The Campus and Environmental Responsibility

Download or read book The Campus and Environmental Responsibility written by David J. Eagan and published by Jossey-Bass. This book was released on 1992 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a college commencement address a few years ago, poet, philosopher, and farmer WAndell Berry raised a simple but nearly impossible challenge. "Find work, if you can," he said, "that does no damage" to the world or its future. Had he addressed the same students four years before at their high school graduations, saying, "Find a college, if you can, that does not damage," where would they have gone? How many institutions have analyzed their resource flows of energy, water, materials, food, and waste? How many have attempted to minimize the damage that they do to the world that their graduates will inherit? How many of the proudest of our colleges and universities educate their graduates even to understand the problem? The answers are clearly "not many," perhaps not even "a few." But things are changing, and some of those changes are described in this volume of "New Directions for Higher Education." The contributors here share a vision of institutions reshaped to respond to the environmental challenges of this decade and beyond. This is partly a "how to do it" volume with practical suggestions. But it is, above all, an idea book designed to stimulate thinking about the evolution of institutions of higher education toward a twenty-first century agAnda that must take into account the finiteness of the earth, the logic of systems and their interrelatedness, and an emerging ethic about our role as citizens of the biotic community and our responsibilities to future generations. This is the 77th issue in the quarterly journal New Directions for Higher Education. For more information on the series, please see the Journals and Periodicals page.