Who's Gonna Change the World?

The answer to this question is... MIT might, but only if it wants to.

I went to a "lecture" at MIT a few days ago — part of the "Critical Issues" series put on by, of all groups, the MIT Women's League. (Kira Gould, author of Women In Green would have a field day with this!) The idea for the evening was to present ways in which MIT might think about greening the campus, in the context of making a much wider impact on the world. Lofty goals indeed.

The interesting points from the afternoon were that first, a little elementary school in the woods of New Jersey has had a disproportionate impact on its community by following its regenerative design ideals; and second, that MIT could easily perform a similar duty in a much larger community and have pretty far-reaching effect.

The folks presenting ideas were:

• Rebecca Henderson, the George Eastman Kodak Professor of Management at MIT's Sloan School of Management. (I'm sure we could toss a few more words in there... but why?) Rebecca is the classic big thinking, big consulting client strategy professor at MIT who is scared to death about climate change and other environmental issues.
• Mark Beidron, co-founder of the Willow School, a kindergarten through 8th grade private school in New Jersey focused on environmental literacy for its students. An interesting choice for a conversation about MIT... but hang with me here.
• Bill Reed, one of the leading voices in green design issues. But that just scratches the surface of Bill's vision of regenerative design and community building. Bill is exactly the right person for this discussion.
• Steven Lanou, the Deputy Director for the Environmental programs Office at MIT. Steve's job is to manage the Energy Initiative at MIT and help green the campus.

Professor Henderson did a great job of channeling Ed Mazria in presenting the need to radically reduce energy consumption. The question that Ms. Henderson left the audience with was this: Why bother with greening MIT? it's just a tiny part of the problem. Why not reach outward?

This is where Mark Beidron teed up the answer that Bill Reed knocked out of the park (to mix my sports metaphors). Mr. Beldron described his small private school in Gladstone, New Jersey as a resource for the whole county around how to use built environments to restore damaged landscapes. Of course, they also do a nice job with bringing kids into this process, thereby spreading the ideas into the future.

Mr. Reed took the opportunity to get the small crowd excited with his description of regenerative design, forcefully making the point that the seemingly small but focused actions of a single campus in a larger community can amplify the results of those actions. One of Bill's examples of such effect was a local town's opportunity to change how it deals with stormwater and how that would affect the whole watershed, as well as a host of activities in the town itself, costing the town about half of what it was expecting to spend for a more technological solution. Mr. Reed's point was simple: change the game, even on a small scale, and other will start to play by your new rules. Turn MIT into an oasis of regenerative thinking and action, and you have changed the game for the whole city.

Unfortunately, Steve Lanou was somewhat mired in his current vision of how MIT works to jump into a new mindset. He did present some interesting information about the energy demands of MIT into the future, showing a 5% to 10% increase in demand for energy onward into the foreseeable future. Steve's question was about how MIT can meet this demand with renewable energy. Steve was not really ready to jump into the idea of transforming that energy demand. Steve mentioned a 2004 study of MIT employee commuting habits that indicate that an effort by MIT to reduce driving by employees has been pretty successful, cutting the transportation energy intensity (see the EBN feature, Driving to Green Buildings) of the campus.

It looks to me that the MIT campus could use a similar effort to change the overall approach to energy and water use and conservation. Hopefully, this symposium continues the push.