Sunday pre-conference session for students: a few highlights

• Universities have a problem of "institutional inaction by design." Students need to take the lead in setting new precedents. The funding for state universities comes less and less from the state, and more and more from students (I'm not sure what the numbers are for USU), so students should have more say in how their tuition dollars are being spent. Truman university undergraduate students started a Grassroots Environmentalism course, which was an service-learning course centered around projects in the community. The students in the course toured their local community (on bikes) to learn more about locally grown food, trails, and sustainable actions taken by community members (such as a successful ecovillage). One of the student projects was to provide educational seminars in the middle schools and high schools about biking and bike maintenance. Another project was to make planting boxes so nursing home residents could garden.
  
• Rice University puts incoming students into groups, based on their residence halls (we were told it was a bit like Harry Potter houses). Even if they leave the dorms they still belong to that group for their entire time at the university. Each of these "houses" comes up with their own community-based learning projects, which are led by senior students. There is a full-time community involvement planner who finds opportunities to connect the students to the local community through service.
  
• Philadelphia University closes for a Day of Service. Prior to the big day there is a big effort to identify service opportunities within the community, then students, faculty, and staff spend their service day doing as much good as possible. They also have 3 special "eco houses" with 5 students each who are competing for lowest resource usage--all the water, electricity, trash, etc. are closely monitored.
• Many different universities talked about bike share programs similar to the Aggie Blue Bikes. We are ahead of the game in this area!
  
• Northland College in Wisconsin has a student leader certification program. Students who get involved can move through level I, II, III, and IV (one level per year). The level IV students conduct training for the incoming freshmen, and the freshmen have service as a mandatory component of coming in to the university.
• UCLA, Berkeley, and other schools have passed student-led initiatives called The Green Initiative Fund (TGIF). The students voted to increase their fees by $4 or $5 per quarter, and the money generated went to student-led sustainability projects. The videos that were made for these campaigns are embedded below. An Action Toolkit to raise money for sustainability projects can be found at Campus In Power.

Keynote Speaker: Lester Brown

• Sustainability is about saving civilization, since "business as usual" is a death sentence
• Review of the scary state of the planet, such as rapid melting of the Greenland Ice sheet (which, if it melted completely would raise the oceans by >10 m).
• 31 states now have commercial wind farms, Algeria is building a solar thermal plant to generate electricity and send to Europe via transmission lines under the Mediterranean sea.