What if the TTC announced that students attending college or university, would no longer have to pay to ride the rocket?
According to the University of Victoria’s Professor Michael M’Gonigle, that idea may not be as farfetched as you think. In fact, the co-founder of Greenpeace International envisions this, and many other benefits, in what has been dubbed “the campus sustainability movement.”
His new book, Planet U: Sustaining the World, Reinventing the University puts the task of saving our planet in the hands of North America’s post-secondary institutions. Over the phone, M’Gonigle spells out how Planet U is going to do more than just use up paper.
Why should universities be taking a lead in the environmental movement as opposed to any other institution?
You know it’s funny, universities are kind of like social wallpaper. There everywhere but people don’t pay much attention to them and kind of take them for granted. Universities are a huge industry, I mean look at Toronto: 200,000 people in the city are students. Just recently, U of T announced that it would be sourcing all food for its cafeterias from local sustainable producers. That’ll have a massive impact on agriculture in Southern Ontario. You multiply that across the 6,500 higher education institutions in the United States alone, and you got a massive economic, political, and social impact on the planet.
Is it difficult to cut through the university’s power structure?
Well yeah. In fact, that’s what our book is all about. Universities have huge public relations arms, fundraising, and alumni relations. The offices of sustainability coordinators are usually pretty small, and low-level in bureaucracy. They should be much higher up.
The campus sustainability movement has been around a few years, and it’s focused on things like getting rid of cars, water use, food sourcing, and planning.
There is no single university which has really done what we say needs to be done: to be what we call a “planetary university”-that is, a university that commits itself to being a model at the local level of global sustainability. For that to happen the process of decision making, the governing structure has to open up and change in a quite innovative direction.
Some critiques perceive the sustainability movement as an expensive solution. What do you think?
That is very interesting. There are many places which have shown how much better it is.
For example, at the University of Colorado, they don’t build new parking spaces anymore and they save some several million dollars a year. They can take that money and inject it into the bus systems. Since they won’t need to buy a car, students can save money when they come to school. Here in Victoria, the Galloping Goose Trail is a city-wide bike trail that now has a big impact on real estate values. People want to be close to it so they can bike. So, it’s not a matter of being expensive-it’s a matter of how you direct the money.
