It’s Getting Hot In Here

This past weekend, I joined 110,000 men and women, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists, from age 8 months – 80 years, and engaged in a century old fall ritual.

Our loosely affiliated group came together from across the country and around the world to celebrate pure person power at its highest level. The participants we watched used no machines, no electricity, and no oil. Instead – full of carbs, sugars, and water – they put on an inspiring display of human power and collaboration.

In the end, the University of Michigan Wolverines football team prevailed 41-17.
NCAA college football is an amazing game and quite a U.S. phenomenon. In England and Europe, college athletics play a relatively insignificant role in the sports scene. Here in the US, we recorded an amazing attendance of 32,641,526 visits to division 1 football games in 2005.

So this past Saturday, my wife and I left the comfort of our home and walked four blocks to Michigan Stadium. We stood in line to get in to the stadium, stood in line to get into our section, and spent the next 4 hours with our butts smushed into 17 inch seats. We got poured on during an hour long rain delay, but stuck it out until (close) to the bitter end.

Midway through the 3^rd quarter, the crowd got bored – we were, after all, playing Central Michigan. In perfect sync, 1,000-2,000 Michigan students stood up and sat down. Around them, 18,000-20,000 of their classmates followed suit. In the next section down, 10,000 graduate students, alumni, and Ann Arbor locals did the same.

Before you could say Big Ten Champions, 100,000 people were following their lead – standing up and sitting down – creating a human wave that made its way around the stadium 3 full times, engaging and mobilizing us all. Just to challenge ourselves, we got tricky. We sped up the wave. We ran the wave in slow motion. On the final time around, two separate waves originating in the student section traveled clockwise and counter-clockwise around the stadium – crossing in the corner of one end zone – and returning to the point from which they had originated. A small collection of student actions had sparked a sports fan “tipping point” – transforming 100,000 distinct individuals into one, collaborative, complex human system.

This year, college students across the country will take on the Hurculean task of doing something very similar but far more challenging – starting a massive wave that they hope will sweep across the country – catching up professors, administrators, alumni, staff, and locals in its current.

The Campus Climate Challenge is the bold and ambitious project of Energy Action – a coalition of today’s leading youth and student environmental and environmental justice groups. Instead of literally standing up, though, students will push their campus communities to figuratively get up – and stand up – to the Challenge of global warming.

In graduate programs across the country, a similar wave will began to break – engaging the next set of lawyers, architects, engineers, divinity scholars, business people, and other soon-to-be professionals in 21^st century consulting projects. Campus Climate Neutral, run by the National Association of Environmental Law Societies (NAELS) will give graduate students the tools they need to join their undergraduate brothers and sisters. Short on extracurricular time, but flush with research hours, they will work with their professors and university staff to help identify over a billion dollars in potential campus energy savings, and speed the walk down paths to capture those savings. Santa Barbara students have already gotten 1/200^th of the way there, highlighting $5 million in savings by 2020 last year. At US business schools, the Green Campus Initiative, run by Net Impact, will engage business students and MBA graduates – helping them to use business skills to improve their universities’ impact on the environment, as well as to raise awareness of environmental problems and solutions among emerging business leaders.

All of these efforts will require thousands, if not millions, of coordinated, collaborative campus actions to be effective. Thousands of bike trips to campus. Thousands of light switches turned off and thermostats turned down. Thousands of signatures gathered. Thousands of hours on group projects – plugging away in libraries and touring campus facilities. Thousands of lectures, discussions, and panels. Thousands of light bulbs changed, windows replaced, and new vehicles purchased.

The ultimate success of these campaigns will depend on how well today’s young leaders are able to overcome the hurdles that have historically plagued student organizing. Their lack of power, knowledge, and experience, high turnover rate, limited time, and the steep learning curve in understanding and changing a complex university system will make this a truly monumental Challenge.

But this weekend gave me hope. Even though tackling the impending threat of climate change is not nearly as fun or inspiring as NCAA football, if the 15 million students on today’s campuses can be innovative, collaborative, and determined enough, they will be able to harness the same behavioral trends that pull millions of people off of their couches and porches and out to college football stadiums each Saturday morning. And together we will all guide a giant wave that will sweep over the 4,000 campuses in the country, riding it to a more sustainable future.

So this fall, keep an eye out, start paddling, and catch the wave as it breaks over your campus. I’m in a coffee shop in Ann Arbor and I think I see it coming now…Whoooooooooaaaaaaaahhhhh!!!