Holland America's MSS Statendam

We chose Holland America because it’s been highly rated by Treehugger and its transparency in sustainability reporting is impressive. See its 2009 sustainability report as an example. Since 2006 the ships have been managed in accordance with the ISO 14001 international environmental management standard, as certified by the independent auditor Lloyd’s Register Quality Assurance. ISO 14001 is voluntary, on top of the flag state, port state, local, and international regulations (like MARPOL) that the ships must comply with.

While onboard the MSS Statendam, I got to talk to to the ship’s safety, environmental, and health officer, Jason Grimes. He held a presentation about what Holland America is doing to reduce its impact (watch the video) and gave me some hard numbers on their actual improvements from 2010 to 2011:

• Goal: Reduce total quantity of solid waste by 5%
• Actual: 8.9% decrease, 11/11 versus 11/10 (cumulative decrease of 8.7%)

• Goal: Increase total quantity of recyclable materials generated by 5% from 2010
• Actual: 94.8% increase, 11/11 versus 11/10 (cumulative increase of 24.8%)

• Goal: Reduce copy paper use by 10% from 2010
• Actual: 38.1% decrease, 11/11 versus 11/10 (cumulative decrease of 12.1%)

• Goal: Implement a sustainable seafood program
• Actual: 100% of all fish served are sustainable in November 2011

• Goal: Reduce fuel consumption by 2% below budgeted amounts
• Actual: 5.6% below budgeted amounts in November 2011

• Goal: Reduce refrigerant releases 10% from 2010
• Actual: 32.3% decrease, 11/11 versus 11/10  (1,351kg)

It’s especially impressive that they’ve been able to do this while adding more ships to their fleet. Outside of these larger goals, Holland America takes many other actions to reduce its impact.

Wastewater – A wastewater purification system treats water to a higher quality than most municipal treatment systems, and the discharge is “clean enough to meet drinking water standards in many communities.” Digestive bacteria, filters, UV light, and oily water separators are all used to clean the different types of wastewater: black water (sewage), gray water (from all other uses), and ballast.

Water use - Outside of water conservation that’s familiar from hotels, like towel reuse and low-flow showerheads, faucets, and toilets, freshwater evaporators use waste heat from the engines to make freshwater from seawater. Condensation from cooling units provides enough water for cleaning purposes.

Emissions – Holland America’s voluntary air emissions standards are stricter than U.S. standards. Some ships, like the Zaandam, even have a seawater scrubber that removes sulfer and particulates from emissions.

Other things they do:

• Use environmentally friendly cleaning supplies from Ecolab.
• Encourage crew compliance with recycling by depositing savings from recycling into a recreation fund for the crew.
• Paint hull with silicone-based paint (refreshed every three years) to reduce growths on the hull and therefore friction, leading to a 5.6% savings on fuel.
• Dry clean without perchloroethylene.
• Print with soy inks.

As a testament to its commitment to the environment, Holland America is the only major cruise line that still sends ships to Antarctica, after increased regulations prohibited heavy fuel oil (diesel) use in Antarctic waters.

There are definitely some smaller National Geographic/Lindblad and sailing cruises that would be more environmentally friendly than a traditional cruise, but those can cost twice as much—prohibitively expensive for us. Maybe someday…

Pink and brown is the new red and green.

How to avoid this trap without looking like a total scrooge?

• Give to people you know well. Daily or weekly contact translates to gifts that are 10% more satisfying.
• Give experiences, not things. Interpersonal relationships and new experiences consistently make people happier than material goods.
• Surprise them. Whether the surprise is in the timing or the present itself, unexpected gifts are the most satisfying.
• Give to those less fortunate. Redistributing wealth—even if it’s just from comfortable adults to broke students—is a particularly good way to make gifts more efficient.

On that note, I just want to take a moment to say thanks to John Eldert, Berklee’s VP of Administration. I can see that in sending me to AASHE this year, and in supporting my sustainability efforts in general, he’s doing exactly what Leith’s talking about, enabling leadership in others. I can’t wait to talk this all over with him!

Leith Sharp opened her session with a little song.

As Leith put it, our role is threefold:

• Removing risk and fostering stability for others to lead successful change
• Creating forums for people to be socially supported, elevated, and engaged with their peers
• Taking calculated risks (personal and professional) to create tension and force change

Some tips for accomplishing this:

• Start with pilot programs. They’re low risk, they require little preapproval, and their success builds momentum. A sustainability office should be a pilot program incubator. Innovation requires iteration (my new favorite word), learning day by day.
• Adult learners want to learn from each other. Skill sharing programs  are the way to go, empowering people and spreading knowledge. Everyone has their specialty.
• Just do it. In large, lumbering institutions, when there’s not an already established decision-making process for something, the default is either to do nothing or to get approval from absolutely everybody. Often, if you start the program, its momentum will carry it along past any objections.

So Carman Schlamb’s session couldn’t have come at a better time. It was titled “Breaking the Circle of One, or Am I the Only One on This Campus Who Believes in Sustainability?” Schlamb talked about her frustration at years of effort that didn’t seem to lead anywhere. Without a sustainability office at Seneca, students focused on on-the-ground projects, administration focused on economic factors, and there was no institutional memory—whenever a passionate person left, all their work left with them. It wasn’t easy to ferret out what she called the “hidden curriculum” and “hidden partners.” She reached out to people through educational poster sessions and open forums where people presented what their areas were doing. Students helped her to break the barriers between offices. Through this process, Schlamb found that there was a person interested in sustainability just one floor below her!

Bill Dillon’s talk later that day complemented Schlamb’s perfectly. He’s vice president of NACUBO and a certified negotiation trainer, and some of his tips were familiar from the (one!) Negotiation and Conflict Resolution class that I took at Tufts. His main point was that every negotiation is not just about achieving the immediate objective, but also elevating your relationship. He pointed out some tactics to be aware of when others use them:

• Emotional tactics: confrontation, threat, tease, body language
• Power tactics: only the messenger, it’ll never get approved, third-party pressures, violins, deadline
• Logical tactics: limiting, foggy memory, fair and reasonable, expert info

He also suggested some alternatives, like creating a neutral environment, asking first for input from others before sharing your ideas, disclosing your feelings, depersonalizing, and pausing for 10-seconds (it’s a long time!). These may seem obvious, but I find I actually need to think consciously about things that other people may do instinctively.

These two sessions back-to-back emphasized that building a sustainability movement takes a lot of collaboration. I’ve been trying to encourage that at Berklee, but I think I need to do it more consciously in order to be successful.

Bill McKibben

There was a dramatic difference between the very practical workshop in the morning and the student summit keynote by Bill McKibben in the afternoon. I’ve always thought McKibben’s 350.org protests were an inefficient use of energy, but I can see how his enthusiasm for them can be infectious. He’s an entertaining speaker, and his emphasis on the immediacy of climate change is welcome, but I’m worried that he discourages students from doing anything but protesting. At one point he seemed to disparage the point of the entire conference by calling it all just “changing lightbulbs in your dorms.”

K. Christian Bayart from Macalester College reports on the Sustainability Student Worker Network he started.

Luckily, the student presentations after his talk showed that not everyone shared his views. I was especially impressed by the student who created a sustainability student employee network (sometimes by co-opting pieces of jobs in other department that weren’t being fully utilized) and the students who organized their college’s STARS data collection (by making it the final project for an Environmentalism 101 class).

Majora Carter’s keynote detailed her work with Sustainable South Bronx and her consulting company, the Majora Carter Group. Her entrepreneurial mentality and eloquence are so strong that they made me feel at the same time inspired and inadequate. Really—check out her TED talk.

AASHE executive director Paul Rowland pulled it all together when he exhorted the assembled 2,000 sustainability professionals to thoughtfulness, but warned “thoughtful hermits are probably good people—and they probably have a very small carbon footprint—but that’s not sufficient to make a difference in the world.” Harried from a day of running around and wanting nothing more than to shut myself away in my hotel room, I felt like he was speaking directly to me. We’re all doing a lot of thinking this week; now we just have to get back to work and turn that into action.

Pittsburgh's nickname is "the city of bridges." It purportedly has three more than Venice.

Of course, thought kind of had to be put into it. The city’s history of steel production—at one time 1/3 to 1/2 of the country’s total—led to smog that rivaled the worst of the Industrial Revolution. Through an extensive cleanup campaign, air pollution has been steadily decreasing for years, but in 2011 the American Lung Association still ranked it the 3rd worst city in the U.S. for short-term particle pollution. Still, the transformation is as impressive as Boston Harbor’s. Check out Pittsburgh Green Story for more info.

More about the conference itself still to come…

Adam’s been all about tea parties lately, so we got him this tea set. It’s from a company called Green Toys, which produces plastic toys made 100% from recycled milk jugs. The set is adorable, and we spent over an hour today drinking our water tea and adding spoonfuls of imaginary sugar to it.

Adam taking tea.

Other things to love about it: the whole thing (including raw materials) is made in the USA. It’s BPA-free, if you’re worried about things like that. The packaging is a) all cardboard and recyclable and b) very easy to get into, without twist ties or plastic fasteners. Also, even though the Amazon website has a blurb about teaching little girls to save the Earth while they pour their tea, the company website is pretty careful not to pigeonhole like that. Though they do seem to think that if a girl wants a tool kit, she wants it in pink.

Anyway, we’re very happy with this purchase. Especially Adam, who declares it “delightful, good, and delicious.”

I’d originally been planning on enrolling at Lesley University, but they changed their curriculum—after the deadlines for most other programs had passed. I was not pleased, but now I think that the Tufts program will be more rigorous and better for me—if harder to juggle with work. The nice thing about the UEP program, at least for me, applying late, is that I can start taking classes through the certificate program (4 classes) and transfer them into the master’s program next year. So I can start taking classes immediately. The admissions office and UEP Department have been really helpful in getting me signed up for classes in time for the summer session.

Not surprisingly, there are quite a few environmental master’s programs in the Boston area. Here are the few I looked into. These are M.A., not M.S., degrees, because I’m less interested in doing environmental research (biology, etc.) than in communicating sustainability information to the general public.

• Tufts, Urban Environmental Policy and Planning – This is all about urban planning, with a focus on sustainability. Electives are mostly at night, but the 5 core classes are generally offered during the day. It culminates with an internship and a thesis.
• Lesley University, Urban Environmental Leadership – This is focused on environmental citizenship. It’s a low-residency program, with intensive classes one weekend each month and one week during the summer/winter. The program is being revamped starting in July 2012 and renamed Ecological Innovation.
• Boston University
  • International Relations and Environmental Policy – This seems to be more of an international studies degree with a concentration on sustainability.
  • Energy and Environmental Analysis – This seems more focused on research, with courses like “stochastic hydrologic models.” I’d probably need more of a science background.
• Harvard Extension, Sustainability and Environmental Management – To be honest, the Sustainable Development concentration seems pretty perfect, but I think I’d feel bad explaining to people “Not Harvard, but Harvard Extension.” It’s silly, but true.

Have any of you tried any of these programs? What do you think of them? Have you tried any other master’s programs in the Boston area? Do you have any advice for me? I have to admit to being a little nervous about the workload.