Campuses Getting Greener: IT has a Role to Play

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Campuses Getting Greener: IT has a Role to Play

8/17/2005

By Terry Calhoun

One of the great things about working where I do is that I have an excuse, really a mandate, to spend a lot of time scanning the higher education environment to see what kinds of changes are happening and report on those – not just IT, but student life, campus planning, budget planning, really just about everything.

For some time I’ve been trying to draft up a long article about the relationship between information technology on campus and sustainability efforts. I know the relationship is there, even if it’s just as minor as the fact that (like planners) IT people and sustainability coordinators work across the boundaries between departments and disciplines a lot!

So, I’ve occasionally written pieces in this column, and here’s one again. But I am really having difficulty getting that larger piece finished. If you have some thoughts about that I’d love to hear them: terry.calhoun@scup.org.

This past week, in particular, I was struck by how frequently IT in areas relating to sustainability kept popping up in the news. Note that “sustainability” d'es not mean just environmental sustainability, in what the leaders in the field call “the Triple Bottom Line.” That phrase is used to expand, for businesses, “the traditional company reporting framework to take into account not just financial outcomes but also environmental and social performance”:see Wikkipedia. Too many, the social consequences part of that includes individual health as well.

So, with that definition in mind, let’s take a look at a string of news items from this week that, to me, have some sustainability thread running through them, despite being “IT” news stories.

CMU's new School of Computer Science is Pretty Green. In this new Carnegie Mellon University (PA) building, which is shared by the school’s Interactive Systems Laboratories and its Institute for Software Research International, CMU is “walking the walk” and “talking the talk.” And, as Brad Hochberg, energy manager for the university, says. “This is not about economics. This is about education. It's about demonstrating to students, staff and faculty that there are alternatives to fossil fuel energy. But, over time, with improved technology and application, it will become economical." IT students got involved with this project to build a digital kiosk which displays a comparision between the new building and the old one, with regard to how many tons of greenhouse gases are being emitted. The display also shows how much electricity, real-time, is being created by the 120 solar panels on the building’s roof, in contrast to how much energy is being used inside the building.

Saving the World With Cell Phones. At the University of California, Berkeley, researchers want to “slip a pollution detector into the mix” of stuff inside your cell phone. These cheap wireless sensors would “sniff out” environmental pollutants, biological weapons, or radiation; providing fine granularity with wide scale coverage, giving central servers somewhere a great deal of valuable information to do good things with.