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.

Going somewhere this holiday season? Have a few empty seats in the car? Here’s my suggestion: offer a ride using the Carpool application on Facebook.
The Carpool application on Facebook is a ride-share program that allows you to view profiles of riders and drivers before you decide to carpool with them. It helps to alleviate the […]

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 […]

Two years ago, I wrote the below article for the Sustainability@Duke website. Most of the ideas in that article are still valid, but many of the links have gone bad, so I’m re-posting it here with new links and a few additional edits. Another advantage of reposting it here is that this site has […]

AASHE MEMBERSHIP IS EXPLODING! The excitement is spreading all across the United States and Canada (and even to Hong Kong and Mexico!); gaining access to our resources and belonging to the AASHE community is becoming part of a widespread campus sustainability culture. So, to help our faithful members illustrate their strong commitment to […]

Cheers to the hundreds of campuses across the globe that celebrated Campus Sustainability Day last week! This post presents a sampling of how different campuses participated in the event.

In case you missed it, let me tell you about a phenomenal event that the United Nations Environmental Programme pulled off on October 15th. They organized the first ever “Blog Action Day.” The goal of Blog Action Day is simple: ask every blogger in the world to write a post about the same […]

Last year, Duke Environmental Alliance commissioned me to make an instructional video about the Eco-Olympics, a dorm vs dorm waste, water, and energy reduction competition held at Duke each year. The goals of the project are explained in the first segment of the video, so I won’t elaborate on them here. But I […]

Ah Canada, a piece of my heart is still there. I visited British Columbia for the first time 4 weeks ago flying into Vancouver on my way north to Squamish, (a beautiful town sitting between the Howe Sound and the massive granite monolith “The Chief”). I spent 10 days camping and rock climbing enjoying beautiful […]