Green Mountain College: Environment

Wanted: Sharp Minds to Solve Complex Problems

You might not know it yet, but just by your interest in GMC's mission, you're years ahead of the curve. That is, ahead of our world's understanding of something we're all hearing more about lately: the environment.

What is the environment? We ponder that question a lot here. Of course it's the air we breathe and the trees we tread under. But it's also the culture wars we fight, the poverty in our cities and the snow on top of Mount Kilimanjaro. When we say "environment" we mean it in the broadest sense - natural, social, and physical.

Did we lose you there? Hope not. What we're saying is that the environment is the one thing in our world that is affected by everything we do.

Time to Step Up
It's becoming clear that the problems of the twenty-first century are the most complicated we've ever faced. It can be scary stuff.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, and submerged the city of New Orleans. Then Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" (if you haven't seen the trailer, you need to) taught millions of moviegoers it could happen again. Car owners watched oil prices climb higher than ever, and then asked, what happens when it's all gone?

But while the public is just learning about many of these things, Green Mountain College students have been studying them, debating them, and working on the solutions -- in any number of ways, from researching sustainable energies to community activism, to volunteering in the community, to things like just plain recycling.

The Advantage is Yours
Green Mountain is different from most colleges because we infuse environmental awareness into every aspect of a liberal arts education. It doesn't mean you have to be a "treehugger" to go here (although we don't mind if you are). It means we're training a generation of citizens to confront this daunting century with smart, positive solutions. More and more employers are looking for concerned, sharp minds ready to solve complex problems that won't wait.

Here are just a few of the ways in which Green Mountain has taken a leadership role in environmental and sustainability issues:

In 2007, Green Mountain College won Campus Sustainability Leadership Award in the “Under a 1,000” category from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). The award recognizes Green Mountain for outstanding commitment to sustainability in their governance and administration, curriculum and research, operations, campus culture, and community outreach.
We were named to Grist’s list of 15 Green Colleges and Universities alongside Middlebury, Harvard, Tufts (and just ahead of Yale).
GMC's energy-saving initiatives earned us the nation's first Energy Star Showcase Campus award given by the EPA.
We get half of our electricity from Vermont dairy farms that generate power from methane extracted from cow manure, which reduces greenhouse-causing methane and offsets nearly 3,500 metric tons of carbon emissions per year. It's like taking 760 cars off the road.
We have a nationally recognized core curriculum called the Environmental Liberal Arts Program, which takes the environment as the central theme in training students to think and communicate effectively about complex global issues.
We co-founded the Eco League of environmental liberal arts colleges, which lets students expand their education to diverse parts of the country including Maine, Ohio, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Alaska.
We have a campus farm--complete with oxen, sheep, and chickens, and a market garden--and it's part of a bigger local foods program, which strives to localize our ecological footprint by purchasing $60,000 annually in local foods.
About half of our faculty use service learning in their courses, which gets you out of the classroom to help solve real-world problems in the community.
We have an award-winning mentoring program that connects GMC students with children from Poultney Elementary School.