEP), for every $100 spent at a local, independent business, the additional benefit to the community is nearly double that of a purchase of the same amount at a chain.  Buying used usually eliminates the need for plastic and Styrofoam packaging (especially if you bring your own bag!), further eliminating waste.

Trash 2 Treasure programs keep usable items from unnecessarily filling limited landfill space, and prevent the use of fossil fuels in the production, packaging and shipping of new items.

Support your campus community, your home community, and our environment as a whole as you get back into the swing of things!  If your back-to-school list is all checked off, you can still help your local T2T sale by volunteering.  Can you think of any better way to kick off the year?!  And you never know what you’ll find…

Does your campus have a similar back-to-school yard sale?  Leave a comment to let us know!

Here are a few more sales that we know about, as featured in Generation E:  Students Leading for a Sustainble, Clean Energy Future:
• Ohio State Dump and Run
• Suffolk University Dump and Run

Click here to view the embedded video.

It used to be that the end of summer meant the end of endless hours of outdoor play time, but now kids are playing indoors year round. Parents and schools need to step up and help kids achieve a better balance.

NWF’s Kevin Coyle released a new report today which documents existing research about how added outdoor time and outdoor education consistently boost a child’s academic performance. The report shares tips for parents and caregivers who want more outdoor time for their kids. You can download Back to School: Back Outside! by visiting beoutthere.org.

Many schools already implement outdoor education during the school day. What are schools doing in your state? Check out our new interactive map to see all registered Eco-Schools in the country…the list is always growing! Visit ecoschoolsusa.org to learn more about this international program.

With all of this back-to-school excitement, it’s easy to forget about the impacts our purchases have on climate change.  Is there a way to know what companies are working to mitigate their effects on climate change?  Do companies listen when you tell them climate change is an important factor in you purchasing their products?  The answer to both is YES!

Your one-stop-shop for climate info on companies is Climate Counts.  They rate companies in many different sectors on their climate action, greenhouse gas reductions, stance on legislation and public reporting.  Companies are listening and are driven by the consumer.  This year, many of the companies rated by Climate Counts scored better than the previous year.  Climate Counts gives you all the resources you need to contact companies and tell them how you feel about their actions (or lack thereof) on climate change.

So before you head out for back-to-school shopping check out Climate Counts’ scorecards and get Back-to-Cool with your purchases.