Assessing the ecological impact of a university

Abstract

Since the environmental movement began, teachers, researchers, and activists on college and university campuses have made great strides toward making campuses “greener” places. As effective as these efforts have been and continue to be, some increasingly salient questions about sustainability remain unanswered. This paper offers an answer to the question, “How big is the University of Redlands’s ecological impact?”, using a recently developed technique called ecological footprint analysis (EFA). The output of EFA, as used here, is a partial ecological footprint for the University of Redlands (UR). UR’s ecological footprint is then evaluated using criteria derived from several different theoretical approaches to sustainability.