Sustainability and the College Campus

St. Olaf College loves to talk about sustainability.  Our wind turbine heralds the approach to the college.   We chart the waste in the cafeteria.  My dorm just won a sustainability competition.   Reading David Orr's article, "Architecture and Education"  made me think about other ways in which St. Olaf is sustainable, and the potential future importance of our attempts to take care of the environment and not be wasteful.  The article's main purpose was to convince the reader that, "In the largest sense, what we must do to ensure human tenure on the earth is to cultivate a new standard that defines beauty as that which causes no ugliness somewhere else or at some later time."  St. Olaf seeks to do this with the programs and ideas I mentioned above, but also with the new Regents center.   Orr's article specifically discussed a progressive ecological science building at Oberlin College, but his descriptions of an ecologically sustainable building reminded me of Regents.  Regents is complete with sustainable toilets and a greenhouse, and incorporates the practical ideas of the curriculum taught within into the very architecture of the building.  This building probably does the best job of any on campus of combining physical surroundings with the teachings of the curriculum, again tying into the idea of landscape and the hope of making the entire college experience a reflection of values and what can be learned.