If we are to arm ourselves and
our leaders with effective defenses against the coming air raids we have to
stop taking sides.
By Dave Newport, LEED
AP
This year my genes strain to engage against the increasing media
strafings of campus sustainability and related practices like diversity,
recycling, and divestment.
Open the bomb bay doors?
Tempting.
One major fusillade came from George
Will’s column in the Washington Post.
The Pulitzer Prize winning writer sniped that campus
sustainability amounted to a new brand of fundamentalism and propaganda that
bloats campus administrations and thereby drives up the cost of college. Campus
sustainability had, in Mr. Will’s view,
“gone from a minor thread of campus activism to becoming the master
narrative of what ‘liberal education’ should seek to accomplish.”
Then he went all scorched Earth.
To combat this, Mr. Will wrote, campuses should “eliminate every
[campus staff] position whose title contains the word “sustainability,” — and,
while we are at it, kill off every position with, “diversity,” “multicultural”
or “inclusivity” in their work plan too.
Wow, talk about collateral damage. Well, if I am going to be
KIA, let me die alongside our brothers and sisters in the diversity,
multicultural and inclusivity movements.
Hard to love any folks more than those.
Several of us felt the need to parry Mr. Will’s thrust. The
University of Arizona’s seasoned campus sustainability veteran Ben Champion
chose to use the attack as an opportunity
to create a vision for peace, not war.
“The
snapshot of campus sustainability efforts depicted by George Will … is not one
we recognize… As society is increasingly challenged by environmental change and
its costs to current and future generations, campus sustainability efforts
offer increasing value to our students and the broader Tucson community. This
is exactly the kind of innovative, efficiency-seeking and entrepreneurial
spirit in education that can be embraced by progressive and conservative
thinkers alike.
Nicely done. But my recycling friends are getting shot up
too.
An October New
York Times Op-Ed tore into
recycling as unsustainable financially, among other faults.
“Recycling
has been relentlessly promoted as a goal in and of itself: an unalloyed public
good and private virtue that is indoctrinated in students from kindergarten
through college. As a result, otherwise well-informed and educated people have
no idea of the relative costs and benefits.”
In response, the National
Recycling Coalition launched the bombers and began carpet-bombing in retaliation.
And through the year, the campus fossil fuels divestment
movement has drawn rational
and marginalizing opponents alike. And many combatants have responded
back and forth.
Is this the start of WWIII?
New rules of
engagement
A wayward turn of my
life back in the day landed me firmly in enemy infested political territory;
chairman of the local county commission. Great experience—as long as I could
stand it. Wisely, the people had a shorter fuse and cast me out.
But political trench warfare, ad hominems, and illegal campaign tactics taught me something I try
to remember that can neutralize my Irish DNA: restraint. That is, when
attacked, think about responding but:
- Don't do it unless you have to and can turn it to your advantage. Apply a high bar to whether you absolutely have to respond so as not to give the attack an extended news cycle and de facto legitimacy.
- Never never never repeat the attacker’s criticisms and try not to mention the attacker by name in the response very much. Why help build their brand?
- Never never never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel. That is, going after the media that carries these attacks is a loser. You are not going to outgun Big Media, the Lamestream Media, Corporate Media, or whatever snarky label you cook up to suggest that the media is a conspiracy funded by whatever bad guy to distort truth. Even Fox News…
- If you do respond be positive, make suggestions for improvements, be a leader, not a brawler.
In short: make love, not war.
All we are saying is
give peace a chance…
This may sound counter-intuitive or may be just plain wrong,
but if we are to arm ourselves and our leaders with effective defenses against
the coming air raids we have to stop taking sides.
Huh?
To avoid Armageddon, our campus leaders need a new paradigm
that’s effective in a political world dominated by ideological one-liners
instead of logic and reason: truthiness. They need a
political positioning system that maps their successful journeys with senators,
business leaders, wealthy donors, and community leaders who may be more akin to
Mr. Will’s worldview. We risk leaving our leaders defenseless if we don’t
design and deliver new tools they can apply in the new political dynamics.
These are not tools of
appeasement or apology nor are they the same tools we give them to support
on-campus sustainability efforts. Green buildings, renewable energy and student
preferences etc. are all valuable on-campus tools to advance sustainability. However,
in the bombastic, partisan political world off-campus, these just fuel the
ideological fires burning in polemic politics that regards sustainability as
little more than progressive propaganda that must be snuffed out.
Instead, we and our campus leaders must remain dogmatically
agnostic in the public realm lest we be branded of one ilk or the other.
Indeed, we will be told to roll back sustainability if we cannot reframe it as
an outcome laden with benefits consistent with campus mission—and devoid of
blame for the many plights society now faces.
Obviously, what is done is done. The question now is: what
are we going to do to fix things.
Today’s campus leaders need to showcase how a sustainability
track solves vexing problems facing the campus, the community, and society at
large—without the blame game.
Yet this limited liability approach may not be our natural
tendency. Remembering my Irish genes. We know that modern climate change, for
instance, has an anthropogenic root and we are quick to argue with or dismiss those that
disagree. However, a significant
fraction of our business and political leadership don’t think people are frying
the planet—or maybe that the planet is even frying at all.
Do we want our leaders to spend time fighting that fight?
Our job is to capture new territory by legitimizing sustainability action as mainstream
and consistent with the central mission of the campus.
Two thousand years ago Sun Tzu wrote in the classic warfare tome, The Art of War, "the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." Embraced by famous warriors and political strategists alike, nothing Sun Tzu wrote about conflict has changed in 2,000 years.
Two thousand years ago Sun Tzu wrote in the classic warfare tome, The Art of War, "the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." Embraced by famous warriors and political strategists alike, nothing Sun Tzu wrote about conflict has changed in 2,000 years.
Let’s play to win sustainability actions, not arguments.
Ready the firing
squad
Some may want to offer me a last smoke before my execution
for saying this, but we must realize our attackers are not all wrong. There are valid arguments
on both sides of most debates that are easily lost in the fog of war. And if we engage in combat,
we don’t engage in dialogue.
At least for this sustainabilista, I have been guilty of
overreach; trying to conquer too much territory with a sustainability argument.
I mean, do I really need my brain surgeons’ or musicians’
education to focus much on sustainability? Do we really want to become so
stringent in campus discourse that confronting dissenting ideas is chilled by
political correctness limits on free speech? Have we become so focused on the
measurable resource conservation elements of sustainability (e.g. recycling rates, GHG emissions, etc) that we lose sight
of social justice and remain missioned by white majority practitioners
imprisoned in privilege? When campus sustainabilistas are ~90% white, how can
we say we represent or even understand the balance needed on campus or in
society?
I fight every day with my ego and DNA to get over myself. Not
winning those fights enough but fortunately I have plenty of reinforcements from folks
that realize we don’t do our friends any favors by bullshitting them. Some of
the people I love the most are the ones that are hardest on me because tough
love is honest love.
Campus sustainability has an honest heart and wants to
accomplish honest and good things. If we engage in war then that’s where we’ll
be.
Remember that
happiness thing?
I’ve gushed before about sustainabilistas needing more fun
and happiness
in our lives if we are to live long and prosper doing this work. Exactly two
years ago I rambled:
“Sustainability
professionals are no good to the world dead, depressed, or
dependent. We have too much life to affirm, too many lives to help.
Life is good. Let's get some.
My
take-home is to play my git-box more, turn down some of the bad habits, turn up
the volume on compassion, remember I can’t fix everything—and kick serious ass
on the problems I can. Tune in and turn up the music of life.”
And war, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
Peace be with you.
-30-
- I published a more respectable and in-depth version of this topic in the October 2015 issue of Sustainability: The Journal of Record. I borrowed some of that article for this blog with the permission of the magazine. Thanks.
- I published a more respectable and in-depth version of this topic in the October 2015 issue of Sustainability: The Journal of Record. I borrowed some of that article for this blog with the permission of the magazine. Thanks.
