America's Greenest College

The view from the Deering Common Campus Center at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor is the
same one that millionaires built mansions around in a town once called Eden. In the summer you can sit on the second-floor deck and look out over Frenchman Bay, watch the lobster boats and the yachts, The Cat arriving from Canada, or the college’s own small fleet as it sets out to study seabirds on offshore islands. The winter sea is greener, angrier, and better-seen from behind one of the triple-insulated picture windows in the renovated old building. On cold winter evenings, the working fireplace warms those students who gather to study, to play music, or to just hang out.

“We had quite a debate about the fireplace,” says Leland Moore, a junior from Amherst, Massachusetts, who has been involved in the planning and construction of several new college buildings. “You lose insulation in the building, but then there’s the aesthetic value of having a fire. It went to the All College Meeting, and the consensus was that a fireplace was worth that small energy loss.”

When you’re considered America’s greenest college, such considerations are taken quite seriously. COA earned that honor by becoming the first carbon-neutral campus in the United States.

What does that mean? A team of faculty, staff, and students tallied the college’s greenhouse gas emissions, and targeted ways to minimize them. The 1,990 tons of gases that COA still emitted in 2007 were “offset” by an investment in a Portland, Oregon, project that reduces greenhouse gas emissions by optimizing traffic signals and more efficiently managing traffic flow in the city. In essence, College of the Atlantic pays for its light carbon footprint on the coast of Maine by helping to remove an equal amount of carbon from the air over Oregon. Thus, COA has reduced its net contribution of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere to zero, and is “carbon-neutral.”

The news brought national attention to the college, but most of the students, faculty, and staff weren’t all that surprised that the school had made good on its pledge to go carbon-neutral, or that COA was the first college in the country to do so. Living gently on the land has been a way of life here since the school’s founding nearly 40 years ago.

“College of the Atlantic is green on two fronts,” says longtime literature teacher Bill Carpenter. “First, in the physical campus itself and, secondly, because it’s the overarching philosophy of the school.”

“Our mission has probably never been more relevant than it is now,” says David Hales, the college’s president, as he sits on the edge of the stage, one long leg crossed comfortably over the other, as he addresses students and faculty at COA’s weekly all-college meeting.

Hales was inaugurated in the fall of 2006, succeeding Dr. Steven K. Katona, one of the college’s four founding faculty members and its fourth president. The Texas-born Hales brings big-league environmental credentials to the job. He directed the Global Environment Center of the United States Agency for International Development under the Clinton administration, charged with integrating environmental concerns into development decisions. During Jimmy Carter’s presidency, Hales was a deputy assistant secretary at the U. S. Department of the Interior. For seven years he held the Samuel Trask Dana Chair of Natural Resources at the University of Michigan.

The topic of today’s meeting is the potential effects of the current economic climate on the environment. “It should be pretty clear to any thinking person that business as usual is not sustainable,” Hales says.

But sustainability—to combine a 21st-century buzzword with a classic phrase—is more than skin deep. Most colleges and universities these days give a nod toward the concept of sustainable environmentalism by recycling trash, installing efficient lighting and heating systems in newer buildings, and encouraging alternatives to automobile commuting. But at COA, green is woven into the curriculum and daily life so completely that it defines the very fabric of the institution—and has since the school’s beginnings.

Bill Carpenter, a published poet and novelist, was one of four faculty members when COA opened in the fall of 1972 with 32 students. Though the school’s enrollment has swelled to somewhere around 325, with proportional increases in faculty and staff, the unity of purpose remains. There are no departments. The faculty meets as a single unit, and the college still offers only one undergraduate degree, in human ecology.

It’s been that way from the beginning. “Luckily, Ed Kaelber, our first president, had the foresight to include the humanities and the arts,” Carpenter says. “Human ecology embraces both the arts and the sciences. Art and literature are just as valid a way to understand the environment as scientific research. They go hand in hand.”

Several different models were considered before the founders decided on the theme of human ecology. Back then it was 1970, and the environmental movement spawned eight years earlier by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was cresting into national consciousness. The college took root on a strip of shorefront just north of the village of Bar Harbor. Some of the buildings had been used by a seminary, and thus COA inherited a library, a meeting hall, and rooms that could be used for classes. The location wasn’t supposed to be permanent. Plans were drawn up for a state-of-the-art, energy-efficient campus on a hilltop overlooking Bar Harbor and Frenchman Bay. According to Carpenter, the new campus was to have incorporated the Mediterranean design of a central courtyard surrounded by buildings on four sides, and a college-wide debate began over the allocation of ocean views. Eventually the plan was dropped, COA acquired more land adjacent to its original location, and today the college encompasses 35 shorefront acres.

The campus buildings are an eclectic blend of old and new. It isn’t difficult to find a parking space, though the parking lots are small and clustered up near the highway. Some faculty and a few students drive to school, but alternatives such as bicycles and a college-run shuttle bus keep the concentration of automobiles low. A walk from one end of campus to the other takes you along wooded trails, over a footbridge, and past open spaces with views of the bay. A few of the older and larger buildings have been here since well before Bar Harbor’s fire of 1947. Others have been added over the years, including the three brand-new buildings of the Kathryn W. Davis Student Residence Village. According to Donna Gold, public relations director and editor of COA’s semiannual magazine, the Village “may be the first-ever human ecological complex built—and one of the most sustainable housing projects in the country.”

The three duplexes house 51 students—and the combined energy they use, even with six full, working kitchens, is comparable to the amount consumed by an average single-family home occupied by four people.

“These buildings are full of green technology,” says Leland Moore, one of the students who worked closely on the project. The heat source for all three buildings is a state-of-the-art wood pellet boiler made in Germany that sits in a small enclosed outbuilding next to the shiny and equally new-looking pellet hopper. The residences are insulated with a foot-thick layer of material made from shredded newspapers. The windows are triple-paned. Hot water from the showers is captured and recycled back into the heating system. The bathrooms have composting toilets. A bucket of wood chips stands next to each. There is no discernible odor. On the outside of each building is a brown door whimsically decorated with a crescent moon like backwoods privies of old. Behind each door stands a large blue composting tank with a crank on it. Once a week, it’s a selected student’s job to open the door and turn the crank.

Jordan Motzkin, another student who participated in the planning and design of the new housing complex, estimates that it will take four years for the tank to fill up. By then, the stuff inside should be clean enough to use for fertilizer around the campus. “That’s the hope,” says the Larchmont, New York, junior. “Of course we’ll have to test it and see.”

As is typical of COA, the entire community was involved in the project, from the earliest plans to final construction. Architects, environmental consultants, and contractors made appearances to discuss each step of the process with committees made up of faculty, students, staff, alumni, and trustees. “It’s really awesome to be at a school where you can be involved in a real process and learn from it at the same time,” Motzkin says. Moore has parlayed his experience working on the student housing project into a job for the town of Bar Harbor, auditing energy use in public buildings.

Saving energy means saving money. The new buildings are expected to pay back their cost in energy savings within eight years. “One of the things we want to demonstrate is that being green is also being smart,” Hales says. “We need to pay attention to the bottom line as well as the green line. For instance, we didn’t do solar in those buildings because we found that we couldn’t pay it back.”

Carpenter acknowledges that “there’s a tension” between the desire to preserve historic buildings and the goals of energy conservation and sustainability. But the mixture of old and new architecture, like the blend of ideas from all over the academic spectrum, is part of what gives College of the Atlantic its particular appeal. “In a way, we’ve recycled the campus,” Carpenter says. “We have recycled the palaces of the rich into a nonprofit entity with an educational purpose.” And this model of energy conservation and sustainability has reached beyond New England and the U.S. and attracted students from across the globe.

In 2000, College of the Atlantic began welcoming an increasing number of international students, thanks to the school’s participation in the Davis United World College Scholars Program. COA, along with Colby, Middlebury, Princeton, and Wellesley, was a participant in a pilot program that gave scholarships to prep school graduates from all over the world. The program has since expanded to include more than 80 U.S. colleges, and COA currently has an international student contingent that is 16% of the student body, representing 38 countries.

“It’s changed us enormously,” Carpenter says. “Maine colleges have to really struggle to get diversity. And the environmental movement was not a particularly diverse movement when the college opened its doors, and has largely been the ethnicity of Thoreau. At that time it had not fully taken into account the needs of other ethnicities and other nations. This has been an eye-opener and a broadening influence,” he says. “I think it’s really allowed human ecology to expand in its understanding of its global impact.”

Another distinction COA offers students is an extraordinary emphasis on hands-on learning. In any given semester, students may be conducting original seabird research on remote offshore outposts, monitoring the energy use in Bar Harbor municipal buildings, growing organic vegetables at the college’s Beech Hill Farm, or traveling to international conferences on climate change—helping them enter the world with a sense of confidence and mission after they graduate. Many remain in the area and start businesses. Some go on to do important scientific research in places as far away as Antarctica. Others become writers, performance artists, teachers, and lawyers. A few run for political office, including Chellie Pingree, class of 1979, who was recently elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Maine’s 1st Congressional District, and Elsie Flemings, class of 2007, state representative for District 35, which includes Bar Harbor, Mount Desert, Southwest Harbor, and the Cranberry Isles. Some 22% of COA graduates go on to scientific careers; another 43% go into education, public service, and health care; 21% pursue work in the arts and communications; and 14% go into business.

John Anderson, a biology and natural history teacher whose 22 years at College of the Atlantic have not entirely erased his New Zealand accent, takes small groups of students out to Great Duck and offshore islands to study not only bird populations, but the human history of the coast as well. “This is a landscape that has had humans in it for more than 10,000 years,” he says. “Many of these islands were heavily quarried more than a century ago, yet standing on them now, you would think you were in untouched wilderness. Last year we went out to one of those islands, and it took us three hours just to find the quarry.”

The small size of the college, and its proximity to a ready-made laboratory in the form of uninhabited islands, gives undergraduates the opportunity to do the kind of field work usually reserved for graduate students at larger schools, according to Anderson. “It’s a completely different dynamic to do research that hasn’t been done and that you don’t know the answer to in advance, than it is to do a prepared lab that’s been done a thousand times,” he says.

Of course, it helps to have a national park literally right outside the door. “Every year we have a number of students working with the National Park Service,” Anderson says. “We had a student a few years ago who did the first definitive study of the mammals of Isle au Haut.”

Acadia National Park also provides “a great political laboratory to observe the nature of conservation,” says Carpenter. “Every student is familiar with how this park came to be.”

The park grew out of land on Mount Desert Island owned by some of the nation’s wealthiest families. The seeds that became COA, Carpenter says, germinated in the ashes of the 1947 fire that destroyed much of Bar Harbor and hammered the final nail in the coffin of the town’s “summer cottage” era as a playground for the super-rich.

“The fire took out so much of the economic structure of the island,” Carpenter says. “A lot of the families who owned those mansions chose not to rebuild, and, because of that, a large part of the employment base left. The elders of the community decided that a school would be the best way to have a year-round economy without having a factory-type impact on the environment.”

The town has changed along with the college. “When I came here, Bar Harbor in the winter was a ghost town, a movie set,” Carpenter says. “The founders of the school wanted a college here because they wanted the cultural advantages of an academic community, and I think they got it.”
 

And even though College of the Atlantic is the country’s first carbon-neutral college, Hales says that it’s “pretty misleading” to call it an environmental school. “What we’re really studying is the transition to a sustainable world,” he says. “The academic focus is on the relationship, including not just the physical but the economic and spiritual relationship as well, that humans have with their environment. In creating societies that are more just and more economically sound, you’re also going to be helping the environment.”

The Deering Common was supposed to be another tear-down, with a new structure on the cutting edge of 21st-century sustainability slated to go up in its place. But some saw value in the old building, beyond the flaws of its outdated energy footprint. An ambitious restoration project was begun. The old hardwood floors were reused in the re-build. And, in the end, the original fireplace stayed.

“Personally, I’m on the side of more fires in the campus center,” Hales says. “But you could make the case that every time you open that sucker up, you’re making the building’s heating system work overtime. Of course the system is all renewable . . . There may be six different ways for students to have a debate on this. The key is that they’re having it.”