Our Intellectual Challenge

By Liz Bloomhardt

Published February 24, 2010

When Kermit sings “It’s not that easy being green,” we can commiserate.

I asked Bill Chameides, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment, about feelings of environmental burnout. Although he flat-out admitted to having little real sense of the mood on campus, he noted that burnout is a problem in general. “It’s definitely true that the public has a hard time keeping their attention on a given issue for a significant amount of time, and I worry about that a lot,” he said.

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Do we lag or do we lead?

By Liz Bloomhardt

Published February 4, 2010

Everyone loves a list, especially the ranked kind.

As a culture, we rank things as varied as celebrities, basketball teams and cities. Most relevantly to the discussion at hand, we rank universities. Or at least U.S. News & World Report does, and a host of others. These titans of opinion don’t just rank the best, they rank the best by program, and the best by size, weight and hair color. It should be no surprise then that there are rankings and report cards that attempt to judge a school’s sustainability efforts and greenness.

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