By Siona Ahuja ’24 and Anoushka Kuswaha ’24
Staff Writer | Science & Environment Editor
Organized by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, the Global Conference on Sustainability in Higher Education is an annual conference that engages students, administrators, business partners and political leaders in critical discussions on the role of higher education and institutions in overcoming the challenges posed by climate change. This year, the conference — the second to be held in a virtual setting — took place from Oct. 12-14, 2021. It aimed to address AASHE’s commitment to reducing the carbon footprint of their events, as stated on their website and lead to a 300 percent increase in participation in comparison to the previous conferences. Mount Holyoke is one of 44 host institutions, alongside universities such as Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, that are re-envisioning sustainability in higher education.
As stated by AASHE on their website, the GCSHE aims to help higher education institutions respond to the climate crisis through discussion, community development and the theme of the conference: “The Future Is...” In this theme, there is “an invitation to reimagine the future, to get away from the business as usual scenario that has led us to oblivion [and to] focus on presenting an alternative vision of society,” according to V.S. (Raghu) Raghavan, the director of sustainability and associate director of the Miller Worley Center for the Environment and vice chair of the AASHE Board of Directors.
Raghavan joined the MWCE in July 2020 and hopes that the discourse created by the conference will inspire Mount Holyoke students to create sustainable, equitable and resilient communities that focus on bringing change both as individuals and through collective action. This sentiment was echoed by AASHE, who, on their website, described this year’s theme of the conference as “reflect[ing] the uncertainty of the future that many feel and invit[ing] participants to recommit themselves to the urgent work of building a future that is sustainable, equitable and resilient. We seek to highlight inspiring examples of higher education leadership that empower participants to envision and create such a future.”
The conference hosted a diverse roster of keynote speakers. According to the GCSHE website, keynote speakers included Heather McGhee, an author who has written about achieving racial equity while trying to make the world more sustainable, Zamzam Ibrahim, President of the The European Students Union and Daphne Frias, an American activist who focuses on climate justice. Also present were academic professors whose expertise covered a variety of topics, such as economics, environmental racism and how Indigenous knowledge can help solve the climate crisis. These appeared alongside a wide range of presentations from students, faculty members and professors from colleges and universities around the world. Their presentations addressed a wide range of topics on sustainability, such as equity, resilience within communities, diversity of student participation and how institutions can support local businesses. The conference resembled a one-stop collection of some of the top actors in sustainability at university and college campuses around the world.
Mount Holyoke also presented a session on conducting and improving the sustainability of campus dining operations in the middle of a pandemic, which was led by Executive Director of Auxiliary Services Rich Perna and Raghavan.
Raghavan praised Perna’s leadership during the pandemic, saying, “There’s no room for failure … you can’t even miss one meal.” Raghavan mentioned that Perna also “improved upon the efficiencies within dining, in terms of reducing waste.” Waste reduction was done in part by generating a “Lean Path Method”: a way to reduce pre-consumer food waste while also saving the institution money, Raghavan explained.
Jordan Lassonde ’16, assistant director for the MWCE at Mount Holyoke, commented on the advances made by Dining Services in the past few years.
According to Lassonde, Dining Services has managed to increase sustainable and local purchasing percentages to almost 20 percent, “which, for the middle of a pandemic, is quite impressive.”
According to Raghavan, the compassionate and humane approach taken by Perna in dealing with the campus stakeholders, staff and students was one of the major reasons he chose Dining Services as the focus of their presentation. He commended Perna’s managerial acumen in dealing with staff furloughs during the pandemic, saying, “[U]nfortunately, within the sustainability field, this aspect tends to be neglected. But I’m glad that it’s not neglected here at Mount Holyoke.”
Raghavan views sustainability as inevitably woven into the larger movement for justice. “Sustainability is justice,” he said. Much like the GCSHE keynote speakers of the recent past, Raghavan called for a movement that will make the world a more egalitarian and democratic place. To rectify the climate crisis is to “bring back a society, which is egalitarian, which is flatter without the gross inequalities that we see,” Raghavan said.
Lassonde echoed Raghavan’s statements about inclusivity, sustainability and environmental justice, saying, it’s all about “making sure that we’re really making [sustainability efforts] a space for everyone to participate in and to feel like they belong and that everyone can [have] agency in.”
To Raghavan, the pandemic has propelled the need for concerted mass action within sustainability movements. His belief is that Mount Holyoke’s progressive space is ideal to model this kind of behavior, bringing it outside of textbooks and into practice. “If we continue to pursue this more aggressively,” he said, “[we can] transform the campus into what is called a living lab for sustainability.”