Extensifying Sustainability

The Chronicle of Higher Education featured a provocative article entitled “True Sustainability Means Going Beyond Campus Boundaries” in last week’s issue. Author James Proctor argues that campus sustainability has focused too much on the “act locally” principle, leading to sustainable islands of collegiate privilege that do not do much to change the larger global forces that will really determine whether we destroy the ecosystems upon which we rely. The article points out that this approach leads to lots of on-campus technology and little sense of how to effect the larger-scale political, social, and economic realities that make human industry unsustainable. I am inclined to agree.