Below is the first installment of a four-blog mini-series, reposted from the Sustainability Education blog of Living Routes Director Daniel Greenberg. Stay tuned for the next three installments, which will be published in the AASHE blog over the next three weeks.

Contrary to common opinion, I believe studying abroad – anywhere – promotes sustainability. But we need to go further. With climate change and peak oil looming, I believe all study abroad programs, not just those with a sustainability focus like Living Routes, need to adopt higher standards of sustainable practices. But what do these standards look like?

From ’08-’10, I had the privilege of Chairing the Subcommittee on Sustainability Standards for The Forum on Education Abroad. Our mission was to review their Standards of Good Practice and Code of Ethics documents and suggest revisions through the lens of environmental and social responsibility. In this blog mini-series I will flesh out four identified strategies, using Living Routes as a case study:

• Program Design and Management
• Student Learning
• Staff Training and Office Management
• Promotion

Let’s start with Program Design and Management. The question we are asking here is:

“How does a study abroad organization consider the safety and welfare of the staff, community, and local environment in the design, management and termination of its programs?”

We came up with five main ideas:

1) Solicit local community and institutional input and integrate local values and practices into program design and management when appropriate.

For example, site directors might explore using Appreciative Inquiry and principles of Public Participation during program development to identify and incorporate local norms, such as community celebrations honoring our relationship with the natural world or common practices of reducing, re-using, and recycling precious resources.

With Living Routes, the whole point of our programs is to integrate students within communities that model sustainable values and practices. Whether it is getting around on bicycles, exchanging goods in the local free store, or taking time to express gratitude before a meal, students learn about sustainability by living it.

2) Utilize local experts, instructors, and other community resource individuals and groups when practical.

It's vital that directors prioritize community engagement and involve local stakeholders at all levels when designing programs. There are too many stories of universities buying up tracts of land to create satellite campuses with little to no local input in their design.

Living Routes is proud to almost exclusively hire local faculty and staff to manage our programs. These local experts know the community and culture better than anyone and their salaries remain in-country, further supporting the local economy.

3) Seek out opportunities to utilize goods and services that are locally-sourced and environment-friendly and strive to work with vendors who are socially, environmentally and economically responsible.

From transportation to supplies, from accommodations to food, directors can make informed purchasing decisions that support the local economy and environment. How about committing to purchase only Fair Trade products when available? With food in particular, there are lots of resources about how to buy local and develop sustainable food purchasing policies. Let’s challenge our students to maintain a 100 Mile Diet and support organic producers! It is also useful to develop a vendor code of conduct (e.g. Fairmount Minerals or SAP) so practices can be maintained even with staff turnover.

Ecovillages’ commitment to living well and lightly typically translates to being local and health-conscious. For example, students on Living Routes programs generally eat organic produce from farms within or associated with their host communities and residences are typically made out of local materials such as keet, earth bricks, or – at Findhorn in northern Scotland – out of recycled whisky barrels!

4) Have a defined system for regularly evaluating and reducing its programs’ harmful environmental and social impacts.

Ask for student feedback about program impacts in end-of-program evaluations. Begin to audit program CO2 emissions and mitigation efforts. Include environmental and social impact criteria in regular site reviews. Sustainable Travel International’s Checklist and the University of Washington’s Exploration Seminar Program Policy on Sustainability, Responsibility and Conservation are good places to get ideas.

Living Routes has a well articulated Carbon Consciousness strategy that I will describe in more detail in a future post. In 2007, we also began asking students to respond to pre-, post-, six-month post- and two-year post-surveys that explore students sustainability-related beliefs and behaviors. Our intention is to discover the long-term impact of our programs on students lifestyle choices.

5) Use resources to strengthen collective assets such as local schools, libraries, health programs, or land and water conservation projects.

What are programs giving back to the communities that support them? Not only do such support build strong working relationships, they are excellent opportunities for students to engage in service learning and work side-by-side with local residents. For examples of potential projects, check out the Geotourism Challenge and the Community Toolbox.

At Living Routes, we have commissioned solar cookers and supported local students to join our programs in Senegal; helped develop an electric rickshaw prototype in India; built a recycling shed in Mexico and an EcoCentre in Peru; and planted trees just about everywhere we go.

These are just a few ideas for how to design and manage study abroad programs that take their social and environmental impact into account. What did I miss? What are you doing on your programs that you would like to share with others? This is all a work in progress, so please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments. Thanks!

In my next post, I will explore ways study abroad programs can further incorporate sustainability into their curricula and student learning opportunities.

In community,
- Daniel

The officers and moderators have been working to finalize the mission plans and gather necessary materials. Right now we really need as much help from players as we can get. This includes:

• Extras for video clips on March 5th, between 9am-5pm. We need a lot of people to play both humans and zombies. If you are available at all during that time frame and willing to help us out, please email me as soon as possible (romig1@umbc.edu). Encourage your friends to come out, too! It should be a fun day!
• Moderators for the event. It’s not too late to volunteer to moderate! Please contact one of the officers if you are interested!
• Hosts for overnight guests. If you have some space on your dorm or apartment floor, consider letting an out-of-town student sleep there! Please contact one of the officers if you are interested in hosting!
• Original zombies.  If you would like to be considered for the group of original zombies, please email the officers by February 26th.

We are also taking suggestions for team names or team naming schemes. There will be five randomized teams during the invitational and they need kick-ass names! Please email me (romig1@umbc.edu) if you have any ideas!

The basic invitational rules have been posted here, but are still being fine-tuned. If you have any comments or suggestions, please contact an officer!

Professor Marc Olano notes that UMBC's GAIM program was identified by Princeton review as one of the "Top 50 Undergraduate Game Design Programs".

"I don’t know how I missed this, but UMBC made the Princeton Review’s list of the top 50 undergraduate game design programs. Now I might split hairs and say that we really focus on game development more than design, much as there’s a distinction between being an actor and being a director, but I certainly won’t complain about making the list!"

Egypt’s most recent change of government has inspired calls for change across the Middle East.

Protests haven arisen in Iran, Bahrain, Libya, and potentially Djibouti.

It looks like the Egyptians have started a regional call for change. The question is will these protests succeed or will they be crushed? Only time and the “skillful” words of a particular blog will tell.

After 40 years in the book business, Borders, the nation’s second-largest bookseller, was forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Additionally, the store announced their intention to close nearly 200 of their 642 stores in the coming weeks. This has us at USDemocrazy wondering…what’s next for the American bookstore?

We’re not the only ones curious about the future of the book market. Borders’ announcement shook the publishing industry from top to bottom, but it didn’t exactly come as a surprise.

The book retailing industry is very challenging right now…We’ve had significant transformation. Bookstores have gradually been losing their prominence, and the U.S. market is oversaturated in terms of the number of retail stores. So that trend will likely continue as e-books gain more prevalence in the market.”

There it is, the term publishing companies have come to despise and fret over in recent years…”e-books.”

As companies like Apple follow the model established by Amazon’s Kindle,  the fear is the digitization of literature will have as much of an impact on the book industry as it did with music and the record business (you remember record stores, right?).

For Borders, this wasn’t quite the case.  While e-books might have played a part in the company’s deterioration they didn’t act alone. A number of factors have been named as contributors to the overall downfall.

Ill-fated expansion plans, too many stores that lose money and being late to realize the popularity of electronic books.”

If traditional bookstores can keep up with their digital competitors they might be able to survive in this environment, but it’s hard to say for how long.