♪...about to change ♪ and it will start with me ♪ ♪ but the world's ♪ about to change ♪ ♪ and it will start with me ♪ [guitar playing] ♪ Andrea Triplitt> I think it's one of the most important things in our lifetime.

Conserving our resources for future generations so that they have the same opportunities that we have.

>> I mean, really, I think first it starts with participation.

>> It's not just the right or the ethical or the moral thing to do.

It's the smart thing to do over the long run.

>> I literally can affect the future of Greenville as a Furman student.

>> Economics are part of it.

Architecture is part of it.

Agriculture is part of it.

All of it goes into sustainability.

And that opening mindset way is very important.

>> I wouldn't say I was passionate about it, but I'd say it's definitely something that, you know, being at Furman's is at the forefront of your mind.

>> So, what we're building here is a footprint where everything is connected.

>> I think one thing about what's happening at Furman University, relative to sustainability, is that their approach is unique.

It's not just a little bit of this or that or the other.

It's a lot of a variety of things that are put together in a coordinated manner.

And that's what makes a big difference now and into the future.

David Shi> Furman's been promoting sustainability in a very concerted way for over 15 years.

The good news is that those early efforts have convinced so many other institutions of the benefits of pursuing similar objectives and projects.

♪ Our world was ♪ meant for this ♪ ♪ ♪ Now we commit to this ♪ ♪ ♪ our world was ♪ meant for this ♪ ♪ ♪ Our lives ♪ are made for this ♪ ♪ for this ♪ ♪ Our lives are made ♪ ♪ Our lives are made ♪ for this ♪ ♪ Nor shall we ♪ trade for this.

♪ Rudy Mancke> At Furman, you'll find a university that's leading the way in environmental stewardship.

From alternative energy sources to recycling, students and faculty practice a way of living and learning that's equipping the next generation of leaders.

It's an approach that influences every decision, from how plants are selected for campus grounds to how buildings are designed and erected.

>> Everyday life requires a great number of resources.

But to be sustainable means that you use those resources in a smart, eco-friendly manner.

D.J.

Harris> You know, Furman's a rigorous institution.

You know, everyone's always doing something.

Translating sustainability back in a fun, engaging way to students, is definitely necessary.

And I think that's really the best approach.

And I don't think that's really quite happened yet.

>> I mean, you know, I care about it, to a point.

But you know, I'm not going to sell my S.U.V.

and buy a Prius, so... >> If people get really involved and interested in it here, then that will affect how they live the rest of their lives.

And it will hopefully influence their role in future communities.

>> We've largely been focusing on the environmental components of sustainability.

But how those relate to economics, how those relate to societal interests and community interests... David Shaner, PhD> And our goal is to expand this kind of footprint of sustainability and environmental awareness through the whole campus, the whole university.

David Shi> Nationally, sustainability is no longer a fad.

It's no longer just a buzzword or a tag line.

It's become deeply integrated into the future of society.

Taking the long view is something that Americans have had a hard time doing.

We tend to be very short-sighted.

We tend to be focused on immediate goals and immediate satisfaction.

And yet, we're now in an era of resource scarcity and economic constraint where we've got to think about the long-term consequences of our immediate behavior.

Kirk Karwan> What is the broadest definition of the word "sustainability"?

Live long and prosper.

But it's live long and prosper according to a different model.

What Furman also brings to the table is some practicality and realism about how we're going to move forward.

>> Furman has been a wonderful model for sustainability and the environment for the rest of the country, and especially for Greenville.

Speaker #1> It's a lot easier to follow some of the habits of sustainability if you learn them early on.

♪ Our world was meant ♪ for this ♪ Rudy Mancke> By taking a total approach, by making the environment a priority in projects, large and small, by challenging students to come up with new solutions in the classroom and in campus life, Furman is putting ideas into motion.

Their goal is to shape a generation of leaders who will leave this campus and find every opportunity to make sustainable living a way of life for all of us.

Angela Halfacre> Students are interested and very engaged with the notion of sustainability.

♪ We're now seeing students of all different types of majors seeing sustainability as a complement to what they're doing here during their undergraduate experience.

♪ >> We try to, like, do little things: recycle, make sure we turn the lights off after leaving the room.

Not leave water running.

It makes our efforts in sustainability like we're all doing our own part.

And especially when we go home, too, like I make a point to recycle or I feel bad if I don't.

So I mean, those are just small things that, as a student, I do.

♪ I'm an empty page ♪ ♪ I'm a naked canvas ♪ ♪ I will clear my slate ♪ ♪ when my hope has vanished ♪ ♪ I'm a skeleton key ♪ ♪ I'm an unsharp pencil ♪ ♪ I'm a mustard seed ♪ David Shi> Michael is working with Greenville Forward.

Have you heard about that organization?

>> No, I don't believe I have.

Speaker #2> Oh, that's very cool.

David Shi> Greenville Forward was created after we finished the Vision 2025 Plan for Greenville, the long-range blueprint for Greenville's development.

Michael Chiu> Sustainability at Furman and Greenville at large affects the entire atmosphere of this entire community.

It actually empowers specific individuals to take specific actions to safeguard our resources, natural and human, for the next generation.

Kenny Palmer> Whenever I think of sustainability, I think about the debate on, like, climate change.

And I think that this is a nice way to slowly move into finding alternate sources of energy and, you know, weaning off of fossil fuels and things like that.

So I think it's rather important.

>> I think that we're moving towards a really good place, but I think that there's a really big disconnect between the student body and what's really going on.

So I think there needs to be a little bit more education on that.

D.J.

Harris> The passions are there from students.

I just think that when all the ideas are coming from the top, and they have to get dispersed among many.

That's a tough thing to do.

As things continue to progress and more students are becoming more involved in the center, I think you will see more organic ideas.

♪ You can mark my words ♪ ♪ I've got a new vision ♪ ♪ You heard it first, ♪ ♪ Starting tomorrow, things ♪ are going to be different ♪ ♪ ♪ Rudy Mancke> Can you live the good life and still do well by Mother Earth?

♪ The Cliffs Cottage is Southern Living's first sustainable showcase house.

Every design element shows you how eco-friendly can be beautiful.

Speaker #3> Everything was a conscious decision to be as environmentally-friendly, as possible, throughout the process.

A real goal of this home is conservation.

Conservation of different resources, different valuable natural resources.

All right, does anybody have a guess what our countertops are made out of?

Speaker #4> Concrete.

Speaker #3> Concrete is correct.

That's right.

Rudy> In some cases, finding building materials closer to home made the house more earth-friendly.

For instance, roof shingles were manufactured in Orangeburg, South Carolina.

And throughout the house, visitors learned about low-cost, easy ways to make changes that could make a difference right away in their homes.

Positioning windows to capture heat from the winter sun, which is absorbed by the stone floor, is one way old ideas and new ones meet to make the house more earth-friendly.

Geo-thermal heating and cooling is another, by tapping into the earth's constant temperature and using a lot less energy to deliver warm or cool temperatures indoors.

Systems like these can save from 30% to 70% over systems that heat and cool air from the outdoors.

The cottage generates solar power using rooftop panels to heat water and photovoltaic technology to convert sunlight into electricity.

The house was designed to teach homeowners, students, architects, and builders about green building practices, energy conservation, and how to live in harmony with the landscape.

Speaker #5> This is the Western Carolina Botanical Club.

There are people from Hendersonville and Flat Rock.

And I'm from Travelers Rest.

And we are just touring the campus and seeing all the many different varieties of trees and flowers and things that there are here.

♪ ♪ Before I leave ♪ this thing alone, ♪ ♪ I gotta know, ♪ gotta know, gots to know ♪ ♪ was it something ♪ I invented in my head ♪ ♪ while I waited ♪ by the phone ♪ ♪ Rudy Mancke> But Furman has always had other plans for this cottage.

Angela Halfacre> The Cliffs Cottage has been re-purposed to be the David E. Shi Center for Sustainability.

What's really exciting about this transformation is that the same lessons that you could learn at the showcase home are still in existence.

But now we're even able to do more.

David Shi> So it will host our staff offices.

It will have seminar rooms for classes to meet in the facility.

And it will also have exhibition space, so that we can showcase projects going on across the campus and in the community related to sustainability and environmental stewardship.

♪ D.J.

Harris> You have the administration and now really the Shi Center for Sustainability moving forward and achieving a lot of goals, but I think, in a sense, the students are maybe left behind, and that's, as far as just their understanding.

And I think you see the Furman administration trying to educate the students, but I think there is a degree of separation that hasn't been overcome yet.

Kurt> I mean, to a certain point I think it's kind of becoming, you know, a marketing ploy to some extent.

I mean, I'm sure it's making a little bit of a difference, but in terms of, you know, actually helping the environment, I kind of have my doubts.

But I think more than the programs that Furman is running, it's about education of the students.

Because it really is the students that are gonna make a difference.

Chade' Franklin> Well, I know there are some student groups that their sole mission is sustainability efforts.

I'm not a part of those groups, but I will say as a student and living here, you see it day-to-day.

♪ ...'cause I want resolution ♪ ♪ Rudy Mancke> From class requirements and research projects to everyday dorm life, the student experience at Furman is preparing young adults to solve the problems facing our planet.

All students are required to take courses about the environment and the impact of humans.

Students help to grow organic vegetables for the campus dining hall.

Campus-wide, an ambitious recycling program takes on everything from paper to used computers.

The lessons they learn can benefit all of us.

♪ Every year, students vie for the opportunity to live with less.

The lucky ones will spend the school year in the Greenbelt.

Daily life here is nothing like your traditional dorm.

Angela Halfacre> The Greenbelt community is a competitively sought-out program where students apply to live in one of the four cottages that we have here on campus that have been retrofitted for greater energy efficiency as well as a community that is seeking a sustainable ethic.

So these students that, and there can be up to 24 of them in any given year, live and work and play right here on campus in our Greenbelt community.

Anna Strick> There is an application process, and it asks about mainly your interests in the sustainable movement and environmental activities.

So, I have a good resume with working on the garden.

I'm on the sustainability planning group.

It seemed fitting for me to live here.

All four of these housing options are now, "eco-friendly" is the term we use today.

Kurt> We have solar heating that heats our hot water, and that eliminates the need for natural gas to do that.

We have easily accessible recycling bins and compost bins that you won't find in other areas of campus.

So it's very user-friendly to recycle and to compost.

But also, living in a community like this enables you to encourage others, to encourage yourself to follow along with recycling and composting.

If everyone else in the house is recycling all their paper and all their cans, you're encouraged and pushed to do the same thing.

David Shi> To the extent that sustainability has become a strategic emphasis at Furman, we're going to see it manifested in the ways in which these young people, once they graduate, but once they begin their careers, they will begin to demonstrate that they have embodied these notions of environmental stewardship and citizenship.

And they will make manifest those commitments in the way in which they operate within their professional environments, within their neighborhoods, and within their communities, as leaders.

Cameron Tommey> Having a consciousness of the world around you and of the environment around you, and that's what I love about living here is that I can look out my front door and see a lake and trees and a beautiful landscape that is constantly reminding me to have a conscience of sustainability.

Rudy Mancke> More than providing a unique college experience, more than saving resources now, making a home in the Greenbelt gives students the chance to put lofty ideas into life-changing practice.

That's the most important lesson of all.

♪ Speaker #6> Ultimately, Furman wants to become carbon-neutral.

♪ Rudy Mancke> Furman is leading by example, using "L.E.E.D."

standards.

"L.E.E.D."

stands for leadership in energy and environmental design.

It's a set of guidelines for building green that includes energy use, construction materials, water use, and air quality.

Herman Hipp Hall was the first "L.E.E.D."

building on campus.

In fact, the first in all of South Carolina.

David Shi> And ever since, we have continued to require that all new buildings and all major renovations of buildings follow these "L.E.E.D."

principles.

Rudy Mancke> Big buildings can make a smaller impact on the environment.

That's what the new Charles Townes Science Center will demonstrate.

Jeff Redderson> When we designed the building, we tried to make it as energy efficient as possible.

And one of the technologies that is allowing us to do that are chilled beams, which you see installed in the ceiling here.

And that allowed us a significant reduction in energy savings totaling $55,000 a year, which is 30% of the total energy use of the building.

You can see the light bouncing off the glass and hitting the ceiling.

So within the space, we have under-floor radiant heating and cooling system, which is a series of pipes that run throughout the floor that hot and chilled water run through and provides the cooling needed, much more efficient than your typical air system.

We put a lot of emphasis on making sure that the building envelope was as tight as possible to reduce the amount of infiltration air coming into the space and making sure that we had adequate insulation in the walls and attics.

We are currently in the greenhouse at the Townes Center for Science.

One part of the greenhouse is used as a gray water collection system.

We take waste water from the building.

It goes through a process similar to a tidal wetlands where we clean up the water, produce gray water that is then sent back into the building.

That is a solar concentrator.

We have two of them installed.

They take energy from the sun and make electrical energy and hot water from the sun.

We are able to produce enough energy to offset approximately 10% of the energy use of the building.

And so the solar concentrators are one example of a system that we might use on a larger scale to eventually become carbon-neutral.

But we've got a number of different technologies here on campus that we're evaluating.

And that's fun and exciting, because you can't do that everywhere.

These are sort of state-of-the-art systems, the chilled beams, the solar concentrator.

It's really kind of cool, I think, to have that on campus.

Christine Whitman> The interesting thing about what they're doing here is, you're taking a university that's adopting a sustainable approach to life with an existing campus.

It's not as if you're building from the ground up, which it's a whole lot easier to be sustainable, to have green buildings, to do "L.E.E.D."

standards, if you're doing it from the ground up.

It's more complicated to do it with older buildings that are already in existence.

And to the extent that they an show that you can do this in a financially supportable way, that's a lesson for everybody.

David Shi> The result is that we now have buildings that are much more energy efficient.

They use much less electricity and fuel oil than our previous buildings.

So it's going directly to the bottom line.

And it's also serving as a laboratory for our students as they take classes every day in these buildings and see these new systems and begin to think about how they relate to broader issues of sustainability and conservation.

♪ ♪ Rudy Mancke> Respect for nature is an ancient value, as you can see when you visit this Buddhist temple on campus.

♪ From the way that wood is joined to the way the building is oriented toward the sun, there are lessons this building can teach us about living in harmony and maximizing what nature gives us.

♪ David Shaner> This is the place of peace.

You know, to our knowledge, never before has a Buddhist temple been actually physically moved from Japan, anywhere out of Japan.

There's an important reason for that.

Number one, had this temple ever been serving a lay community and had an assigned priest, you would never move it.

But because this was a family temple built by the Tsuzuki family, it was their wish to move it here to Furman University.

And so that probably explains why this is so unusual.

Speaker #7> It is our hope that the place of peace engages their curiosity and energy to learn more about the culture and the world from which the place of peace originated.

David Shaner> 2,400 pieces were individually dismantled and shipped all the way across the Pacific Ocean, 'cause there's not a single nail in this facility.

The whole thing is about being natural.

It's made out of keyaki wood, and it should last 350, 400 years.

[Speaking Japanese] It means "blessed universal spirit."

Immediately, or in the present moment, we feel this connection, connection to the earth, to this whole environment.

That calligraphy faces directly to the water feature right over here at the Asia garden.

So when people say, "Well, where is the place of peace?"

I'm fond of telling people, "The center of the place of peace "is in that waterfall way over there "about 200 yards down this hill."

♪ Sustainability requires an interdependence with everything.

The Buddhists call this the theory of dependent origination, or in the earliest Buddhist texts, the Pali Nikayas, it's pratityasamutpada.

It means that all of us exist in a kind of inter-being sort of way.

Speaker #7> Ichi, ni, san.

All> Ichi, ni, san.

David Shaner> Meditation, which we practice here with our Furman students, as well as the public, is designed to help us do two things.

Number one: to stop, stop the busy-ness of your conscious attention.

People don't know how to relax.

They suffer from nervousness, anxiety, because they just don't know how to stop the constant bombardment of thoughts in their head.

The second thing is not just stopping, but then looking, looking deeply at yourself, because they'll be able to take these principles with them their whole life, anytime they're suffering from stress, anxiety, they just want to slow down.

And I think giving people that kind of confidence to live in a way that's harmonious with nature, that's in accord with sustainability and environmental awareness.

It will give them a sense of liberation and the power of their mind and body unified together, they can conquer the world.

Speaker #7> Kanpai.

All> Kanpai.

♪ ♪ Angela Halfacre> We spend a lot of time, again, looking at the long view, both from a campus perspective as well as a community perspective.

Rudy Mancke> We share this earth.

There are no borders protecting us from dirty water or polluted air.

No endless supply of resources for food and energy.

Working campus to community is the only approach to sustainability that makes sense.

Russell Stahl> When we think about the future of the community, when we think about our environment, when we think about sustainability, Furman is a place where a lot of these innovative ideas originate and start.

Michael Chiu> Greenville Forward sent an outpost of Greenville Forward to Furman called Furman Forward.

Basically, we wanted students to be engaged in the Greenville community and to really say, "Okay, as a Furman student "I have a stake in the nature "and the economic and environmental sustainability "of Greenville itself".

>> Furman has been leading all the way along.

It was a leader in bringing together the colleges and universities in this region to focus on ways that they can all fulfill the president's climate commitment and reduce their impact and help with the generation of jobs in the community.

One of the programs that they're beginning right now is a program to have the students and some of the people that are working in the facilities portion of the university to work with low-income housing in the Greenville area to increase the weatherization so that they would reduce their energy consumption, reduce their bills, also reduce the climate impact.

There are a number of things that Furman has done in that arena.

Richard Riley> It's really important to stop and think about what you're doing and how it will impact others, if everybody is doing it.

And how it would impact others beneficially if you would change the way you're doing it.

All of that mindset is so helpful in a real liberal arts education.

It's good for Furman.

It's good for Greenville.

It's good for the state, and good for the world.

♪ Russell Stahl> We are currently on the, at the Reedy River Falls in downtown Greenville, and if you go up trail, up the Swamp Rabbit Trail, you'll run into Furman University.

Rudy Mancke> We're standing on the Swamp Rabbit Trail, a symbol of how this campus is connected to the land surrounding it.

This 13-mile trail goes from Travelers Rest, two miles through the Furman campus, and on into the city of Greenville.

The university and the community have collaborated to preserve the land and open this abandoned railroad line to hikers, runners, and cyclists.

♪ Russell Stahl> It creates a sense of community.

It gives a better linkage to downtown and the campus.

Rudy Mancke> Maybe the most enjoyable connection between community and campus is the Randy Blackwell Farm Stand.

Here, Furman students market organically grown herbs and vegetables, and community volunteers play an important role in helping students and the farm's manager in planting and harvesting good things from the farm.

>> Furman has really been at the forefront here in this region in a way that I think has paved the way for some of their peer institutions here.

And so for that regional leadership as well as for the fact that they're just so far ahead, nationally, in all aspects of their work, we chose them as our campus climate champion.

Rudy Mancke> Furman continues to be recognized and encouraged by these honors.

I think the thing about sustainability that I like most is that it reminds you that you're a part of something bigger than yourself, that humans are a part of the natural system, not separate from it.

And once you realize that, you want to take better care of the system.

Not because it's out there somewhere, but because you're a part of it, and your life depends on that system.

That's pretty incredible when you think about it.

♪ Our lives are ♪ made for this ♪ ♪ Our lives are ♪ made for this ♪ ♪ Our lives are ♪ made for this ♪ ♪ Nor shall we ♪ trade for this ♪ ♪