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Stern: Commitment, Costs Are Factors Affecting Sustainability
Story and Photo by Shawn Esworthy
Stern says sustainability is not new.
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Political science department chair Larry Stern says sustainability ideas are not new and have been gaining attention for many years at Mars Hill College.
Stern has been at MHC since 1971. He has served on two statewide boards and was the director of the college’s Institutional Research and Effectiveness division for 25 years, which involved him in accreditation and coordinating reports to government agencies and educational groups affiliated with MHC.
Stern said getting students involved in sustainability by recycling more and saving energy at Mars Hill College is not new.
“Students have been interested in this kind of thing for about 40 years,” Stern said in a recent interview. Issues of sustainability have been around for a long time, he added.
“The question is, are students able to continue to be interested in buying into this?” Stern said.
Stern said he believes there is instability in the demand for recycled products. “It takes efforts to provide baseline stability,” Stern said.
But he said he thinks there is a lot more potential for plastic recycling.
“We can get greater awareness of the need to separate things in different recycling,” Stern said. We are moving in the right direction, he said, but he still thinks demand is not there yet.
The faculty is also a big part of making things work, he said, and that the faculty is enthusiastic about things it can do.
“They have good leadership to provide. However, I am not sure if faculty is where leadership is,” Stern pointed out. “The question is, which faculty is ready to lead in this movement?”
Stern said he strongly thinks there needs to be involvement coming from different groups. This includes student involvement, administration involvement, county, town and volunteer involvement.
“There needs to be some kind of coordination between the town and faculty,” he said in an interview from his office in Founder’s Hall.
Although Stern is a faculty member but no longer part of the MHC administration, he said he understands what administrators are trying to do. He said the administration is buying into the idea of sustainability and into the principle of it.
“The administration wants to use less fuel to heat and less water as well,” Stern said. “The problem is, what can you do that is cost effective?”
There has to be a great commitment to make these changes stick, he said, and everyone must keep efforts going after they get started.
“There are times when it is hard to get things going, and other times when things are going but they are hard to keep them going,” he said. There are goals that need to be set, and everybody needs to try to accomplish those goals, he added.
“It’s a matter of making things going with cost-efficiency,” Stern added. He said he believes recycling is good as long as we make intelligent and appropriate choices about where to begin.
Efforts to promote sustainability arise from the concern over climate change and global warming, and although Stern is not a specialist in global warming research, he said he has given it some thought.
“For me, it is: What can we come up with that will cost us less than the benefit we provide?” he said.
The goals of the campus to find ways to “green-up” can be practical, he said.
“People thinking about how long they stay in the shower, how much food they throw away, and what the thermostat level should be are things we need to think about,” Stern pointed out. “The key thing is raising awareness about things that people can do something about and letting them know what to do, and keep it simple.”
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