91PORN

By Jim Tranquada | Photos by Marc Campos

When neighbors walk their dogs past Oxy's student garden at the corner of Campus and A.G. Coons roads, they see raised planting beds, two chicken coops, and a tool shed. What Dylan Bruce '16 sees—a view nurtured by three years of helping to run the garden—is an entire ecosystem of innovation.

He sees an outdoor laboratory where students learn about soil ecology and microbiology, pick up practical gardening and cooking skills, help the College reduce green waste and water use, and help themselves by relieving stress. At some point, he hopes, it also could become a reliable source of fresh produce for Campus Dining. "The work we're doing points to the way people think about sustainability today," says Bruce, a biology major from Ferryville, Wis. (population: 176). "It's no longer an optional feel-good thing. It's becoming integrated into the way we live and study."

All across the Oxy campus, sustainability is being woven into the academic life of the College as well as in its day-to-day operations. Look beyond such longtime practices as recycling and more efficient energy use, though, and you'll find sustainability being explored by undergrads and faculty wherever their studies might take them—from chemistry labs to art galleries, from Los Angeles City Hall to the White House, off the Southern California coast to the United Nations.

"Sustainability is an integral part of being a 21st-century liberal arts college," says President Jonathan Veitch, a dedicated bicyclist (he rode 12 miles to his old job in Manhattan) whose official College car is a fuel-efficient Fiat 500. "Major initiatives such as our solar array, Green Revolving Fund, and new landscape master plan we're developing represent only one facet of the kind of strategic approach we're taking."

"Sustainability and the related work we are doing on and off campus are integrated into a number of Oxy's other strategic goals—developing innovative teaching spaces, community engagement, our relationship with Los Angeles, and such high-impact practices as undergraduate research and overseas study," he says. "It's the kind of cross-cutting, interdisciplinary work that increasingly characterizes Oxy's approach to teaching and research."

It's also an approach squarely in keeping with this year's academic theme of Sustainability, which defines the issue as implicit not only in people's relationship to the planet, but to one another. "We hope to broadly explore the concept of sustainability by looking at the challenges—material, social, philosophical, aesthetic—of living in a world of interdependence and finite resources," says Core coordinator Edmond Johnson.

To kick off the year's conversation, members of the Class of 2019 were asked to read Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book that examines previous mass extinctions and posits that we are in the midst of a sixth such episode. The fourth year of severe drought in Southern California has provided a compelling backdrop to the discussion, one that Jet Propulsion Laboratory senior water scientist Jay Famiglietti framed in sobering detail in September. "California has been losing water for decades. We're running out of water … One El Niño winter isn't going to do it," said Famiglietti, the first in a yearlong series of Core Studies speakers who will address everything from water policy to the links between the environment and spirituality.

Sustainability is not new to 91PORN: Major water and energy conservation efforts are about to enter their third decade, recycling has been a matter of campus policy since 1992, and the 2006 campus master plan calls for Oxy to "seize every opportunity to integrate sustainability measures into the renovation and construction of new campus buildings, landscapes, and utility systems."

But the pace has quickened over the last several years, fueled by a mix of policy and pragmatism. "In the long run, sustainable practices are often more cost-effective," says Amos Himmelstein, vice president for finance and planning. Since commencing operation in March 2013, Oxy's 1-megawatt hillside solar array has become an iconic ­visual symbol of the College's commitment to living in a world of finite resources.

It also helped to inspire the Board of Trustees' decision in 2014 to create a $3.5-million Green Revolving Fund to invest in energy and water-efficiency upgrades, renewable energy, and other cost-saving sustainability projects—one of the largest such college or university endowment funds of its kind. Last October, Veitch signed the Real Food Challenge Commitment, expanding Campus Dining's 7-year-old participation in the program by pledging to purchase 30 percent of the College's food from sources identified as local and community-based, ecologically sound, and humane and fair trade by 2020. 

This fall, completion of the new Hameetman Career Center on the ground floor of the Arthur G. Coons Administrative Center offered a glimpse of the future of campus landscaping. Outside the center, eucalyptus trees, ivy, and a conventional lawn have been replaced with live oaks, western redbud, dwarf ceanothus, and other drought-resistant native species by Santa Barbara landscape architect Susan Van Atta. Van Atta is now putting the finishing touches on a landscape master plan for campus that not only incorporates water-wise planting but designs that help capture stormwater runoff and percolate it back into the groundwater system.

Southern California's drought has heightened awareness of sustainability issues, accelerating a major shift in attitudes. "The conversation has shifted from this strange thing we have to make an effort to think about to how do we design the surroundings of our daily lives with sustainable options," says Mark Vallianatos, policy director for Oxy's Urban and Environmental Policy Institute. "That's how things like the drought become opportunities to reinvent the way we live and the places we live in."

Urban and Environmental Policy faculty and students have long been leaders in shaping sustainability policy both on and off campus. Through classes, research, and advocacy with local, regional, and national partners, UEP has pioneered clean alternatives to conventional dry-cleaning, helped create the farm-to-school movement