Green Umbrella Meetings: Kasdin et al., 10 March 2006, 4:30 PM, 311 Low

Minutes by Scott Cardiff. See also minutes by Alex Bomstein.

Meeting attendance: Kate, Anjana, Alex, Coogan, Six, scott (me), Robert

Kasdin (SR Exec VP), Will McKoy, Scott Wright.

Kasdin explained his background of having successfully worked on

environmental stewardship at UMichigan and how he perceived a need at

Columbia to address environmental stewardship quietly with out much

publicity (or, in initial stages, student involvement). He seems to think

that this allows more to be accomplished and avoids empty promises. Upon

arriving here over three years ago he decided that he would wait to

address environental issues on his third year, which started last spring.

Kasdin says the Enviro Stewardship Taskforce sounds more formal than it

really is as it is a group of administrators spending extra time on it. He says

the effort is now gaining traction (is that what his "bandwidth" means?)

and they are hiring an Environmental Stewardship Coordinator. Will and

Scott (after Robert left) that the ESC should be hired within 1 to 4

months (and that they've already found some candidates and that the

position is posted on some website) . Used term "stewardship" rather than

"sustainability" because Kasdin says the latter is not well perceived by

everyone.

Will (and the other two ) discussed some current and past efforts. Some

of these have happened, others are for soon (?). THey started about

six or eight months ago looking at what other schools have done and

invited a

woman who coordinated things at Yale (Kasdin's impression was that

the person was great but that their work wasn't up to speed with

their PR). Apparently they've also talked with people at

Environmental Defense. Efforts included

switching to low energy lighting and low water consumption systems and

env. resp. cleaning products in facilities. Planning an energy audit in

residential; academic spaces may have had one already (?). Scott W has

been coordinating with student groups and they established some academic

links with students conducting two studies in SIPA. They also did some

sort of enviro work with the K-n young kids school that Columbia runs.

Also the excellent example set by dining. And they mentioned the

purchasing and recycled paper content. THey've also put together a draft

web site to publicise their work a little bit; Kasdin will soon be sending

it out to his "direct reports" people.

For future work, Kasdin said he's not against an overall environmental

impact asessement including carbon emissions etc for the university but

clearly not anytime soon. Sticking to residential energy audit for now.

They did not respond to Anjana's question about scope possiblibly

including Manhattanville and expansion.

On student representation, Kasdin seemed open to future involvement

through Scott and Will and then presumably through the hired Env

Stewardship Coordinator (he said he thought we were justified in

perceiving that there had been no room for student involvement but that

that wan't true... presumably meaning that that situation can change).

He says he's open to meeting again but next

step probably should be meeting with Will and Scott (who seem willing to

have students involved). Extent and structure of involvement essentially

still to be determined for long term. So for now involvement is meeting

with Will and Scott, which seems like a great step forward.

After the meeting, we discussed sending out ideas for what the university

needs to work on and getting ideas from our respective groups. Six is

also setting up a wiki for Green Umbrella to complement the listserve.