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A university strives for the high road to sustainability
Outside of curriculum changes, how
has Pomona approached sustainability?
Just before I arrived, the college had
developed a policy on building standards for sustainability, but we’ve
pushed that forward in several directions. In particular, we now have a
policy of LEED Gold for all new construction, and if anything, to go beyond
LEED Gold. We’re really trying to
develop our own standards, which
are in some cases California-specific.
The LEED standards are fine in general across the country, but one of the
things we find is that water use is so
important in California, but it may not
be as important in some other part
of the country. The LEED standards
are really too generic, so we’re going
beyond those standards.
There are always challenges, certainly with the balance between LEED
standards, on the one hand — reducing
energy costs and sustainability — and
the aesthetics. We just have a new residence hall underway. And there were
two groups, both on campus and on the
board of trustees, and one group wanted
to build a traditional building that in
California would have red tile roofs,
and another group wanted solar panels
covering the roofs. We decided with the
You also have criticisms
of the carbon credit
approach. Why?
It’s not that I’m totally
opposed to it. I’m a skeptic about the zero-carbon
concept and, in particular,
about moving toward that
by buying carbon credits.
There are certainly students who
think we should go carbon neutral
immediately. We have an endowment,
we’re a relatively well-off college, why
don’t we just start buying these carbon
credits? And we could. If we wanted to,
we could spend some money to become
carbon neutral immediately, just by
buying carbon credits. I think that’s
a really false sense of sustainability.
In my view carbon credits are underpriced — the cost of serious investment to reduce energy [use] is much
higher than that. We’re spending more
money than that, for example, to build
solar roofs, and if we were to divert
How do you balance
sustainability against
other concerns?
We had a sort of funny
discussion. Several people
on campus, both faculty
and students, were argu-
ing that Pomona should
change the fundamental
nature of our students,
that we were being very
nonsustainable by drawing students
from all over the country because of
course they fly long distances to get
there … so we should just be local. So
you can go too far in that direction. To
me the goal of getting a group of stu-
dents together and teaching them out-
weighs the fact that some of them have
to fly long distances. So you need to take
everything with a grain of salt. If you try
and make everything as carbon neutral
as possible, then you are not going to be,
in the long run, creating the educational
experience that’s going to create the
future scientists who are going to solve a
big problem. s
