BRYAN WELCH

I would describe myself as a committed environmentalist. It’s my passion and my work. I’ve covered our deepening environmental crisis as a journalist for 30 years and now I run magazines and Web sites dedicated to raising human awareness of environmental issues. My wife and I raise much of our own food on our little organic farm and we supply organic food to lots of other local families. Environmentalism is my passion, my career, my chief avocation.

I’ve watched the environmental “movement,” if you will, grow from a radical, tie-dyed clique into a mainstream global consensus. I don’t think we, as environmentalists, can take much credit for that however.

We have, for the last 30 years, been among society’s least effective leaders and least pleasurable companions. In his 2006 essay, “Beyond Hope,” Derrick Jensen claims that the most common words he hears spoken by environmentalists,everywhere,are “We’re fucked.”[1] He exaggerates, but he has a point.

Our attitudes reek of Puritanism. We are, often, dour, strict and humorless. We’re judgmental. Behind most of life’s simple pleasures we see unnecessary consumption, which we ridicule. Because humanity is responsible for environmental problems we are, ipso facto, all sinners and we find little joy in being human. We portray the giant global corporations as occult covens, and we burn their representatives in effigy in our own reenactments of the Salem witch trials. When our neighbors seem too moderate or abstract for our tastes — as the Quakers did to New England’s 17^th-century Puritans — we whip them out of the colony, at least figuratively, and we’re not above discussing executions. (The Puritan authorities hanged four Quakers for their religious beliefs in Boston between 1659 and 1661.)

To say the least, we’re no fun a lot of the time.

Maybe that explains why we’ve accomplished so little in the past 30 years. After all, we were right all along. Why has it taken popular opinion so long to catch up?

Well, for one thing, no one follows a pessimist. We’ve spent far too much time confessing our sins and assigning our scarlet letters. We’ve invested far too little time visualizing successful outcomes.

Eco-Libris takes the guilt out of the guilty-pleasure of reading for some environmentalists.

Books today can be made of recyclable material, but chances are, the new best seller you’ve been waiting for is printed on virgin paper (meaning it’s never been used before). In fact, each year, 30 million trees are cut down to supply the paper for books sold in the United States alone.

However, Eco-Libris offers an alternative, so you can still read those new releases with less of a guilty conscience.

The company lets you off-set the paper used for your book by paying for trees to be planted in its stead. The system works on a relatively equal proportion - $1 for 1 book plants 1.3 trees. (I know, how can they plant 1.3 trees? The company does this so that for every $10, 13 trees will be planted in case some don’t make it to maturity). Eco-Libris calls this “balancing out” your book and sends you a sticker, printed on recycled material, to put on the book. The trees are planted in developing countries by a series of planting partners within a year of the purchase.

Eco-Libris started almost a year and a half ago, and has already contracted book publishing companies to balance out the companies’ books, the newest addition being Flux. Their goal: plant 1 million trees for 1 million books by 2009.

Grades of the environmental efforts of 300 colleges and universities can be found at a new, interactive Web site, which shows data from the College Sustainability Report Card of 2009. The report card is produced by the Sustainable Endowments Institute, an independent, nonprofit organization based in Cambridge.

The site, which was launched today, provides detailed profiles for each school. The profiles contain grades for nine categories that combine for a composite grade, as well as detailed explanations for why each grade was given.

I poked around on the site and found it hard to tear myself away. The site lets you compare colleges side-by-side and search for different programs, along with their locations. There also are ideas on how different people can help universities become more sustainable. The report cards are extensive, and the site is easy to navigate. I’d encourage you to check it out.

Here are some facts taken from the press release and the Web site:

• Two-thirds of the 300 colleges improved their scores from last year.
• The highest overall grade was A-. Fifteen colleges received this grade.
• The average score was C+, meaning 75 percent of the colleges earned Bs or Cs.
• Only four colleges received Fs.
• Combined, these colleges have endowments reaching almost $400 billion.

A recent poll conducted by the Princeton Review showed that a majority of high school students consider a school’s commitment toward sustainability and environmentalism when deciding which school they will attend. Obviously, students are thinking about these issues, and I think these report cards possess an immense potential to influence enrollment in the schools, which would even push schools to expand their environmental programs to attract more students.

I also think it’s great schools are being held to some degree of accountability for their environmental programs. Maybe with the increased attention, schools will start thinking of new, inventive ways to become a little greener.

If you did visit the site and found something encouraging, upsetting or anywhere in between, I’d really like to read your comments. I hope you enjoy the site as much as I did.