Continuum

On a breezy November afternoon in 2006, a small group of students waited in the Olpin Union Building theater on the University of Utah campus. Alexandra Parvaz, Lindsay Clark, Shane Smith, and other students affiliated with Sustainable Environments and Ecological Design, a group that goes by the acronym SEED, were frustrated. For more than a year they had fought for better recycling, less water waste, and more space for community gardening at the U, but with little success. The campus administration, they believed, wasn’t doing enough to work with them on their efforts.

“I felt the prevailing culture of the campus then was resistant to change,” says Parvaz BA’06 BS’06 MS’11. “They didn’t seem to account for wasted water, energy, and over-consumption.” The students had invited campus administrators to a public discussion about a “Sustainable Campus Initiative” on this November afternoon. For the meeting, the students planned to use a charrette method, a group planning technique for helping brainstorm with all stakeholders, with the aim of defusing confrontational attitudes and eventually coming together to promote joint ownership of solutions. The students wondered, though, whether anyone would even show up.

Soon, a crowd of more than 70 staff, faculty, and community members, as well as students, filled the small theater. The audience included a representative from the Utah Office of Energy Development, a Salt Lake City Council member, and a Utah legislator. The students with SEED were elated. They talked to the group about their frustrations and discussed the need for different interests to unite. They asked for the group’s ideas on what needed to be done to make the U an environmentally sustainable campus.

Alexandra Parvaz, who oversees the U’s organic gardens, stands in front of amaranth on the campus. As a student, she helped lead overall sustainability efforts. (Photo courtesy U Office of Sustainability)

The forum broke barriers. “Our perception of an administration closed to creating something like an office of sustainability was shattered,” Smith BA’01 BS’01 MAr’07 says. “It became clear that many staff at the University were already working to integrate ecological principles and that administrators were working hard to provide the necessary resources to support these activities.”

Indeed, just a month before their forum at the Union Building, Lorris Betz, then senior vice president of Health Sciences, had asked Bruce Gillars, the associate director of Space Planning and Management, to host a campuswide teleconference on sustainable practices for universities. After the October teleconference, and unbeknownst to students, Betz then had begun recruiting a group of faculty members to develop an action plan for what sustainability might look like at the U. At the forum, the students learned that faculty members and administrators were moving right beside them in support of campus sustainability. The U’s Facilities Office had already been taking measures toward sustainability, such as improving energy efficiency across campus. “Facilities was very much out ahead of us, but over time I believe SEED got everyone in the same room,” Smith says. As a result of that November meeting, and with the concept of campus sustainability firmly planted, the administrators, faculty and staff members, and students organized more forums, and they created a task force for designing an Office of Sustainability.

Six years later, the seeds of those efforts have grown. The University of Utah has a formal Office of Sustainability, and the campus is now nationally recognized for energy innovation and energy efficiency. The campus is on track to “water neutrality” by 2020 by capturing and using for irrigation only water that falls naturally on campus. The U is leading state efforts to design and construct energy-efficient, LEED-standardized buildings. And students have worked to legitimize their campus gardens as a valuable landscape feature and outdoor laboratory for academic research projects.

Last year, the U was one of five U.S. universities invited by the White House and the U.S. Department of Energy to be inaugural partners in the Better Buildings Challenge, a national initiative that has a goal of making American buildings 20 percent more energy efficient by 2020. And the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ranked the University of Utah third in the nation on its most recent list of college and university “green power partners,” for taking extraordinary efforts to reduce the environmental impacts of electricity use and support renewable energy development.

Paul Rowland, president of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), an advocacy group based in Colorado, says the University of Utah’s achievements are nationally significant, but the U still has room for improvement. The U is one of about 200 institutions that currently participate in the group’s Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating System. The number of institutions that participate is only about 10 percent of all U.S. colleges or universities, so the U’s efforts are noteworthy, especially in the area of co-curricular education, he says. “The whole host of activities they do with students—that’s clearly one of the places where they shine.”

Compared with other Pac-12 schools, the U ranks somewhere in the middle. Rowland’s group gave the U a “Bronze” rating last year for campus sustainability efforts that include education and research, operations, planning, administration, and innovation. The only other Pac-12 schools to complete his association’s voluntary assessment last year—the University of Colorado and Oregon State University—both received “Gold” ratings. Another group, the Sustainable Endowments Institute, gave Utah a B+ on its “Green Report Card” in 2011. To determine its grades, the institute evaluated more than 300 colleges in the United States and Canada in the areas of climate change and energy, green building, food and recycling, student involvement, and transportation. However, as The Chronicle of Higher Education noted in an article last year about the report cards, “sustainability is an inherently difficult thing to measure, and some sustainability advocates have worried that sustainability-rating systems may—like the U.S. News & World Report rankings—do more harm than good.”

Utah Transit Authority TRAX light rail stations, such as this one near Fort Douglas, are part of the University of Utah’s ongoing sustainability efforts. (Photo courtesy U Office of Sustainability)

Back in the late 1990s, sustainability was on few people’s radars, at the University of Utah or on most other campuses nationwide. But as a U undergraduate student in 1998, Kevin Emerson BS’02 remembers discovering a student group through the Lowell Bennion Community Service Center called Terra Firma (which means “solid earth” in Latin). The group was a collection of students involved in environmental awareness and activism. They took on controversial local issues such as the then-proposed Legacy Highway, and they worked to tackle environmental problems at the U, including campus waste. “There basically was no campus recycling when I was involved with Terra Firma,” says Emerson. “We actually dug through bags and bags of waste doing waste audits, to get a feel for how much recyclable material we were throwing away.”

While the group struggled to get administrators excited about recycling, Emerson and Elise Brown BS’04, serving as co-directors of Terra Firma, found more success with another project: a campus wind-power campaign. In the fall of 2001, they began promoting the concept that a $1 student fee each semester could help the University purchase renewable energy certificates to help offset some of its electricity use. “Part of that campaign was to help educate students about the story of our electricity, that it comes from fossil fuels, and primarily coal,” says Emerson. “That really motivated lots of students to say, ‘We have the [cleaner] technology today. We want to be responsible with the energy we use at our university that we are proud to go to.’ ”

More importantly, Emerson says, the concept was easy to understand. “One dollar every semester was palatable,” he says, “whereas the challenges with recycling at that point seemed almost insurmountable, because we had to prove where we were going to sell the cardboard and the plastic to make it cost-effective for the University. The wind-power campaign made [students] feel they could have an impact.”

Up until then, students consistently struggled to influence administration decisions regarding sustainability policies. “Students felt like there were major contradictions between what the University was doing and what we were learning,” says Emerson. “Students were saying, ‘We’re learning about all these amazing new technologies, or environmental problems, or entrepreneurial solutions, yet there’s not a clear pathway to help our university lead.’ ”

Yet sympathetic faculty members were also speaking up. “Over the years, there have been students and faculty who cared about issues related to sustainability. But those efforts tended to be isolated,” says Chris Hill, a Distinguished Professor of biochemistry. After Hill saw the widespread student enthusiasm for the wind-power campaign, he encouraged other faculty, staff, and supportive community members to also pitch in. “I realized we could open it up for other people to contribute, because the rate at which the University could purchase [renewable energy certificate] credits was much lower than most average people could, because it’s about economies of scale,” says Hill. At that time, $30 per person, per year of purchased renewable energy certificates was enough to offset much of the University’s overall electricity consumption. The achievement made the University one of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Top 10 Green Power Power Partners, and that national recognition continues today.

By 2005, “sustainability” was being discussed more frequently on university campuses across the country. Groups like AASHE were emerging to support a burgeoning crop of universities now aspiring to be “green.” By this time at the U, Terra Firma had disappeared, and a new group had sprung up to take its place: SEED. Concerned with growing local food and creating sustainable landscaping, this handful of students envisioned making a community garden for campus residents near the Bennion Center building then located on Officers Circle at Fort Douglas. After months of talking with administrators about their idea, they thought they had won approval. Instead, their garden proposal was rejected. The campus grounds supervisor worried about possible disturbances to the historical area, water damage, and the University not having enough manpower or budget to permanently maintain the gardens.

“We felt as if our work had been completely uprooted,” wrote Clark, in an Environmental Studies thesis in 2007 that documented SEED’s efforts. Other students, including Smith, saw the rejection as part of a larger pattern in the campus culture. “Administrators seemed to wait out the frustration [with sustainability issues] until a new batch of students came along,” Smith says. “I’m not trying to point fingers. It was clear that diving in was not the best way to appeal to the administrators and get higher level support.” According to Clark BA’07 BS’07, the garden rejection catalyzed a student movement to create a sustainability center for campus. “We realized that we needed to change our approach to how we would help the University of Utah become a more sustainable environment, and not to perpetuate a legacy of minimal student involvement,” she wrote.

Katie Sikkema harvests beans in one of the U campus gardens in 2011. (Photo courtesy U Office of Sustainability)

Still, individual faculty and staff members and administrators had tilled the ground for making sustainability possible at the U. Beginning in 1991, Norman Chambers, then assistant vice president for Auxiliary Services, and Alma Allred, director of Commuter Services, had steered the campus from building large parking structures by partnering with the Utah Transit Authority and expanding the U’s shuttle bus system. Faculty lecturer Fred Montague, a biology professor, encouraged students to champion sustainability through his Global Environmental Issues classes. Montague also established the University’s first campus food garden outside the Sill Center in 1996, with support of the dean of Undergraduate Studies, John Francis. And librarian Joan Gregory worked to educate colleagues at the Eccles Health Sciences Library about environmental issues and started recycling and composting for her workplace.

Among the most passionate and involved with campus sustainability was Craig Forster. Trained as a hydrogeologist, Forster held a research faculty position in the College of Architecture + Planning with a focus on urban system dynamics and sustainability. “He was kind of an idea man about campus,” says Dan McCool, director of the Environmental Studies Program. “He had to be entrepreneurial and constantly look for projects to work on. Craig was a wonderfully creative and innovative individual.” Early on, Forster encouraged students to generate their own projects and collaborate with administrators and faculty. He championed efforts to improve campus recycling, install an advanced watering system and a co-generation plant, and begin a campus farmers market.

After the faculty and staff members, students, and administrators had their meeting of the minds at the Union Building forum in 2006, students Parvaz, Clark, and Smith, as well as Emerson—who had recently returned from Edinburgh, Scotland, with a master’s degree in sustainability—set to work to craft a proposal for a formal Office of Sustainability at the U. In February 2007, they presented their proposal to the Campus Planning Advisory Committee. They received a unanimous endorsement. By April, University President Michael Young approved a pilot year for an Office of Sustainability. The program was to be a division of Facilities Management, housed in the Annex Building and headed by Forster, and with one full-time staff member, Jen Colby, who had been the SEED students’ staff adviser, serving as a sustainability coordinator.

Among Forster’s initial efforts in the first months of the new Office of Sustainability was helping students begin crafting a fund that would empower them and other students to plan and manage sustainability projects around campus. He envisioned creating a cross-disciplinary sustainability curriculum with degree programs, and he talked about the need for a center for sustainability research. To help achieve those aims, a President’s Sustainability Advisory Committee—composed of students, staff, faculty, administrators, and community members—was formed to provide guidance for Office of Sustainability staff and to review policy recommendations to be forwarded to the president.

A year later, on Earth Day 2008, Young signed the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment. The pledge placed the U among 650 other colleges and universities nationwide that were formally agreeing to achieve sustainability and completely reduce their carbon emissions. “That really demonstrated commitment to the issue,” says Emerson. “It gave University students, staff, and faculty members something to point to and say, ‘We’re going to do this.’ ”

The following November, Forster fell from a ledge and died while hiking in Zion National Park. But his death only strengthened the resolve of the administration and students alike to achieve sustainability goals at the U. A memorial service was organized for him in the College of Architecture’s Bailey Hall. “The room was absolutely packed,” remembers McCool. “There was definitely a sense among the speakers and the people in that room that it would be a disservice to Craig’s memory if we let this thing die on the vine.”

A computer screen inside the U’s natural gas-powered cogeneration plant shows the turbine details. The plant supplies 10 to 15 percent of the U’s electricity. (Photo by Stephen Speckman)

The milestones accrued after that. In April 2009, the Sustainable Campus Initiative Fund—an idea modeled on the wind-power campaign—was approved. A $2.50 student fee each semester would allow students seeking to develop economic, social, or scientific solutions to environmental problems. In 2010, the University completed its Environmental and Energy Stewardship Initiative, or “Climate Action Plan,” for steering the University toward zero carbon emissions by 2050. And in 2010, the U added a Sustainability Research Center, designed to bring researchers together from different
disciplines and levels for funded research in sustainability-related topics. A sustainability curriculum and professorship program also was established to integrate sustainability more firmly into the University’s curriculum.

Today, sustainability is an emerging cultural canopy at the University of Utah. “[The change] has definitely been evolutionary,” says Myron Willson MAr’97, who became the director of the Office of Sustainability in 2009. “Something I’ve really come to understand is that people want to do better. They want to be more sustainable. They want to reduce energy use. But oftentimes, they don’t know how. So our office provides a clearinghouse of answers.” Current projects include requiring University-wide green purchasing practices, which now are voluntary. Willson’s office also is working with senior administrators and Facilities Management leaders to create a revolving loan fund to finance more sustainability projects. And the office continues to support departmental Green Teams that encourage administrators and faculty and staff members to adopt sustainable behaviors at work and at home.

With the University’s goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 now a priority, the campus faces an enormous and exciting challenge, says Bruce Gillars BS’98, the U’s director of space planning and management. “Think about that for a minute,” Gillars says. “We’ve set a goal for the University of Utah having the same exact carbon footprint in 2050 as we did when we turned our first shovel of dirt in 1850. This will take the entire intellectual capital of the University to achieve. But think about what we’ll learn. Think about what we’ll be able to teach.” And think about what a difference for the planet those students, administrators, and faculty and staff members will have made, not just with that achievement, but with their myriad steps along the way.

—Ross Chambless MA’11 interned for the Office of Sustainability before graduating with a degree in environmental humanities from the U. He now works as planting coordinator for TreeUtah, a Salt Lake City-based nonprofit group dedicated to tree planting and education in the state.

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Five things you should know about Fred Montague: He’s 4.5 billion years old, and he’s a large animal, a heterotroph, a flux structure, and a killer. That’s the résumé Montague wants you to keep in mind, not just about him but also about you. It’s the backdrop, he says, for every other assumption you should have about the world—we are part of, not separate from, nature and our environment. If for no other reason than this, we should not be making such a mess of things.

Montague’s résumé also includes these entries: University of Utah professor (lecturer) emeritus of biology, wildlife biologist, author, artist, and gardener. Among his legacies at the U are two organic gardens that students plant and tend each year, one just east of Pioneer Memorial Theatre and one west of the Sterling Sill Center.

He remembers meeting, 16 years ago, with the committee that had to approve this addition to the U’s Service Learning Program. Other Service Learning initiatives had obvious beneficiaries: refugees, adults who can’t read, at-risk youths. And who would be the recipients of your project, the committee wanted to know. “I thought for a moment in a cold sweat and panic,” Montague remembers. “And then I blurted out: ‘They haven’t been born yet.’ ”

The simple answer would have been “the community food banks that will receive the produce grown in the gardens.” But Montague always takes the long view. What he had in mind was the next generation that would benefit if he taught the current generation how to grow food without resorting to pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, and patented seeds. Agribusiness, he argues, takes the short view, which is why its practices tolerate erosion, groundwater contamination, toxins in the food chain, and excessive use of fossil fuels, he says.

Fred Montague works on a drawing in the art studio at his Summit County home. His artwork can be found in private collections around the world.

“I dispense guilt and despair,” says Montague. But gardens are the flip side of this jeremiad; in the garden, he finds joy and peace—and answers.

In 2009, Montague’s own publishing imprint, Mountain Bear Ink, released the limited-edition Gardening: An Ecological Approach, a book that took him 13 years to create. The book begins with a polemic about the unsustainable practices of industrial agriculture, moves on to textbook discussions of botany, and ends with every detail you’d ever need to plant any edible thing.

Montague painstakingly hand-lettered the 400 pages himself, and the book is liberally illustrated with his own pen-and-ink drawings. Each book is signed and numbered.

It was this same down-to-earth intensity that made him a popular teacher during his 17-year career at the U. When the Biology Department announced that it was eliminating his untenured position a decade ago, remembers U cell biologist David Gard, “the students raised an uproar,” and the position was reinstated.

Two woodblock prints by Fred Montague: //Raven Chat//, top, and //Wolfpack—Alpha Pair//.

James Ruff, a biology graduate student who took classes from Montague and was his teaching assistant, says Montague enlivened the academic subjects he taught. “He bridged the gap between data, theories, and what those mean to you and me,” Ruff says. “And he still left room for wonder and inspiration from the natural world.”

Before retiring in 2010, Montague taught environmental science and wildlife ecology, was a recipient of a Distinguished Teaching Award, and was academic advisor to the Biology Department’s 1,000 students. On the first day of class, he would typically ask his students to write down five things about themselves. Answers usually included academic major, religious affiliation, gender. But what he wanted them to recognize was that each student could also be described in other ways: as old as the universe, primate, killer. Although vegans might balk at this last descriptor, Montague delights in pointing out that carrots are no less an integral part of nature than a cow. And what’s a bean, he adds, but a plant embryo.

“Every atom in your body was not created the day you were born,” he reminded his students. “You are made up of the environment. So don’t you want it to be clean?… If everyone realized they are environment with a spirit, everyone would be an environmentalist, including Newt Gingrich.”

When he served as academic advisor, first at Purdue University and then at the University of Utah, Montague also liked to challenge students to think hard about why they were pursuing their major. Write your obituary as if you had died at a ripe old age, he would tell them, and figure out what you would have wanted your life to add up to.

This ink drawing, titled //Calico Butterfly//, is among Fred Montague’s artwork.

Montague’s own epiphany about the future came as a sophomore at Purdue in the mid-1960s. He was majoring in engineering, just as his father had done. But one fateful day, his English professor introduced the class to Robert Frost’s poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” with its last stanza that includes the lines, “My object in living is to unite/My avocation and my vocation/As my two eyes make one in sight.”

Montague had grown up in Indiana, and what had captivated him was the outdoors—how things lived, not how things were put together. He liked to hike, fish, and roam the fields around Lafayette, and even in high school he began to notice with dismay as wildlife habitats and small farms were converted into industrial farms. So, not long after reading that Robert Frost poem, he changed his major to wildlife sciences.

After college and a three-year stint in the Navy, he returned to Purdue for a doctorate in wildlife ecology, supplementing his grad-student income by selling his nature drawings and woodcuts at Midwestern art fairs. His art can now be found in public and private collections in all 50 states and in 30 countries.

Fred Montague works on a raised bed at his home in Summit County. He also founded two organic gardens at the U that students tend each year.

He and his wife Patricia (they met in a geology class in college; he calls her “the smartest person I’ve ever met”) moved to Utah in 1993 to escape the Midwest mold she was sensitive to. Once here, they began searching for the cleanest air they could find within driving distance of the U, settling on 20 acres of sagebrush and scrub oak in Summit County. What sold them was the lichen they found on the rocks there, because lichens only grow where the air is clean.

They built their dream, green homestead, and Montague built most of their furniture by hand. There is a greenhouse and what he calls a “modest vegetable garden” covering 900 square feet.

Fred Montague stands in his studio with a 1913 “Golden Jobber” press that he uses for his print and book making.

“Environmentalists make lousy neighbors”—they’re always hectoring people to recycle—“but great ancestors,” Montague says. “Ecology emphasizes relationships more than individual entities.” And that makes it subversive, because “the dominant world view reveres the supremacy of the individual,” fostering the exploitation of nature, he says.

Montague is fond of testing our assumptions about the world, starting with the notion that “humans are No. 1,” and moving on through 129 other things we take for granted, including “nature equals resources,” “time is linear,” and “science and technology can solve all our problems.” Phrases like endangered species and extinction are “mealy-mouthed and wishy-washy,” he says. The words he prefers: condemned species and eviction, which acknowledge humanity’s role in the process, he says. Not one to hold his tongue, he argues that universities (including his own) are often “research arms of industries” and that most students are learning how to “cash in” rather than be part of a sustainable larger community.

“Politicians say ‘as soon as the economy is fixed, we’ll take care of the environment,’ ” Montague complains. “The assumption is that nature occurs inside a chain-link fence.” But people and their economies “exist with the permission of nature.” What really makes the world work, he notes, are not humans but bacteria, fungi, plants. “Without bacteria, ecosystems would collapse in a matter of months.”

So the trick to saving (insert your words of choice here: coral reefs, forests, biodiversity) and preventing (radioactive waste, dead zones, oil spills) is “responsible restraint,” he says, not “sustainable development.” Yes, “sustainable” is crucial, but “development” assumes we shouldn’t take a hard look at our dependence on economic growth.

Montague holds an art book he made that features hand lettering and ink-drawing illustrations.

Of course, creating an economy not based on growth, exploitation, and convenience isn’t easy. Even a professor of ecology might be known to drive 26 miles each way to teach his classes, he notes with a wry nod to his own inconsistencies.

These days, Montague occasionally gives guest lectures but mostly tends to his land. The U’s Edible Gardens, meanwhile, continue to flourish. Although there was concern that this prime University real estate might be turned into building sites or parking lots, says garden coordinator Alexandra Parvaz BA’06 BS’06 MS’11, the gardens have been put under the auspices of the U’s Office of Sustainability, and there is an effort afoot to write them into the U’s master plan.

A coalition of students and faculty launched a garden preservation campaign, and the result is not only four-season produce (more than 2,000 pounds in 2011) that is sold to the campus cafeteria and broader community, but also an integration of the gardens into the curricula of disciplines ranging from entomology to civil engineering.

So, yes, we should be filled with guilt and despair. But we should also celebrate Earth and the life on it, Montague says. Or, as he puts it, “Many organisms—from carrots to chickens—die so that we may live. Say grace.”

—Elaine Jarvik is a Salt Lake City-based writer and playwright, and a frequent contributor to Continuum.

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