Most Likely to Succeed

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The students I met at ASU probably weren't bothered by their absence. Despite an obvious interest in topics that many would classify as environmental, few of these sustainability students would identify themselves as traditional environmentalists or list Silent Spring or John Muir as an inspiration. "I'm not a Sierra Club member," Funke said when I asked him what environmental groups he belongs to. He and his classmates are anything but the antiestablishment, anticorporate environmental types that filled my small New England liberal arts college 15 years ago. Most of my friends studied neo-Marxist theory and found just about everything to be protest-worthy, from items in the campus bookstore to a weapons lab at a nearby university; political outrage was practically part of our curriculum. The ASU students focus on transportation planning, water resource management, industrial ecology, and integral calculus, among other subjects. They may not know John Muir, but they know General Electric's ecomagination initiative and Wal-Mart's promotion of compact fluorescent lightbulbs. For them, sustainability is not a cause; it's a career path.

"In some ways they're more sophisticated than I was," ASU president Michael Crow said about the sustainability students. "They're more worldly and aware. They just don't take it for granted that the corporation is necessarily the evil force; the redirected corporation can be a force of good." Working in tandem with corporate entities enables the school "to find sustainability trajectories and solutions that are based on real challenges, based on looking at how real problems are being confronted," Crow said.

Arizona State launched the Global Institute of Sustainability in 2004 at Crow's instigation. He came to ASU that year from Columbia University, where as executive vice provost he helped create the Earth Institute. Academic institutions have a responsibility to take the lead on climate change issues, to weave them into their curricula, he asserted: "Colleges and universities may have only 3 percent of the carbon footprint, but we have 100 percent of the student footprint." 

ASU is not alone in promoting the study of sustainability as an academic discipline. Institutions ranging from Ivy League business schools to small liberal arts colleges, from state universities to community colleges, are picking up on the trend, adding classes and required readings on the subject. Membership in the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education -- an organization of colleges and universities that promotes sustainability through education, research, and professional development -- has increased dramatically since it was founded two years ago, from 35 schools to 675. "We call it an explosion," said Judy Walton, the association's acting executive director.

But nowhere has it exploded more than at ASU. Under Crow's direction, some 9,000 freshmen now study sustainability as part of their required first-year course work. One class, called ASU 101, includes a module in which the students calculate their environmental footprints, examine the economic and social benefits of the natural world, and study the science of climate change. One lesson made a clear distinction between sustainability and environmental advocacy: it's less "save the whales" than "save ourselves."

There are no strictly environmental groups on ASU's campus, save for a wing of the Green Party, but seven groups came up when I searched the university's student organizations Web site for "sustainability," most of them run by the same person, a bubbly student named Terra Ganem.

The School of Sustainability wasn't around when Ganem declared her major -- nonprofit leadership and management, with an informal concentration in sustainability -- so she's not officially enrolled. But she does have a job at the new school, and one of her primary goals is to create a sustainability coalition, a group of faculty, students, and staff that aims to reduce ASU's environmental footprint. She's also the founder of a student group called R.A.D. Recycling.

In fact, university administrators share so many of Ganem's aspirations and passions that she has joined forces with them. Why waste time railing against the school for its environmental crimes -- only 10 percent of consumer waste on campus is recycled or otherwise diverted from landfills, for instance -- when it's willing to work with you? "We're not holding picket signs anymore," she said. "We're shifting from a negative sort of activism -- we don't want war, we don't want something -- to let's build a model. We're not antiwar; we're pro-peace. We're not antipollution; we're pro-public transportation."

Neither Ganem nor the administrators who lament her imminent departure -- and they do -- have a clear idea of what she'll go on to do when she graduates next May, nor does anyone seem too concerned about this. Her course work as a nonprofit major focuses on community building and volunteer management, skills that transcend  the old notion of nonprofits as groups run by do-gooders without any real business smarts. Her job at the School of Sustainability was created expressly for her, and she figures she'll continue to forge her own path. "It's probably going to be something that doesn't even exist right now," Ganem said about her future career. Whatever it is, she told me, "it will scream sustainability. It will be zero-waste and a model for other businesses."

That goal was shared by many other students I met, including Chris Samila, who transferred from ASU's business school to its School of Global Studies (he changed his academic focus before the sustainability program came into being). Samila was the one student to appear with McKibben at the Phoenix library event. In 2007 he started the GreenSummit, an event designed to connect green companies, consumers, and students that drew 55 exhibitors and 4,000 attendees. This year's event is scheduled for September and will be held in the Phoenix Convention Center; by late July about 100 exhibitors had signed up. Samila now has contacts at just about every business with green aspirations in the greater Phoenix area, from Intel to AZ BioDiesel, and he feels good about his career prospects. 

Jobs may come easily to highly motivated students like Ganem and Samila, but what about others in the fledgling field of sustainability? The only change that ASU's career services center has made in response to the university's sustainability makeover is to add "sustainability" to a form that lists desirable knowledge sets to be ticked off by corporate recruiters. Yet the school is already getting calls from other universities that are eager for newly minted graduate students to teach sustainability, as well as from government agencies, renewable energy companies, and businesses looking to raise their environmental responsibility profile. One current student was hired part time by a global manufacturing firm to do sustainability audits.

These students may well be desirable not just because they know the new sustainability lingo -- indeed, they're creating it -- but because they have a working knowledge of subjects like integral calculus and transportation planning, which can always be put to use.

More important, their lack of political fire, which I initially counted as a deficit, may work to their advantage. They may regard environmentalism as outdated and elitist, but they see sustainability as inclusive. This particular program is teaching modern-day planetary stewardship in a pro-development state not otherwise known for espousing environmental values. Although we can't predict the extent to which these students will go on to change the world for the better, they are part of the most environmentally conscious generation we've ever seen, whether they know it or not. Ganem and Funke may call it sustainability, but to an old-school environmentalist like me, they're still speaking my language.