Can We Build Our Way Out?
Since last you heard from me, I moved back to school and am once again immersed in the excitement and constant activity that characterizes life here at Columbia University. As a new member of environmental peer educators at Barnard (we call ourselves the EcoReps), I have been learning so much as to what goes into making a campus green. While our activities to promote sustainable living vary widely in approach (including guerilla art tactics, which I promise to devote a post to later), I feel compelled to discuss a specialized tour the Ecoreps were given by the director of Facilities at Barnard.
Going into the tour, I expected to specifically hear all about physical infrastructure. After all, we were going to see heating and cooling systems, pipes, machines and the like, to understand how much energy it actually takes to run my college. In actuality, the engineering aspect of Barnard’s carbon emissions was only part of the tour’s purpose. With every stop, whether on the roof of a building to see water being cooled for air conditioning or deep down in underground tunnels to check out the boilers, the director of Facilities, Julio, expressed his conviction that “you cannot build your way out of a problem.”
The problem in this case, is the monetary and physical restrictions to installing the newest and most energy efficient technologies that would reduce more of Barnard’s energy wastes. While Barnard is doing what it can with its budget and small perimeter that lies within 116th and 120th streets, such as using a “bio-digester” in its sole cafeteria to chop up food scraps (food that cannot be delivered to City Harvest) to decrease its surface area, it cannot accommodate important technologies like programmable thermostats. What must happen then, Julio explained, is that the students and faculty must step up and change their own behavior (like wearing sweaters so that the heat can be lowered all the time) that would then allow facilities to conserve energy with the infrastructure it has.
This is exactly why a group like the Ecoreps is necessary. I am here to work on the behavioral and inspirational aspect needed to reduce Barnard’s carbon footprint. Technology and infrastructure will help the world to waste less indeed, but we cannot build our way out of our problems! Everyone must act as everyday agents in this environmental movement, so that we can work with what we have as much as possible, yet still promote sustainable living.
The idea of a dual ethic reminds me of the Tower of Babel story we read in the Bible (Genesis 11). By destroying the tower that humans were building to reach the divine, G-d teaches us that sometimes, striving for such perfection does not solely come from infrastructure-it comes from our intentions and varied modes of behavior. Just as we must be creative in our religious worship, we must also seek all sorts of ways to save our environment. Infrastructure can only be successful with our own unique and diverse deeds.
