 Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trans Forum. I'm delighted to see you here today. We have an important topic with a splendid guest and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. You'll notice the Future Trans Forum has been doing more and more sessions on what the climate crisis might mean for the future of higher education. We've been exploring this from different angles and it's actually the subject of my forthcoming book. Now if you would like to dive in and learn more please just contact me and we have more guests coming up the pipe. Now for today we're gonna focus on one particular aspect of the climate crisis in academia which is looking at the physical campus, at the buildings, the grounds, the planning cycles of colleges and universities. In order to help elucidate this and to explore it we have a wonderful wonderful expert. Michael Hagins is an architect, campus planner, a terrific networker, a deep thinker with a huge amount of expertise, a lot of great thinking on this subject. He's just my go-to person on earth for what happens at campuses in higher education and I feel immensely privileged to be able to welcome them to be this week's guest. So without any further ado I will bring them up on stage. Hello Michael. Hi Brian. Hi everybody. That's good to see you. Where are you today? I am in Guilford, Connecticut. Ah I see I see and it's July. Does that mean it's pretty warm? It's pretty warm but it's not mid-western warm like I'm used to. Yes I can hear that I can hear that. Well I'm delighted you can join us. You know Michael you've you've been a participant in the forum for some time and you know that we like to ask people to introduce themselves by speaking about what they're working on for the next year but you somehow somehow claim to be kind of retired. So if that bizarre rumor is actually true let me ask you this what are you going to be thinking about for the next year in terms of higher rate? What are the major topics and themes that are really uppermost in your mind? Yeah well uppermost is the response of campuses to climate change. In other words the institution's response and how it's expressed in the physical campus. That's that's the number one topic. For many years I've been writing campus matters blog and that started as an exploration of the implications of digital transformation on the physical campus. In other words what did it mean when more and more of the activity and we'll say content of the institution moved online and how was that beginning to show up and then you know in March of what was it 2020 everything transformed almost instantly and so that activity is in the rear of the mirror and now what I'm looking forward to or looking to is the changes that are beginning to take place in terms of the physical campus in response to climate change. Well that's appropriate because that is the topic of our discussion today. Friends if you're new to the forum I'm going to ask Michael a couple of questions to just start him riffing on this subject but the forum is here for you so as we start talking please start thinking about the questions you'd like to put to our guests and again the very bottom of the screen there's the raised hand button if you want to ask out loud and the question mark if you like to type in your question. I guess Michael I have so many so many questions to begin with but but if if we think about higher ed as a whole what are the what are the biggest threats that climate change poses to a physical bricks-and-mortar campus. Well it very much depends on where you are this is one of those things where location does matter for those institutions that are near the coast and places that are affected by sea level rise they're already beginning to respond by raising floor levels and beginning to think about storm surges. In other parts of the country issues of water wind up being fairly important the ability to actually maintain the presence of the campus in the way that it's come seen and across the board there are concerns about energy the cost of energy and for those who are beginning to take that complex of issues more seriously they're moving as in to varying degrees in responding to the climate crisis by reducing their carbon footprints. If I could press on a couple of these first when you when your second point when you mentioned water I see you're referring to scarcity yeah well first we see yeah I intended to mention scarcity but there are certainly some campuses that have had to adapt to increase flooding inland campuses an example of that would be Iowa University that sits on two sides of a river and they've had at least one fairly disastrous flood within the last many years and they've prepared for that by building various mitigation measures their their risk is one that they can assess fairly directly some other places are still to discover exactly what their physical their physical risks are and and all of that response fits into the category that's called resilience in other words the ability to continue on even in the face of challenges of of weather climate and resources. So if your campus is hammered by storm surges or if your campus dries out so that you can no longer provision enough water for your foliage or your humans how do you continue? Well you know that I think I think you and others have speculated that that leads to a question of migration and in my conversations over the last six months I've I've picked up at least one example of where that where people have begun to talk about that but not seriously because because it's such a dramatic it's such a dramatic question for people to begin to consider that that sort of effort. It is I went to the University of Michigan starting in the late 1980s and they had tried to migrate the campus about 10 miles in the 1960s and 70s and did about half of it and then gave up basically and that and that still scarred the University at the time and that's just a little a little shift. I guess that the another question asked is to what extent do you see the physical campus being vulnerable to the secondary impacts of climate change and that is thinking about for example changes in animal life flora as well as fauna as animals diseases plants have to move as heating changes local climates but also knock-on effect such as economic changes you know an area that depends heavily on agriculture losing losing money as a result of that. How well how else should we expect campuses to be well endangered by this? Well the lens that I look through is the changes that take place on the physical campus in other words what does it become and by virtue of a whole series of forces digital transformation as well as resource limitations I see campuses becoming more focused and potentially smaller while still serving the larger the populations that they that they serve but that is of course a bending of a curve that has been rising significantly for quite some for quite some time. I don't see can I I guess Brian to answer your question let me come at it a little bit different way. I see that what campuses are is a type of we'll call it small city to put a simple label on it in other words their places where people work where people live where they recreate they they attend a variety of functions it is a it is a place that can be a model for how it is possible to live on a planet different than the one that anybody on this call grew up on yes because that's the realization that's beginning to come to campus planners and others at the institutions not that anybody has any magic answers to this but the challenge of the next generation will be to adapt these campuses for that changing environment and all the different aspects of it that the different vectors that we could describe that are impacting and the metaphor that I've used is it will be like rebuilding that ship at sea. Wow wow that's a great metaphor and and also a great way to frame this my friend Bill McKibbin has a book called Earth it's spelled E-A-A RTH it's a way of getting us to think about Earth being being that different I had another question I wanted to pose to you Michael but we have a actually a better way of asking that question that just came in from one of our one of our participants I'll put this on the stage so you can all see it this is from Charles Finley Northeastern who says a digital transformation requires energy to support the technology what do campuses do to get off the fossil grid develop their own off-grid power source or what? Great question Charles. Yeah thanks thanks for that question the short answer is yes that's exactly what happens there are many campuses well let me rephrase that there are some campuses that are in effect already off the grid. The best example the best publicized and documented example of that is Arizona State University. They have gone extensively into solar some wind but they they use no electricity that is generated by fossil fuels. Those are big shifts some institutions are able to make those kinds of moves but those are the exactly the kind of steps whether wholesale or incrementally that are included within what are known as climate action plans that that several institutions have and those are documented best the best single source to see where your campus is is the website I put in the chat which is the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in higher ed and they if your institution is in there you're going to be able to see the specific steps that your institution is taking if your institution isn't there there you might wish to ask questions about why your institution is not there yes so so Charles that the simple answer to the question is yes that's exactly what folks are doing and it's happening at a small scale or a large scale and it's happening in many places across the country but as I've scanned the progress it's not happening rapidly enough nor is it happening every place so first of all if you're if you're new to the future Transform this is an example of a text question and it's also an example of a great text question and a great great guest answer so if you'd like to follow suit please I hit that Q&A box I do have one question if I could just follow on on that Michael which is to what extent are you seeing campuses start off-shoring or outsourcing their power in different ways I'm thinking for example about Berea College in Kentucky was just bought or help take over two different hydro power facilities but nearby so instead of forcing from coal they're sourcing from hydro right there there are many steps like that the Arizona state example I used is is an example that that solar is not coming from is not coming from the campus at the same time that that solar is within the economic envelope of the institution there's no question about that that doesn't really it doesn't change the physical campus except to the extent that every rooftop surface that's available for solar locally is beginning to be exploited for that purpose and that's beginning to happen on on many campuses as new buildings are built at the if I could add to that there's also the development of what's known as living buildings those are buildings that produce more energy store more water than they use etc in other words there we can think of those buildings as almost being organic entities in the sense that they're designed in order to function to support the people who use that building in a way that does not require them to be connected to the grid and the way that we think of normal normal buildings as being plugged in as it were friends I think you're starting to hear the outline of what the campus might look like in this new world I just shared the Association for Advancement of Sustainability and Higher Education link I just repeated Michael's link to that in the chat and Ed Webb just shared a story about his campus Dickinson College which they have a solar project which just won a global sustainability award so and if you want to say more about that please please feel free I just personally I think Dickinson does the great work for that but before I could say anything more we have more questions coming in so let me just bring them up as well we have from my good friend Mark Rush we have this question like you're not should campuses not look to operate more locally and support commuters that would decrease the need for dorms etc this is radical the radical measures are necessary well radical is in the eye of the beholder isn't it and so yes I believe that campuses need to adapt in the way that's suggested by that comment in particular if we I'm going to go a little bit technical here just so we've got some some structure to grab on to and what it means to go to carbon neutral in other words reduce the footprint of the campus to zero there are three categories that carbon impacts are counted in the first is combustion on site cold powered fire plant power plant would be a typical example the second is offsite emissions that would be for example purchase purchased electricity that's perhaps even generated by natural gas so we've got categories one and two and a lot of institutions are driving to take that categories one and two to zero and as you as indicated is already done that and there are others who have done it as well on a smaller scale category three is where we get into the commuting and air travel consequences of the institution's very existence and that's where some really innovative work needs to be done to balance that commuting with living on campus and at the same time recognize that the way in which campuses will be used in the future is a lot more episodic and transitory than we may have thought about it in the past and that's the consequence of the realization that we don't have to come to the campus every day if at all and we learned a lot about that from the past two years we sure did that's a thank you that's a great answer and Mark had an actual follow-up on that so I might just flash this on the screen so we can carry this on where it takes this in one particular direction this would clearly counteract diversity efforts but the cost of recruitment and air travel generally are important considerations for greening though there's there's a lot of complexity to to being able to do that and so somebody who's able to go to zero carbon on campus in categories one two and three and that does not mean that they do no air travel that does not mean that they don't invest in any use of fossil fuels it's just that they do it in such a way that a it's small to begin with and thoughtful as opposed to unthoughtful which is frankly the way that we've been using the resources that we have but but doing it in a strategic way and offsetting that as appropriate with other actions thank you this this is definitely a sphere of great complexity and Mark has just taken us through one vector of that very clearly we have we have more questions coming up and I want to give people a chance and this is one from art Trudeau the president of Trudeau associates and he asks does Michael have any suggestions on how to evangelize students we recently planned the net zero ready student residents and the residents are complaining about cooling set points the minimum 72 degrees fair yeah well in my experience the folks who might be in bad evangelism are members of boards of directors and the management of universities but I appreciate at the user level the the issues of set points and thermostats and the air conditioning and all of that those are important things the steps that I have seen that have been effective specifically with respect to students is that the students are allowed to self-select for those environments and therefore they have in a sense committed to understanding what they're what they're getting into in that particular facility you know if somebody does not like the temperature at any one point those are those are complaints that every architect and engineer whoever practiced is very familiar with those and and they need to be and they need to be responded to and it may well be that that the temperature setting in a particular place needs to be tweaked down but that doesn't mean that that has an environmental consequence if an electric system that or a ground-source heat pump or other non polluting non carbon generating system is using in the in the chat there's observation there was a great story from a British University where the bursar offered to lower the heat in dorms to meet the students green demands so part that's that's a different take on your question there we have a question that spins off of this and that comes from a good friend Joe Murphy and I want to bring him on stage to ask this question because this is a good one here hello Joe your your voice is a little quiet I don't know if your mic is low or not a little bit mark Michael can you hear him okay I can let's try it okay is that better gotcha whoa sorry just wait till everybody turns the volume up and then I'll fix my mind that's right so as you were talking about the way that different buildings might be have different statuses up to the point of being more organic it started to make me think about some of the curricular and logistic implications of that that particularly if we're talking about getting to the stage where this building will have full water and this building will have restricted water you know we're already at my campus participating in an energy response plan where on particularly hot days the thermostats all go up to you know not not to not to reduce carbon use but to reduce energy costs and strain on the grid so I found myself wondering you know should we be thinking about a world in which maybe some programs only exists during the summer when we've got lots of abundant solar power to do power them or some spaces that are mostly used at night instead of during the day when it's more expensive to cool them or and I'm just wondering if there is if there's work going on that's addressing the idea that we might need to change either our daily or yearly schedules to make these kind of changes work well I think that's a that's a great question and let me come at it from the practical pieces that I see and let's we'll come back to what the future may hold with respect to that the one place where there is some motion that is related to this is in the scheduling of classrooms specifically recognizing the classes from that being the spaces are not being used the way that they were and and it's not possible yet but folks are beginning to talk about being able to schedule classroom seats the same way that you schedule an airplane seat well and and of course different different rooms have different characteristics depending on how what's being taught what's being discussed what the size of classroom is etc etc so you can begin to describe think about that as being a series of alternatives that are available in order to customize the response or the support for the for the the class that's being taught with respect to the time of day and all the rest of that in many parts of the country right now electricity in particular is priced by time of day and I think that's what you're right it may be related to what in Kenyan is experiencing and for what it's worth that has a carbon benefit when you don't turn things on right the other thing that's happening at a technical level with respect to those kinds of questions is beginning to store energy in different ways in tanks of water in tanks of sand using ground source heat pumps for seasonal and daily storage in other words water going in and out of the ground depending on the time of day and the cost of being able to do that all of that fine-tuning the the machine to respond to the needs but overarching that and then I'll my speculation will stop this point in response to your wonderful question I'll work on this one for a while but the but the idea the thing is that to begin to think more flexibly about the way we use facilities and begin to modify as you suggest the schedules this becomes very difficult just the scheduling is a huge task to begin with right and modifying it for the number of people that you have to have to get together is is also very difficult but I think there's movement movement in that direction and certainly the ability to not use some facilities during some parts of the year is is certainly a way to begin to respond to that now I'll be thinking about your question for a long time okay great question Joe thank you thank you and that was one of those moments in the future transform where every person on stage has a beard I just wanted to recommend that and that we have friends we have lots of room for your questions and comments so if you're just joining us we have the wonderful Michael Higgins and as you can hear we're exploring the different ways that campuses can respond to the different challenges posed by the climate crisis we had a wonderful question that came up from our great Madison Wisconsin connection John Hollenbeck he actually put two questions up and let me give you the first one because it builds on what we're just talking about University Wisconsin Madison is constantly building and expanding to accommodate the four-year degree in grad students when do we alter curriculum and degrees to make more efficient use of existing facilities I think you were just speaking about in your response to Joe right but this isn't quite the same question could you put that back up again of course thanks well many people are modifying their curriculum to well many people are beginning to modify their curriculum the more efficient use is something that's coming very hard it's it's more difficult John as you would appreciate a large institutions they move in large blocks they behave as aircraft carriers do they continue to move in the direction that they're moving for quite some time and that has its strengths in terms of stability but it has its weaknesses in terms of being able to respond the place where that's happening is college by college and course by course and instructor by instructor where things can be a lot more fluid and I think you would if you look around at UW-Madison you'd find some colleges or some units and some programs are behaving more nimbly than than others and Brian was there then a second question yeah there was which has to do with a very particular aspect of this which is a very American aspect which is sports collegiate sports be cancelled as a public statement of carbon let me come at that from from a different direction John recognizing that there there's a lot of complications on related to that question I was once asked the question so if you were gonna design a new university today and you would start from a bare piece of ground and begin to build that up what would you put where would it be well I started with a library that's my thought experiment on that because the librarian has the library has a librarian and the librarian is the key to to so much but the last thing I would do would be to build any sports facilities because they add to that core that core mission I don't know that one cancels sports events as a function of achieving carbon neutrality but those institutions who are taking carbon neutrality seriously certainly include the sports activities within their problem set and as a result they address those energy costs those environmental impacts as well and so I think that's the way to get to the kind of question that the the the way to think about that particular question in a physical context well John thank you as always for a great even puckish question and Michael the the chat box just blew up on this you know people really you know you know Charles Roberts offered the incredibly acidic line if we eliminated intercollegiate sports it would make things overall more efficient because of the small colleges that would close without them you know there but but I thank you John and thank you Michael for that very very nuanced and sensitive response we have a comment that came in from Howard Seth wartimer who just had to go but I wanted to make sure we could hear this in terms of the set point of temperature he pointed out humans students included have the ability to control their micro environments to address their own personal interests clothing work very well and can have significant impacts in the environment with financial benefits which just made me think Michael that we could see campuses pushing branded clothing for the climate perspective angle you know get more hoodies more sweatshirts that kind of thing shout out to Howard a longtime friend and colleague from Georgia Tech and he and others responsible for a living building at at Georgia Tech and so his his observations are based on personal and practical experience excellent excellent Bravo and then we had to I can't flash this on the screen right now because this has occurred through a few different chat lines but I just want to put the topic up for your consideration Ed Webb and Mark Rush were asking about this what happens to internationalization Ed was asking about study abroad international exchange and so on he mentions or I should say Braggs that he spent last year directing the study abroad program in Italy we all hate him very cordially now but he said virtual exchanges can substitute only up to a point yeah and what do you think about this should we push for fewer international exchanges but longer term or what do you think I think that zero carbon campus doesn't mean you're not using any carbon it does mean that it's done in a thoughtful way so that's the overarching principle the question then is what choices does an institution make at its local place to be able to do that so I certainly agree that virtuality is not the be all end all that there is something important about people sharing space and time that's why I labeled my blog campus matters because of exactly that phenomenon whether that's in Italy or Tierra del Fuego or Madison Wisconsin the contact between people is important the reason why focus on the campus is so that and its future is so that it will actually be there in the future I think we need to in general then to conclude that thought I think we need to be more intentional about that those investments in travel in particular and more careful in them rather than assuming that it's okay now there was asking the question is this really what needs to be done and certainly you can't experience Italy by being anywhere else but Italy now or Tierra del Fuego there you go doing this more intentionally thank you for everyone who brought that topic we have more questions barging in and there's one from our our great friend and wonderful screen capture and thoughtful thinker Roxanne Risken who asks this question another university's are building satellite campuses in different states and even outside the u.s. in Europe and elsewhere have you seen any environmental exemplars in place easy answer Roxanne is no I will add that to my add that to my data search I think there's certainly a nuance to that would be for example the acquisition of Mills College in Oakland by Northeastern University we might say they're building a campus there really they're incorporating though they're somehow merging those two campuses whether that's successful or not but those models may lead to some environmental benefits in other words there's less investment in in some aspects of the operation energy investments in the operation but the I think the questions of the off of the international campuses or more there are other issues that are more important than the environmental ones there that have to do with cultural cultural political implications and the guests on the forum last week President Guy from West Virginia at a point of view on that at least from his standpoint that those international campuses were he didn't find them to be appropriate investments but that was his that was his view was Roxanne thank you for the great question Michael thank you for the for the excellent answer and the connection to our previous session we have more questions that have come in and I want to make sure that we get a chance to talk about them from James Sullivan at Marywood University where he is the Dean of architecture you address adaptive reuse of existing buildings as a sustainable strategy yet the challenge of changing older buildings to accommodate contemporary uses what strategies are being oh James what a great question you know we don't have the opportunity to start from scratch we have to start from where we are and so that means that institutions have a host of buildings that were built for a different time and place and so the adaptive reuse of those buildings is extremely important and it's also environmentally important because those buildings represent sequestered carbon just stop and think about that for a moment those buildings represent sequestered carbon every piece of steel and wood and brick and concrete and everything is sequestered carbon in one way or another and as a result thinking about taking those buildings down rebuilding something else in this place is a huge carbon load and so it makes a lot more environmental sense to reuse those buildings and not only honors the place but it honors the it honors it's an environmental appropriate response there are of course exceptions to that some buildings must must go there's no question about that but the vast majority of the buildings on campuses right now that that are there will be there for a long time and they there i'm going to digress into another point this gives me the opportunity to talk about something that relates to the way i think about campuses and institutions there is an unspoken part of every institution's mission to exist forever it's never written down but it's there the assumption is that institution will be there in effect forever and i believe it's important for the people who are building those places taking care of those places to include that in their understanding of their responsibility and from that perspective keeping those old buildings reusing them making them new is a way to be able to do that it's not fancy like building a new flashy building but it is appropriate environmentally and it's consistent with their overall mention mission to be there for the long term that's a it's a huge point and that's where trustees and presidents often think indeed thank you that's a that's a powerful digression we also have a question coming from bob hicks at stentek and he asks comes back to the curricular question friend for a different angle or i think a very precise angle should we modify the academic schedule to reflect seasonal energy requirements for example summer vacation seems particularly poorly timed for many schools i guess by that he's referring to the abundant amount of solar power available yeah bob thanks for thanks for the question i think that relates back to or connects back to the question that we had from the from kinion college earlier i bob i i see the schedules becoming much more fluid and and that may be that i'm not certain how that will happen but i do see the schedule becoming much more fluid it's uh if you talk with some current college students it's not unusual for them to conceptualize the school year in a series of four and eight block timeframes even some institutions that are organized in normal semester plus uh plus summer schedules in other words there's a lot of movement going on there at least at some institutions and maybe i've been talking with folks who are going to the i'll label it the northeastern's where where geography geography is malleable and the schedules are malleable in the sense that the four and eight block time schedules matter but but to return to your the technical component bob of your question i think it's possible to to bridge those gaps in whether solar energy or wind with energy storage and so i think technically energy storage on site will wind up being a large part of the way that campuses achieve net zero carbon and are able to accommodate fluctuations in energy supply as a function of weather or reason how do you think physically that will appear on campuses i mean do you think for example we'll have the campus energy storage building or you know there'll be the the underground storage facility perhaps using sand perhaps using salt that'll be under another building or you know or would that be a building for campuses to celebrate as a sign of their of their greenness most of what i've just talked about is invisible brian uh-huh it's invisible because it is not like a power plant and it doesn't have a steam you know it doesn't have a smokestack the most dramatic example that i could give you would be a ground source storage facility that princeton university has under construction it'll take them 15 years to implement it started it and it's a series of it's a series of wells that go into the ground they don't discharge water into the ground it's a closed it's a closed system but they're using the temperature of the deep in the deep below the surface now there's certainly above ground there are you know pump houses and that sort of thing but it's most of the kind of systemic issues that i'm talking about are invisible on campus now in order to make those schemes work it is first necessary to decrease the demand for energy for every piece that's there and that's where the changes take place in the desert southwest those changes include shade structures that are relatively large compared to the building so that the buildings themselves are shaded and protected from solar radiation now that solar radiation of course can be those shade structures those can be solar panels so that's an exact that's an example of of that thank you i'm i think that's uh i mean it's like we're getting a kind of richard's scary style view of a campus right you know just going bit by bit uh pulling out everything um one of the things that i love about uh thinking this way is how much we get to learn about campuses but one point of energy use comes up that venice avail just raised and this is this is a deep question and i want to give you a chance to chew on this one for a bit um considering an inevitable move to online learning increased online learning what are the plans for green computing computing uses a bunch of energy uh yeah venice that's a that's a tough question it it does fall outside the meter that the institution has you know if you think about the institution it's got one electric meter and it's got one gas meter and it pays a whole series of it's pays a whole series of bills that's why the campus is a unit that you can actually get your hands around and do something and demonstrate it it's not just that you're talking about it you can measure it now the use of a student offsite her use of her computer offsite in her house as a as a green computing response is going to be dependent on the larger solution set and that is the the decarbonization of the network itself and at that point you're talking about the state the city the county the the nation's infrastructure being decarbonized in terms of the delivery of electricity now why do i keep saying electricity again and again and again that's because the that's the form of energy that does not have to be fossil fuel and that's why a lot of institutions first step in decarbonizing new buildings is to make sure that they're 100 electric i hope that's towards the answer that venice was looking for i think it's towards an answer and venice i hope you get to hear this at least in the recording hopefully live venice is coming on a very very thin bandwidth pipe but i guess if i could build on that michael do do you anticipate for example campuses using a lot more computing because they're using that to do virtualization of study abroad they're doing it in order to reduce other travel but also to reduce other carbon footprint issues or do you see campuses using less computing for example to pick an extreme example banning bitcoin mining because that's incredibly intense or perhaps reducing the amount of ai neural network training on large data sets because that's also computationally intensive perhaps campuses will use less in the way cloud computing more on site hosting so i guess do you see more or less computing in terms of green computing hadn't really thought about that question until now brian it seems to me that the that i'm going to fall back to this if that electricity that's being used for whatever purpose came from a carbon source that's the issue if that electricity all of the things being equal came from renewables in one way or another and and once again that's wind and solar that's ground source heat pumps that's wave action that's a whole variety of technologies that are available that's the source of that electricity i see it as not mattering now diving inside that box you get to the question of when electricity is used computing it generates a great deal of heat and so that creates an opportunity to recapture that energy so that it can be reused for other purposes whether that's generating yet more energy electricity or simply using it in heat form to heat water that's stored in such a way that it's later possible to be able to use as we would think of it as being stored in a battery great idea great idea thank you thank you venessa thank you for that great question as always we're great to great to have you on board michael we're almost out of time and we are fortunately just about out of questions but i had one last one to ask you we're talking about net zero and ways of reducing electrical use and and reducing fossil fuel use i'm wondering what kind of future you see for carbon sequestration and capture on campuses do you think i mean that if you're if you're new everyone else if you're new to that this idea of sucking down carbon from the atmosphere and you can do it naturally such as with forests or you can do it with new technologies iceland has a big project for this right now i'm just curious do you think we'll see campuses covered with more uh more trees for this purpose or mounting big dac units or do you think we'll think that's just not a contribution we're willing to make i think the easy answer is yes on trees i'm uncertain about the large sequestration projects because from my perspective we need to concentrate on the things we can do now as rapidly as we can do them if other things come along that's that's wonderful and and in fact necessary given the pace which we uh collectively are are moving uh but on the question of on the question of trees some campuses have farms that they have planted and are approaching previously and are approaching the point where those farms have captured as are at the growth they've grown as much as they can in other words they're reaching a peak sequestration point so their question is do we plant more trees someplace else etc etc so those those items uh those approaches like that albeit on small campuses are significant and meaningful and instructive it's a part of the mission of the institution to inform people about how to live on the planet and those actions and the subtlety of oh the the forest can't store any more carbon that's an important kind of understanding as people forward into the future to live on that planet that's different in the in the chat oh about half an hour ago um uh Tim Michels or Michael said that there are real opportunities that colleges can be the basis of future workforce development by addressing the pedagogical opportunities of training students in climate change responses the campus becomes a laboratory that can leverage community solutions um and Brian if I can add quickly to that on the uh at the ashi website that's the association for advancement of sustainability in higher education there by every institution there is a description of what they're doing in terms of their curricula what kind of courses are being taught in some places you can pick up the syllabuses for those for those courses and see the results of the of the student work on those topics fantastic fantastic what a great point I'm afraid we have to pause right now Michael because we're at the top of the hour but what a great point to end with real projects real work and looking at higher education as a way of helping students and others try to adapt to a new world Michael what's is campus matters dot net the best way to keep up with you and your work it is absolutely excellent well I'm going to say this again thank you thank you so much you've just been a terrific guest you've shown us so much so much and you've you've you've taken us in the in the tour of where it physically be going where it physically be going thanks Brian great to be with you oh our pleasure well don't go away friends this has just been so important I'm so so glad that we've been able to have this conversation we're going to continue this more and for those of you in the chat who would like to see more please reach out to me I'd like to do more if you want to keep talking about this you can right now I'll go on Twitter and use the hashtag FTTE or tweet at me Brian Alexander or at Shindig events you can also jump on my blog BrianAlexander.org because we've been talking about this for a while if you'd like to look back into our previous sessions either about green and climate issues or about physical campuses just head to tinyorl.com slash FTF archive now looking ahead we're going to continue on the climate crisis as well as on topics including free speech on campus young adults and jobs in the paradigm project just go to form that future education that you have to learn more and if you want to share your own work like Ed Webb is sharing the project to Dickinson or elsewhere just ping me Brian Alexander at gmail.com once again thank you all for your questions for your thoughts this has been a terrific discussion I hope you're all doing well this summer I hope you're all safe and working hard take care of yourselves we'll see you next week online bye bye