Facing Tornados and Climate Change: An Interview with Jim Dontje about Environmental Innovation at Gustavus
Intersections No. 36 · Fall 2012
What is the work of the Johnson Center for Environmental Innovation at Gustavus Adolphus?
The Center works in collaboration with students, faculty, and staff across the campus. On the facilities side, it has worked with the Physical Plant director, as well as some key faculty, to bring on-line three large solar thermal systems and several solar electric systems over the past 18 months, as well as support the LEED certification in Beck Hall, our new academic building.
Through student connections, I and others have helped with recycling and energy conservation efforts, consulted on numerous student projects, and been a part of developing a student garden. Over the next few months, we will be adding a food waste composting system and greenhouse to that effort.
I have seen good environmental initiatives come from all across the campus. One of our Campus Safety Officers took it upon himself to create a battery recycling drop-off in our bookstore. When we got NSF funding for a small wind turbine, our physical plant staff “did their homework” and were able to do the installation in a very technically proficient manner.
What is the most challenging issue?
The issue of climate change was, and remains, the top environmental concern. Reducing our greenhouse gas emissions is essential for the success of all our other environmental efforts. I have an ongoing concern that we, as a society, and Gustavus as in institution, have not taken seriously the climate issue. The political partisanship and corporate disinformation campaigns that have led to a public disregard for the issue, the distractions of a severe economic recession, and the administrative changes that we, like every institution, go through on a regular basis, keep distracting our attention from a response to climate change that is proportionate to the danger. This distraction is despite the fact that through our annual Nobel science conference, we have had internationally respected scientists and ethicists state very clearly in front of large audiences on our campus that it is time for strong action. On a more hopeful note, after our most recent Nobel Conference that focused on oceans, some key faculty and administrators have recognized the need to work together toward a better response.
How is Gustavus positioned or equipped to undertake these initiatives?
The history of Gustavus includes its challenging but successful recovery from being struck by a tornado in 1998. While that was a painful event, and the response taxed the community’s resources to the extreme, the result was a community that knows that once they have come to consensus about what needs to be done, they can do amazing work together. When I am discussing environmental initiatives, if there is consensus about what to do, the conversation moves quite easily to “how can we make it happen.”
Each of our core values, Community, Faith, Justice, Excellence, and Service has an environmental component. We could add a sixth for environmental stewardship, but when we take each one of the existing values seriously, the environmental values rise to the surface naturally.
Our Linnaeus Arboretum gives us space for reflection and a constant reminder of why environmental stewardship and sustainability are important. Besides wildlife, including deer and wild turkey, it draws student researchers pursuing class projects and members of the public wanting to enjoy the space. Because we value the environment in a way that prompts us to set us aside this much area for the arboretum, we are naturally led to think about extending that preservation across campus.
Does the Lutheran identity of Gustavus here matter?
The “Lutheran identity” sometimes leads us to be more cautious, but ultimately our “Lutheranness” is an essential part of our environmental ethos. Lutheran theology and history has always been open to considering environmental issues, witnessed by Luther’s response what we should do if we thought Jesus would return tomorrow (“plant an apple tree”). Our Lutheran identity leads to a willingness to ask what our ethical response should be to our creation.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm argues that the rhetoric framing ELCA higher education as a binary between “secular” and “religious” is “hokum”: there is a third way of doing higher education from a Christian perspective that is religious in motivation and practice but on the ground looks secular. After more than half a century of debates, he calls on ELCA presidents to “do something” in 2013 to move forward in shared mission and vocation.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn introduces the issue through Norman Wirzba’s The Paradise of God and the Genesis 2 vocation given to Adam to care for adamah—arguing that “vocation” is the Lutheran name for an incarnational, creation-centric theology of kenosis and that Lutherans bring distinctive theological gifts to environmental work even if no absolutely unique perspective on caring for creation.
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Institutional Focus
Vocation for Life: A Report on a New Initiative for Alumni
A report on “Vocation for Life,” a collaborative initiative of ELCA-related colleges and universities to make vocational exploration available to alumni across the country regardless of which school they attended. The first pilot retreat—“Explore Your Life’s Calling,” in Rochester, Minnesota in November 2011, facilitated by Tom Morgan of Augsburg, Chris Johnson of Gustavus, and Tom Scholtterback of Concordia using the Circles of Trust approach—is described.
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Article
A Traveler's Manifesto for Navigating the Creation
Ann Pederson
Pederson asks who we are, where we are, and how then we shall live within the Epic of Evolution and the doctrines of creation, incarnation, and imago dei. Drawing on John 3:16 (“For God so loved the cosmos…”), Luther on God’s presence “in the veins of a leaf,” Augustine’s City of God, Phil Hefner’s “created co-creator,” Joseph Sittler’s “Called to Unity,” and Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, she argues for a cosmic reading of incarnation in which all of creation—not only the human—bears the image of God.
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Article
A Lutheran Ethic of Environmental Stewardship
Jim Martin-Schramm
Martin-Schramm sketches a Lutheran ethic of environmental stewardship organized around four moral norms inherited from World Council of Churches discussions and developed by Presbyterian and ELCA social statements: sustainability, sufficiency, participation, and solidarity. He grounds each norm in scripture and the Lutheran tradition—the theocentric doctrine of creation against rampant anthropocentrism, the incarnation against destructive dualisms, Christ in community against modern individualism, and accountability to God for future generations—arguing that this “ethic of ecological justice” offers a common moral vocabulary for engaging environmental policy debates that would otherwise collapse into cost-benefit analysis.
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Institutional Focus
Putting Principles into Practice: An Interview with Kenneth Foster about Concordia's Sustainability Council
Kenneth Foster
Foster, chair of Concordia College’s President’s Sustainability Council, describes the Council’s formation under President William Craft in 2011 as a re-energization of stalled task-force work, its coordination with grass-roots campus initiatives, and its strategy of moving from principles to practice in stewardship of natural resources at a Lutheran liberal arts college.
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Article
Climate Justice, Environmental Racism, and a Lutheran Moral Vision
Cynthia Moe-Lobeda
Moe-Lobeda argues that the vocation of a Lutheran college is to prepare students for Thomas Berry’s “great work”: forging a sustainable relationship between the human species and the planet while diminishing the gap between those who have too much and those who have not enough. She develops a three-fold “moral vision” rooted in Luther’s theology of the cross—seeing what is (climate injustice and environmental racism for what they are), seeing more just and sustainable alternatives, and seeing God’s saving presence at work—and offers it as a distinctive Lutheran contribution to the panhuman and interfaith challenge of our day.
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Institutional Focus
Farming and Eating Locally: An Interview with Garry Griffith about Augustana's Farm2Fork Program
Garry Griffith
Griffith, Director of Dining at Augustana College (Rock Island), describes the Farm2Fork program’s shift from pre-packaged food to fresh produce sourced from local farms (beginning with Jim Johansen of Wesley Acres in Moline), the Augie Acres campus garden tended by students in learning-community courses, the bio-diesel conversion of used fryer oil for greenhouse heat and farm equipment, and the stewardship calling that grounds these efforts in Augustana’s Lutheran identity.
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Article
Sustaining Sustainability
Baird Tipson
Tipson—former Provost of Gettysburg College, President of Wittenberg University, and President of Washington College—reads Romans 12:2 (“be not conformed to this world…”) against Victor Ferrall’s Liberal Arts at the Brink and the contemporary financial reality of small Lutheran colleges. He tells three case-study stories from Washington College’s Center for the Environment and Society—the Chino Farms partnership, the Chesapeake Semester, and the acquisition of the work boat Callinectes—to show how presidents must engage “the world” to secure resources for sustainability work without being conformed to it.
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Institutional Focus
Health Food in the Inner City: An Interview with Brian Noy about Augsburg's Campus Kitchen
Brian Noy
Noy, Director of Campus Kitchen at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, describes the Kitchen’s four-fold program—Food to Share (2,000 meals per month from surplus dining-services food and Campus Cooking Classes), Food to Grow (an 80-plot community garden), Food to Buy (two farmers markets that accept EBT/food stamps), and Food to Know (educational programming)—and the deep history of Augsburg’s service to the immigrant communities of the Cedar Riverside neighborhood, now Somali and Mexican as well as historically Norwegian.
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Institutional Focus
Building a Developmental Framework for Vocational Reflection at Thiel College
Brian Riddle, Greg Q. Butcher, Liza Anne Schaef
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Riddle, Schaef, and Butcher describe how a NetVUE Program Development Grant enabled Thiel College to build “the Tomcat Way” — a four-year developmental framework with personal, social, academic, and professional domains and four phases (Explore, Envision, Belong and Lead, Launch) — that now guides every aspect of the student experience.
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Article
“A Decolonizing Conversation”: Indigenous Engagement at Luther College at the University of Regina
Marc Jerry, Sarah Dymund
No. 58 · Fall 2023
Jerry and Dymund describe Luther College at the University of Regina’s response to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission — Land Acknowledgments, a Starblanket ceremony, the Project of Heart, an Elder in Residence, and the unedited video conversation with Elder Lorna Standingready that anchored their 2023 VLHE keynote.
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Editorial
From the Publisher: Reflections on the 2024 Vocational Leaders in Higher Education Conference
Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 60 · Fall 2024
Wells reflects on the 2024 VLHE Conference theme — “Educational Access: Lutheran Roots, Contemporary Practices” — tracing today’s commitment to inclusivity back to Martin Luther’s radical 16th-century insistence that both boys and girls be educated, and previews NECU’s expanded engagement of student leaders alongside faculty and administrators.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 29 · Spring 2009
Wilhelm introduces essays from the 2008 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference held at Luther College under the theme “Educating for Responsible Citizenship,” previewing contributions from Paul Pribbenow on dual citizenship at Augsburg, Wanda Deifelt on Luther College’s engagement with civic vocation, Jose Marichal on the promise and peril of digital citizenship, and Arne Selbyg on his three experiences of being educated for citizenship.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 40 · Fall 2014
Wilhelm draws a parallel between the rediscovery of vocation and the rediscovery of interfaith understanding in Lutheran higher education, arguing that previously under-emphasized aspects of the Lutheran tradition point us to interfaith work and that an authentic Lutheran college or university will make interfaith understanding a feature of its mission.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
James M. Unglaube
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Unglaube reports on the second annual Vocation of a Lutheran College conference of August 1996, where Walter Bouman of Trinity Lutheran Seminary addressed “What is Lutheran; What is the Lutheran Tradition” (biblical, catholic, evangelical, sacramental, world-affirming—the world “received, enjoyed, served as God’s Gift”). He previews presentations by Wendy McCredie of Texas Lutheran and Baird Tipson of Wittenberg on how the Lutheran tradition is embodied in its colleges, and Bob Vogel’s challenge in “Coherence—And Now what?” that the tradition comes to life in how faculty give expression to their beliefs and values in the classroom and with colleagues.