Many reading this will know that after twenty-seven years as the founding Executive Director of the UNH Sustainability Institute and since 2008, the Chief Sustainability Officer for UNH, I am transitioning to retirement. Over the next 2 years I will act as a senior scholar and advisor through June 2026. I appreciate the opportunity here to share a few retrospective thoughts as well as providing some perspective on the present and future of this work that is fundamental to our public mission.
First, it has been an honor and a privilege to contribute to the role of higher education generally, and the role of UNH specifically in advancing the principles, commitments, and goals of sustainability. Sustainability is all about education and learning. It is a big, complex, and cosmopolitan set of ideas and commitments when taken at full measure, present challenges and opportunities to individual and institutional collaboration that tests our imagination and culture on a scale unique in human history.
When I came to UNH in 1997 to help lead a university-wide commitment to sustainability, it was the first such program of its kind in the country, and that is a tribute to the faculty, staff, students, and partners that laid the groundwork for a series of transformative gifts from UNH alum Oliver Hubbard, both before and following my arrival, that enabled us to take a comprehensive approach that was equal to the encompassing nature of this field. That approach, what we call the Sustainable Learning Community, supports a culture in which everyone is teaching and learning as we continuously work to embody sustainability in every aspect of our public university mission.
As a result of a deeply collaborative approach to our shared work, UNH’s? teaching, research, extension and engagement work combined with our practices and policies that all advance our shared commitment to sustainability, have propelled UNH to a position of national leadership in sustainability in higher education. In 2016, we became one of only 4 institutions in higher education to achieve the highest, Platinum, rating in the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System (STARS). STARS is administered by the Association for the Advancement of Higher Education (AASHE) and UNH was part of a pilot group of universities that helped develop this comprehensive assessment of all aspects of our mission and culture in 2009. In 2021, we renewed our Platinum rating as one of eight institutions, and in the fall of 2024, we expect to renew that rating again.
Notwithstanding all of the great work at UNH, across the country and around the world to advance sustainability, the international community has fallen far short of its commitments and obligations formalized in multiple treaties, laws, and international agreements. In March 2023, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a process involving thousands of scientists from around the world that prepares comprehensive assessment reports,?issued its sixth assessment synthesis report. The report stated that “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all ...?but that window is closing very quickly;” and that “the choices and actions implemented in this decade (between now and 2030) will have impacts now and for thousands of years.”? Similar reports on biodiversity, food systems, peace and security, human rights, and democratic governance are all blinking red as we’ve entered an unprecedented period of human existence on the only home that we’ve ever known as a species in the larger community of life: planet Earth. And in 2023 and 2024, an acceleration of what some refer to as negative tipping points have accelerated across all of these areas.
Thankfully, a positive vision of our near-term future grounded in the principles and commitments of sustainability is growing and coalescing into a global movement capable of driving the political, economic, and social transformation that is needed. Even as the forces of authoritarianism and injustice resist this global movement, an alternative sustainable future, and the transformative pathways to get there, are coming into focus both here on our own campus and across the world.
Acts of radical imagination, movement building, and collective action are growing from the local to the global scales and must continue to grow to guide a just transformation through the chaotic instability and suffering of our present and near-term future. Grounding ourselves in a realistic understanding of just how serious our collective predicament is and engaging in bold acts of imagination and organizing to confront that predicament, can enable a kind of well-informed mix of anger and hope to drive transformative action across the coming decades, and UNH will continue to play a leading role in higher education.
My colleague and friend, Fiona Wilson, will assume the role of Executive Director of the Sustainability Institute and the UNH Chief Sustainability Officer as of July 1, 2023. I’ve had the great honor of working closely with Fiona co-leading the Sustainability Institute over the last four years and I am delighted that she will be leading the next phase with the help of Elisabeth Farrell and Jennifer Andrews, two long-time colleagues of the Sustainability Institute team who will serve as associate directors. Together with the rest of the phenomenal Sustainability Institute team that I’ve had the great fortune to work with, they will continue the collaborative work with faculty, staff, students, alum, our dynamic Sustainability Advisory Board, and community partners to advance our sustainability leadership and commitments. Under Fiona’s leadership there will be both continuity and creative innovation in responding to the challenges and opportunities before us and that is as it should be.
I look forward in my new role over the next two years to supporting Fiona and the leadership team and our colleagues and partners in support of UNH’s national and international leadership.
