Sustainability Master Plan points to a greener tomorrow

Ever wonder whether Furman's focus on sustainability is full of crap?Well, its new Sustainability Master Plan does propose to utilize manure from the Greenville Zoo as part of a campus composting program.

Earlier this month, Furman's Board of Trustees approved "Sustainable Furman," the university's official title for the Sustainability Master Plan. Sustainable Furman includes a "Climate Action Plan" detailing the university's strategies for reducing and eventually neutralizing its greenhouse gas emissions and outlines goals and strategies for further integrating sustainable practices into all aspects of campus life.

Sustainable Furman is drafted around eight core areas of focus, including curricular opportunities, co-curricular experiences and transportation systems. These are further subdivided into specific strategies and initiatives, including developing curricular opportunities to serve the broader community and promoting new, more efficient transportation options.

For now, though, Sustainable Furman includes specific proposals such as creating an alternative, sustainability-centered spring break program, increasing the operating hours and routes of the campus shuttle, creating a sustainability service division within the Heller Service Corps, revising parking policies and researching the effectiveness of changes in automobile registration fees to discourage casual car use on campus.

Furman first marked sustainability as a point of focus when the university revised its strategic plan in 1997. The Board of Trustees then adopted a resolution in 2001 to begin promoting sustainable practices.

In 2007, university president David E. Shi signed the American College and University's President Climate Commitment, which promotes institutional action against global climate change and requires all of its 660 signatory colleges and universities to develop a Climate Action Plan (CAP).

"We were one of the first schools to connect the idea of a CAP with a larger Sustainable Master Plan," said Angela Halfacre, director of the David E. Shi Center for Sustainability.

"We want to make our campus's conservation efforts more visible to students, and to encourage more student involvement in those efforts."

Thomas Kazee, Furman's provost and executive vice president, said that the drafting of the SMP required the university to coordinate its hitherto disparate sustainability efforts into a cohesive, institutional framework. This spurred the creation of the Shi Center for Sustainability.

With the creation of the Shi Center, the existing Sustainability Planning Group was expanded into the Sustainability Planning Council (SPC), comprised of over 120 students, faculty, trustees and community leaders. The SPC - co-chaired by Kazee, Halfacre and Bill Ranson, professor and chair of the Earth and Environmental Science Department - was charged with drafting the final version of the SMP.

Although Sustainable Furman is certainly ambitious, the financial resources required for its employment will not come from students' pockets, Kazee said. Rather, the project will largely be funded through external support, savings from reductions in the amount of energy purchased by Furman and from investments from the university's endowment.

"Sustainability must be a part of the university's identity," Kazee said. "We want our students, tomorrow's leaders, to understand the need to create a more sustainable society.