When I was a sustainability faculty fellow here at the University of Vermont, I wanted to take this a little bit further and ask: What does it mean to be green on campus? What does it mean to make a campus green? What does it entail?

One of the things that campuses now have to negotiate is the current desire to showcase sustainability. How is it possible that we can become a more sustainable society? Develop new sustainable behaviors, sustainable technologies, ways of organizing politically around key issues to do with the environment. These are really pressing issues. And so some institutions have taken this issue up front and center such as the University of Vermont, Middlebury, Green Mountain College, and several others.

And some institutions aren't, it's not their priority, or there are other things going on. Like financial issues that make it less of an incentive to try to go down that route.

One example of ways in which campuses today are trying to be cutting-edge or to show that they are markers of progress is through experiments in sustainability. They are trying out new technologies, practices, research, they are trying out anything that they can to demonstrate how one could live sustainably, right? And part of what they do is greening the physical landscape of the campus and another area that they work on is integrating sustainability into the curriculum, there's many ways that they do this, both visibly and invisibly, like the insulation behind the wall that nobody is seeing on the campus tour, right?

So one of the things that we're interested in is 'what role does greening the campus play in the ongoing struggle to maintain nostalgia for the past, the current needs of the campus in the present, and projecting this future notion of progress all in the same space.