In June 2007, Kalamazoo College became one of 336 institutions to pledge carbon neutrality by 2050. By 2010, a committee had formalized a Climate Action Plan (CAP) detailing how the college would achieve this goal. But implementing the plan has not been easy. Interviews with students, faculty, and staff pointed to issues of limited resources, understaffing, stopgap solutions, and conflicting institutional priorities.

Former College President Wilson-Oyelaran signed the commitment, originally known as the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC), at the urging of student activists. The ACUPCC has since been re-branded as the Carbon Commitment through Second Nature, an organization that works with colleges and institutions on climate change issues. Today, K is one of nearly 700 other institutions who have committed to prioritizing sustainability through Second Nature.

Student activism has historically played a crucial role in pushing sustainability initiatives forward as an institutional priority. When the Hicks Student Center was built in 2006, it was also LEED certified, thanks to student activism. When the Hicks Renovation Committee decided against certification, students protested this decision at a Board of Trustees meeting over the summer. This decision created the precedent that led to the LEED certification of the Arcus Center and Fitness and Wellness Center.

In 2008, Wilson-Oyelaran formed a planning committee to develop K’s long-term roadmap for achieving carbon neutrality, the CAP. In July 2009, K created the Sustainability Advisory Committee (SAC) to advise the President and Board of Trustees on the implementation of the plan. The finalized plan was submitted to ACUPCC and Kalamazoo College community in 2010. Today, the CAP is headed by Susan Lindemann, Director of Facilities Management.

The CAP calls for annual reports measuring the College’s carbon emissions. This report “takes into effect everything that could produce carbon at any level of the system,” Sustainability Intern Camden Gardner ‘21 explained, “[and] ranges from the annual operating budget to how many air-miles students fly on study abroad.”

However, an annual report has not been issued since 2014, and the College is currently missing six years of data: 2012, 2013, and 2015-2018. The College has committed to achieving a 25% reduction in carbon emissions by 2020, relative to their original benchmark set in 2008. “Our problem now is we’re coming up on a deadline. We’re supposed to be at 25 percent reduction and we don’t even know how close we are,” said Gardner.

The last report, issued in 2014, reveals a 14.98% decrease from the 2008 benchmark, “however this did not account for food consumption, which is about 15% of a college’s carbon emissions,” according to Gardner.

Though the CAP called for the production of an annual emissions report, the plan does not specify how the report will be compiled, or who will compile it. The responsibility of compiling the report was taken on by committee chair Paul Manstrom, former Associate Vice President of Facilities Management. Manstrom hired Sustainability Interns and together they attempted to complete the reports. “That’s not legislated anywhere, it [was] just out of the goodness of his heart,” explained Professor of Biology Binney Girdler.

Sustainability Intern Malak Ghazal ‘19 explained that reports were usually completed through “either a SIP or a student intern who specifically devoted all of their time to that.” However, the SAC eventually stopped meeting, and the lack of oversight and devoted personnel led to the gap in reports.

The dissolution of SAC appears to lack an official, documented explanation. According to Jim Prince, outgoing Vice President for Business and Finance, while SAC was originally tasked with the implementation of the CAP, “the committee began to stretch out into other areas, which made it more difficult to support with limited resources. That, coupled with a series of large capital projects that made demands on [Paul Manstrom’s] time, is probably the best explanation for why it eventually diffused.”

Dr. Girdler, who took part in writing the original plan and has served on the SAC, remarked that “a lot of colleges have an entire department full of professionals and interns doing this work and we don’t have anyone, and it’s a disservice to the planet, the community, the students that go here.”

Because the data came from departments and institutions across the College, Manstrom had to understand K’s organizational structure and build relationships with key stakeholders in the process. Despite these efforts, no system or process for regular data collection was ever implemented across campus. This lack of policy has led to a highly inefficient process for the Sustainability Interns, who have to locate and then manually enter information from receipts dating back to 2015.

“The problem is not only now do we have to fill out for the 2018 fiscal year, but we have to do every year since then because no one’s ever entered the data points,” explained Gardner. “That’s not a long term solution.”

After its unintentional hiatus, the Sustainability Advisory Committee reconvened in January 2019 with biweekly meetings. Associate Professor of English Amelia Katanski and Dr. Girdler were crucial in helping to organize the committee. When Dr. Katanski realized that the committee had not been meeting, she reached out to Lindemann, Chief Sustainability Officer for SAC, and offered to help find committee members and schedule meetings. The committee now includes 10 members across faculty, staff, and students. Faculty and staff are appointed on a three-year basis and students on a 1-year basis.

“Key responsibilities include measuring and tracking the College’s progress toward its Climate Commitment goals, providing a means for the different campus constituencies to have input in sustainability initiatives, and advising the Office of the President on how to best meet the goals,” Lindemann explained. This includes the creation of a data collection system across campus. “Creating a system where it is easy to report and compile data will allow us to figure out where there are successes and where improvements need to be made,” committee member Sara Stockwood commented, who serves as the Director of the Center for Environmental Stewardship.

“We should really be better. We are capable. We’ve got such student brainpower and initiative and we’ve got a lot of very competent people who are doing too many things,” Dr. Girdler said.

For Ghazal, “there’s a big separation between sustainability and the rest of campus functions where ideally we want to see those things become part of our normal culture.” Dr. Katanski remarked that SAC “doesn’t want to just have some numbers that look good. We really want to engage the campus and to change our culture as a campus to really foreground sustainability.”

View K’s progress towards reducing emissions here.