Focus the Nation was a great success and I am proud to have been able to participate and present at the University of Kentucky about AASHE and the Presidents Climate Commitment.  In my pre-FTN post two weeks ago I asked for any campuses that were especially excited about events and activities they had planned to […]

“When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.” - Daniel Webster
The 17th Annual Practical Tools and Solutions for Sustaining Family Farms Conference was January 16 – 19, 2008 in Louisville, KY. A driven collection of people making a difference on the ground in their communities, […]

I’ve just finished a great book by Laurence Gonzalez called Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why. Gonzalez does a great job of synthesizing a lot of the fascinating research that makes a connection between neural network activity and human behavior. Much of this research has been popularized by helpful books by […]

I wanted to update you on one of our most exciting projects last year, which continues into 2008 – the creation of a standardized, national “Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System” (STARS) for colleges and universities.

Many people have been asking Judy or me about the difference between the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System (STARS) that AASHE is developing and the Sustainable Endowments Institute’s College Sustainability Report Card. To help respond to these questions, we worked with our friend Mark at SEI to produce the table below comparing key features […]

As you may know, AASHE has involved the higher education community in a collaborative process to develop an assessment and self-evaluation tool for campuses to rate their sustainability efforts, with the goal of providing a usable, comprehensive measurement of success for sustainability in higher education. The project is called STARS (Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Rating […]

Building Design + Construction recently released their Green Building Research White Paper (the fifth in a series of annual reports on the green building movement). The October 2007 white paper looks at the Green Building sector through 12 research studies of building owners, facility directors, and end users in key sectors: healthcare, corporate offices, […]

Congratulations to researchers at Pennsylvania State University who recently announced they have discovered a way to convert cellulose into hydrogen with a 288% return on energy input! This could be a huge development in the move to a hydrogen economy given that splitting natural gas was previously the only economical way to derive hydrogen.
Hydrogen […]

AASHE is looking for motivated schools to pilot the first ever community-developed campus sustainability rating system.