University of Washington campus.Did you know that many of our country’s colleges and universities -- places that are supposed to be a source of higher-education and leadership -- get their electricity by burning coal? And sometimes those coal-fired power plants are even on the campuses?

I think many of us look back in disbelief at some of the things we did in college. We’re seeing that same sense of disbelief from current college students when they learn that their campuses are still powered by coal.

This ad launches a campaign that will use print and online advertising (two more video ads to come) to highlight that some things are just too dirty, even for college.

The ads play off stereotypically “dirty” college behavior, becoming progressively more “dirty” throughout the series. Though college life allows for leniency in the socially acceptable, coal still crosses the line.

The ad campaign targets schools in 11 states which currently rely on coal power.

If you attend one of these schools, you can sign a petition asking your university president to kick coal off your campus -- the list and the petition are on this website. 

The Campuses Beyond Coal Campaign is working nationwide to wean all campuses off coal-generated electricity and replace it with clean energy options. With organizers on the ground in several of the more than 60 campuses with on-site coal plants the campaign is working to help universities achieve the zero carbon emissions targets set forth in the Presidents' Climate Commitment.

We released a report last month to support the campaign: “Breaking Coal’s Grip on Our Future: Moving Campuses Beyond Coal.” It highlights many of the problems facing coal dependent schools and the solutions available.

We know students want a cleaner, healthier future, and so they're organizing on campuses coast-to-coast to make that vision a reality.

The ad campaign will run through the end of October, with the remaining two videos to be released in the next few weeks. It’s time to kick coal off campus!

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The Ivy League is the greenest of them all, according to the EPA, which today announced the college and university winners of the Green Power challenge -- a competition to motivate American schools to purchase more renewable energy. Participating schools compete within their athletic conferences to purchase the most certified green power, but conferences only qualify if each purchases more than 10 million kWh in aggregate. 

University of Washington.The Ivies, anchored by University of Pennsylvania's purchase of 192 million kWh, chalked up the best conference performance, purchasing a total of 225 million kWh of green power. Here in the Pacific Northwest, four colleges and universities bested their respective conferences: Oregon State University (Pacific-10), Western Washington University (Great Northwest Athletic Conference), The Evergreen State College (Cascade Collegiate Conference), and Pacific Lutheran University (Northwest Conference).

But as remarkable as these collegiate green-power investments are, the competition itself is a bit thin.  For instance, participation in this challenge is voluntary, so even though Oregon State won in the Pac-10, it only had to beat the University of Washington and Stanford University's Synergy House, a cooperative living residence. Other major Pac-10 schools such as USC, UCLA, and Arizona State did not participate.

What's more, the competition results are misleading. UW is only recognized for a purchase of 14.9 million kWh of green power, even though the university is entirely powered by a portfolio of carbon-free electricity.  John Chapman, director of campus engineering and operations, explained that 94 percent of UW's power comes from hydropower, which the EPA does not count as green.  The 6 percent the EPA does credit comes from the the renewable energy certificates that the university purchases to compensate for the portion of its utility's electricity portfolio that is fossil-fuel derived.

"We are completely powered by renewable energy and carbon-neutral electricity, but the EPA does not count hydro, and it does not look kindly on utility-purchased electricity," said Chapman.  "They want you to buy the credits and certificates."

Oregon State's win comes from its purchase of renewable energy certificates for 75 percent of the university's need. "We buy 75 percent of our power in renewable energy certificates from the Bonneville Environmental Foundation.  It's mostly windpower," said Brandon Trelstad, sustainability coordinator for Oregon State.

But the Green Power challenge wasn't a motivating factor Oregon State's win.  The university won in 2008 with the exact same amount of green power  (66.7 million kWh), as it did this year. The green-power investment is primarily funded (and limited) by a student fee of $8.50 per student per term, which was voted on by the student body in the spring of 2007.

"Nothing really significant has chaged in our power purchasing," said Trelstad.

Like Oregon State, it seems that most collegiate winners were celebrated for doing what they were already doing. Overall winner U. Penn. purchased over 192 million kWh of green power to win this year, but the Ivy League leader posted the exact same amount in 2008 [PDF]. In the three years that the challenge has run, the overall purchasing leaders have stayed the same -- U. Penn., New York University, and Penn State -- with little variability elsewhere in the field of competitors (see 2007 results [PDF]). So what good is a Green Power challenge that fails to motivate colleges to actually green their power purchasing habits?

I would have liked to pose this question to the EPA, but the contact did not return my calls.

The Green Power challenge is one of many tools with which to rank the greeniness of colleges and universities in the U.S. For more info, check out America's Greenest Campus, the Princeton Review's green rating honor roll, and Grist's list of the 15 greenest colleges.

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A pop quiz for the college crowd:

Which of the following is no fun?
A) Beer
B) Doing it in the dark
C) Global warming activism
D) This is a trick question -- they're all related

If you picked C, you're forgiven, says Maura Cowley, campaign director for the Sierra Student Coalition. But, dude, you're so wrong.

The right answer, of course, is D. Today's campus eco-actions involve all sorts of festive frolicking, from "Save the Ales" parties for the 21-and-older set to "Do It in the Dark" contests, green condoms, and risqué recycling campaigns.

"We want to make climate change a top issue among young people," explains Cowley, "and to do that, we've had to come up with fun, accessible ideas that resonate with a wide audience -- and not just with enviros." Cowley, 25, knows the ropes: As a Penn State student, she led a campaign that brought renewable energy and energy efficiency to campus; since graduating in 2006, she's worked for the SSC, the student wing of the Sierra Club.

Five years ago, there were only about 25 volunteer student organizers for the SSC at a thin smattering of colleges, says Cowley. Today, the SSC has thousands of student organizers at 150-plus colleges nationwide, all searching for creative ways to mobilize green forces.

Likewise, the Energy Action Coalition, an umbrella group for the SSC and 47 other green organizations that focus on students and youth, offers fun-laced forums to spread its message. Power Shift is a prime example -- a youth summit in Washington, D.C., that combines climate activism with crowd-rocking music and spoken-word performances.

Beer bashes are another playful way to, well, draft new recruits. Organizers of "Save the Ales" gatherings [PDF] raise awareness about climate change by telling party-cipants that global warming threatens supplies of hops, a key ingredient in beer. Hops need cold winters; when global warming makes temperatures unusually hot, production suffers and beer prices climb. Beer also requires a steady supply of fresh, pure H2O, so the parties provide opportunities to talk about clean water -- or launch any number of worthy efforts, from petition-signing to fund-raising. (Post-college progressive groups like Drinking Liberally can also attest to the power of politically charged beverage consumption.)

"Do It in the Dark," meanwhile, doesn't mean what you think it does -- unless you think it means energy-saving contests between dorms, frats, or sororities. Colleges across the country have been holding these smackdowns in which student residences compete to see which can use the least amount of electricity. In the process, students get turned on to the power of turning things off. They power down computers, flip off lights, unplug cell-phone chargers and other electronics when they're not in use, and install compact fluorescent lightbulbs. In turn they get treated to non-electric parties, with acoustic music and schwag like CFLs and green condoms. The victors get glory, more parties, and prizes like bikes and iPods. Williams College offered up tips for slashing energy use and ended up saving $10,000 in electricity costs during a month-long "Do It in the Dark" competition in spring 2006, earning props from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

Not frisky enough for you? Consider the "I (heart) slutty paper" campaign in which student Hannah Riches, winner of a National Wildlife Federation fellowship, convinced the New School in New York to use non-virgin, 100 percent recycled paper and reduce paper use campus-wide.

Other green campus events can include concerts by eco-friendly bands, glow-in-the-dark soccer games (no nighttime lighting needed!), and giveaways of goodies like reusable water bottles and condoms. Even students stuck in the dorm cramming for tests can listen to green-leaning musicians and draw the blinds to let in natural light.

If they peer out the window, they might even see someone in the center quad dressed as a wind turbine and engaged in faux hand-to-hand combat with a rival dressed as a coal plant. "One of our other fun ideas is to have pretend boxing matches between the two," Cowley explains. She'll let you guess who wins.

A fuddy-duddy disclaimer: All of the alcohol-related events mentioned in this story are intended for responsible drinkers of legal age, in compliance with laws and campus rules. Alcohol abuse is associated with everything from DUI arrests to rape, suicide, and death. 'Nuff said.

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The sites below aim to help you find the right green-leaning campus, cause, or contest. There's no way we've uncovered all the good ones, so tell us what we've missed in the comments section at the bottom of the page.

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For some people, life starts after college. For Karoline Evin McMullen, it began in middle school.

Karoline Evin McMullen
Age: 18
School: Yale University

By the time she was 14, McMullen of rural Geauga County, Ohio, had already: written a textbook for elementary school kids; started a project with two friends to protect endangered brook trout; won a Christopher Columbus Award and a trip to Walt Disney World; and won a President's Environmental Youth Award and a trip to another fantastical kingdom, the White House, to meet President Bush and the head of the U.S. EPA.

Those awards -- and others -- poured in after McMullen teamed up with a couple of eighth-grade friends to form Save Our Stream, an effort to help protect one of Ohio's last reproducing populations of "brookies" from pollution in the watershed. After surveying community members and discovering that most didn't know much about the issue, the trio designed and distributed educational pamphlets. They reminded residents that poisons dumped in yards and down storm drains ended up in waterways; they put warning stickers on stormwater grates; they pointed out that, since most people in the area relied on wells, groundwater purity would help human health, too.

Since then, McMullen's textbook (Where Did They Go? A Community's Struggle to Preserve the Native Ohio Brook Trout) has been published by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. And she helped lead another campaign that brought students and volunteers together to plant 1,000 trees in stream-restoration areas.

We asked McMullen about her future plans as she spent a last day at home, packing up before the drive to Yale to start her freshman year.

You've got more on your résumé already than a lot of 30-year-olds. Are you going to slow down in college?

Oh, my goodness, I would say the opposite. I think my background in environmental activism and my dedication in high school have given me a base on which I can build bigger experiences. And the environmental movement on college campuses and the green culture there is really flourishing -- the energy and the passion and the copious amounts of free time there can all really help.

How are you going to decide whether environmental engineering -- your current interest -- is the right career?

I've just recently realized, "Hey, I can do everything I want to do." So I'm trying to stumble my way along! The requirements of environmental sciences and environmental engineering at Yale involve the geopolitical things and the hard sciences -- the beakers and pipettes, and also the social, the political, the economic. And that's what I like: I'm really interested in the interdisciplinary nature of all the different environmental fields. So technically I'm heading in a science direction, but I'm far from just wanting to look at the lab stuff.

What about fun?

That's what one of my relatives said -- she said, "You've got to have fun!" And I said, "Are you kidding? I get to take the classes I want and wake up every morning and say to myself, 'What do I want to do today?'" What could be more fun that that?

Why brook trout?

I grew up in a very rural environment; it's a combo of several townships that are too small to have their own post offices. I wanted to start an initiative to try to get the community to appreciate the local environment, because I started to see some development happening, and I wondered, "What happens if you put a McDonald's there?"

What kind of activism do you imagine doing at Yale?

Earlier this year I was at a youth summit with Jane Goodall to gather ideas from youth around the world and put them into action in terms of environmental justice. And she encouraged me to look into a group called Engineers Without Borders, [which builds sustainable engineering projects in impoverished areas worldwide]. And then I was speaking at a conference by the Construction Industry Institute ...

The what?

I was invited to speak through a Destination ImagiNation team -- we'd been involved in a creative problem-solving competition. And our team placed third, but we sort of created a buzz -- a group of high-school girls in a math-science competition dealing with the construction industry. So we were invited to speak at this conference and when I was there I met Bernard Amadei, [the founding president of Engineers Without Borders]. They have a very active chapter at Yale, so I'm excited about that.

Do you think you're more optimistic than most people?

Optimism is one of the hallmarks of my generation -- the seemingly boundless ability to access information and creatively solve problems. But it's present in all generations. Dr. Jane [Goodall] -- she obviously has that frustration with politics, but she has such faith in the ability of people to solve the problems of today. And I see it everywhere: in my friends, my teachers. One wants to see the promise and opportunity and exciting possibility of the future. If you're sunk into complacency, you'll continue to stay there.

How should people avoid the complacency pit?

There are students who have fallen into a very comfortable apathy. It can be easy to zone out with the Game Boy and forget what's going on around you. World hunger or such things: They're not things Americans have to deal with. It's important to keep in touch with what's going on in your community and in the world.

What eco-action hasn't worked for you?

My brother and other students at middle school lobbied to make the spotted salamander the official state amphibian. A state senator introduced a bill on their behalf and it passed in the Senate, but now it's stagnating in the House. It's facing opposition from supporters of the bullfrog, which is invasive and cannibalistic.

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Leith Sharp.

When Leith Sharp left her native Australia for a five-month tour of the U.S. and Europe in the late 1990s, she could hardly have guessed that she'd be gone for a decade. But that's exactly what happened.

Sharp had spent five years piloting eco-efforts at the University of New South Wales, in a paid position that was not only a first for the school, but was also one of the first in the country. She set out on her travels to explore sustainability on other campuses, sharing her own experiences as she went. After she spoke at Harvard, the co-chairs of a new green-campus group asked her to stay and lead their charge. In the nine years that followed, this Wizard of Oz turned the Harvard Green Campus Initiative from a one-woman undertaking into an influential office with a full-time staff of 24 -- an office that has literally changed the face of America's oldest college.

Since launching in 2000, HGCI has rallied the university's 11 schools to implement projects ranging from recycling paper to fueling university-owned buses with biodiesel to designing green buildings. Its programs have led to an annual reduction of well over 80 million pounds of greenhouse gases -- saving $7 million -- and have created more LEED-registered projects than any university in the nation. As a result, Harvard has scored top marks from the Sustainable Endowments Institute and the Princeton Review. (It even graced Grist's list of 15 green colleges and universities.) Perhaps even more impressive, HGCI helped secure university-wide commitments on green building, greenhouse-gas reduction, and sustainable development -- pledges, says Sharp, that mean "campus sustainability will be now and forever deeply woven into the fabric of the institution."

After years of adding green tinges to Harvard's crimson hues, Sharp has decided to move on to ... well, greener pastures. This semester will find her writing case studies based on her work and spending a couple of months in her home country. But before shifting gears, she took the time to share a few secrets of her success, in an effort to inspire sustainability-minded students and staff at other institutions.

Get down to business. Harvard's Green Campus Initiative has met with success in large part because it focuses on the business case for sustainability, not the hippie-dippy stuff. Sharp says it's possible -- and necessary -- to "prove point-blank that if you change every light bulb in an institution to the most high-performance light bulb, you will get a payback on the order of three years ... most of these projects are self-fundable. One of the most important things we need to do is use less energy [and] use less materials, and that is fundamentally a cost-saving activity."

Start small ... The best way to get green efforts rolling, Sharp says, is one step at a time. Identify a concrete project -- buying greener cleaning supplies, say, or lowering energy use in a computer lab -- then find a "grassroots partner" who is willing to experiment, such as a purchasing manager or facility supervisor. Document the project's successes, challenges, and benefits. Once you've built a portfolio of small projects that have worked, you can take them to the powers that be with a proposal to expand them, "because you've proven through these examples that not only does this work, but your own staff has the capacity to pull this off."

Students scheme to go green.

... but think big. Once you have a few successes under your belt, Sharp says the best long-term strategy is to focus not just on individual projects, but also on institutional change. "[The first approach] is likely to give you a fantastic green building, but then very likely to result in every other building using the same conventional approach," she says. Broader shifts, on the other hand -- while decidedly less glamorous, involving work like "getting middle managers engaged in reforming the capital approvals processes" -- can create real and lasting change.

Make your way to the middle. And speaking of middle managers, Sharp says they are the real key to change, since they control most behind-the-scenes systems and processes. But more often than not, they need to know that there's a desire and capacity from below (students and staff) and a mandate from above (administration) before they will consider acting. So Sharp recommends the "sandwich" method: building grassroots support, then using evidence of that support to get top leaders on board, then taking that buy-in to the middle.

Have patience. Understand that you probably will encounter resistance, but it's likely not insurmountable. Often people are afraid of change, worried about costs, or concerned that they'll be burdened with more work. "Come in with a deep sense of curiosity about other people's thought processes," Sharp says, "and keep a respectful dialogue going." And it doesn't hurt to explain exactly who's going to do the work, how much it will cost, how long it will take, what the tangible benefits will be, and what support you personally will offer.

Be creative. You don't have to be as well-endowed as Harvard -- which runs a $12 million revolving loan fund for green projects -- to make change. "No matter how small your organization," says Sharp, "you have an energy bill, you have a waste-related bill, material costs, staff-time costs, and these are all the ingredients in the kitchen ... Wherever you can conserve your resources more, that's where you are going to have your savings." She says there are plenty of models for groups without upfront capital, including taking out a short-term loan or partnering with a local utility to upgrade equipment.

Play well with others. It's the nature of colleges to compete, and the eco-realm is no exception -- just look at the Princeton Review's new green rankings. But it's much more useful to collaborate, Sharp says. Through coalitions like the Northeast Campus Sustainability Consortium, the Campus Climate Challenge, the national Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, and even a nascent international network Sharp is helping to organize, campuses are learning how to learn from each other. With the future of the planet at stake, says Sharp, it's the only solution: "If you're serious about sustainability, you have to be serious about collaboration, because there's no other way we're going to work through the complexities of this situation."

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Kappa and Trade
Green the Greeks, a student organization at UCLA, is trying to educate the school's Greek system about sustainability issues. Frats and sororities use a disproportionate amount of energy, the group says, so it's aiming to "harness the resources of the Greek community for the environment," its website explains. The rush to get eco-friendly is happening elsewhere, too: At Dartmouth, the Green Greeks Program involves a sustainability coordinator in each house who orchestrates composting, recycling, and energy conservation. Green Greeks at the University of Michigan held a recycling competition that raised almost $1,500 and recycled over 60,000 cans and bottles. Who nu?

Paper Chaste
Applying to college means the liberal use of caffeine, SAT words, and ... paper: more than 750 million pieces of it every year, according to Students Plant the Seed. Don't want to join the ream team? Apply electronically, an option available at hundreds of colleges nationwide. Start by checking out the websites of the schools of your choice; many allow e-admissions. In addition, nearly 350 schools accept the online applications provided by the nonprofit group The Common Application. The SPS site, meanwhile, lets you petition colleges to support electronic apps -- and the group is aiming to plant 9,388 trees, the number it estimates are cut down each year to produce all that wasted paper.

Tray Chic
In a move that will leave many a student without a winter sled, colleges around the country are going trayless. Though some students may worry about balancing their plates as they move through bustling cafeterias, ditching trays means big energy and water savings -- up to half a gallon of water is saved for every tray that doesn't need to be washed. It also means less food waste and may even cut down on the Freshman 15 (although the Freshman 5 just isn't as catchy). No word on a substitute shield for food fights.

Photo: rpb1001

Keeping It Reel
Pop some organic popcorn for the touring Wild & Scenic Environmental Film Festival On Campus, which visits colleges nationwide with a three-hour lineup of incite-ful action shorts and documentaries. Student groups can invite the tour to campus to show one of several themed lineups -- wildlife, agriculture, activism, etc. The energy-themed set includes the provocative consumer-culture critique The Story of Stuff. Watch the film trailers.

Wheelie Cool
A growing number of colleges are launching or expanding their bike-loan or bike-share programs, aiming to get students, faculty, and staff out of their cars. California State University's Fresno campus has had a bike program for seven years; it makes about 100 bikes available for rental each semester. The University of California-Berkeley is starting up a program with 20 bikes available on campus for students to use for up to a day at a time; a $15 charge for the semester covers bike use, a lock, a map, and a light. Auburn University complements its bike-sharing program with a bike maintenance shop in the student union building. Wisconsin's Ripon College this year offered free mountain bikes and locks to the incoming class if they agreed not to drive to or park on campus, and more than 60 percent took the wheel deal.

Flush With Success
Forget girls gone wild; dorms gone green is the new (albeit less libidinous) collegiate stereotype. Wake Forest University fitted its dorms with low-flush toilets, low-flow showerheads, and Energy Star appliances. American University renovated a dorm with low-VOC paint and eco-friendly flooring. And don't pooh-pooh composting toilets, now in the College of the Atlantic's green dorms and Warren Wilson College's popular EcoDorm, which also uses collected rainwater and passive solar heating.

Om Cooked Meals
Iowa's Maharishi University of Management says it's the first college in the U.S. with an all-organic, vegetarian, freshly prepared menu; others, like the University of California-Berkeley, are in the process of obtaining organic certification. Colgate student Nina Merrill's food blog Organic on the Green rounds up efforts to increase sustainable, local, or organic food on various campuses. And Pennsylvania's Lafayette College takes food uber-local with corn on the quad. There, six-foot-tall plants are almost ready for harvesting, and freshmen students are required to read The Omnivore's Dilemma to learn about the twisted path that conventionally grown corn takes on its way to their plates.

Rank and Smile
The Princeton Review this summer started ranking colleges on greenness, with 11 schools receiving top honors. Kaplan's newly released 2009 college guide lists 25 green colleges, and other rankers include the Sierra Club and the Sustainable Endowment Institute's "College Sustainability Report Card." Arizona State, Bates, University of New Hampshire, University of Washington, College of the Atlantic, Harvard, and Yale make several of the lists. The last three made Grist's list of green colleges, too.

Waste Not, Want Rot
Greening the caf is great, but what happens after lunch? Three of Yale's dining halls this summer tried a pilot program to turn campus food waste into compost for eventual sale to local homeowners, and a new dining hall at Colorado State has two pulpers to compact food waste so leftovers can be composted. But Ohio University wins bragging rights for the country's biggest on-campus, in-vessel composting system, which turns leftovers into rich soil in a quick two weeks (and gets half its energy from solar power).

Fare Play
Forget what you heard in high school -- riding the bus is hip. Especially if you're aboard the University of Montana's new 50-seat biodiesel bus, which is clean, smooth, comfy, and best of all, free. Traditional bus service is becoming limited on some campuses due to rising gas prices, but schools like Duke and the overalls-conjuring University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh are expanding their bus service off-campus and at night. California's Butte College runs the biggest community college transportation system in the state, which helped it win the National Wildlife Federation's grand prize for campus global warming solutions.

Photo: presidentsclimatecommitment.org

Vow-ers That Be
Not content to let students have all the fun, college presidents are joining hands (and putting pen to paper) to stop global warming. By signing the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, presidents pledge to come up with comprehensive plans for cutting their schools' greenhouse-gas emissions and moving toward carbon neutrality. Though the pledge is less than two years old, more than 550 presidents have signed on, at least one from every U.S. state.

Move-in and Groovin'
Washington, D.C.'s George Washington University just had its first-ever "Green Move-In," which included a paperless check-in system for dorms and designated recycling areas for moving boxes. Instead of passing out heaps of unwanted orientation literature, the school encouraged students to print out just the info they wanted or consult maps and handouts posted in common areas. "Green Move-In" was inspired by last semester's successful "Green Move-Out," in which volunteers gathered up and recycled 3,000 pounds of food, 2,200 bags of clothing, and 4,500 books left behind by students who'd vacated the dorms.

Semester in Green-land
Flying halfway around the world may seem like the antithesis of green, but studying abroad for a semester just got a little more sustainable. The Green Passport program offers information about everything from eating locally to volunteering, and includes a pledge in which students promise to minimize their impact on the environment, be culturally respectful, and give back to their host community. In that same spirit, Middlebury College in Vermont now offers grants to students who plan to research sustainability issues or do eco-projects during their study-abroad experiences.

Hooky, Line, and Sinker
Gas prices are hitting rural colleges especially hard, and some are responding creatively by condensing classroom days or moving instruction online. Some students at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College, which has five campuses spread over 100 miles, couldn't afford the commute for thrice-weekly classes, so the school created twice-weekly hybrid courses that are supplemented by extra work at home and online. Lakeshore Technical College in Wisconsin this summer cut out all Friday classes because most students are commuters and there's no bus line near the school. Officially sanctioned hooky!

Photo: valkyrieh116

Oh, Grow Up!
Students in several dorms at Pitzer College in California have access to rooftop gardens and are encouraged to join garden workdays on Fridays. Four buildings at Texas' Rice Univerisity feature green roofing, which keeps them cooler and helps lower energy use. And the architecture department at the Massachusetts College of Art got a $10,000 grant to design and build a rooftop garden that incorporates local native plants. While all this greenery will look lovely and help prevent runoff, students will have to look elsewhere for their favorite plant.

Did we miss a great greening effort you know about? Does your college deserve kudos for its eco-efforts? Tell us in comments below.

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Sometimes people do things because they don't realize they can't. If this makes no sense to you, you haven't met Chris Samila, a (permanent, as he jokingly puts it) senior at Arizona State University in Tempe, where he had some epiphanies, founded a business (Green Summit Inc.), and somehow managed to pull off a wildly successful green business expo on campus. With no experience. And no real cash. And about five volunteers.

"We had no idea what we were doing," Samila says. "There were so many nights where I was like, 'Oh my god, what do we do now?'"

What they did, it turns out, was bring together several thousand students, locals, and business owners for a one-day showcase of green products and services spilling out from under a rented tent on campus. The April 2007 event was so successful, Samila signed on to coordinate another GreenSummit in 2008 -- this time a two-day affair at the Phoenix Convention Center -- to again bring consumers, educators, and eco-friendly businesses under one roof. The summit, which took place on Sept. 5 and 6 with support from ASU and its Global Institute of Sustainability, drew 5,000-plus people, including a U.S. Commerce Department-sponsored delegation from Eastern Europe. Next year the GreenSummit will expand to Atlanta.

We caught up with Samila shortly before this year's expo began, on a day when he'd been racing around campus putting staticky film (an eco-friendly, no-residue variety) on windows to advertise the event.

Why window stickers?

We're trying to do as much as possible without using paper. So we've mostly been trying to get the word out through social networks to avoid things like flyers and mass mailings. With the summit itself, we really pushed the exhibitors hard to create digital profiles. We didn't want them putting out a billion promotional packets.

How did all this environmental commitment start in your life?

The first six months at ASU, I lived in the most insane party complex you can imagine. It was like Animal House. So after about six months I said, "Okay, enough," and started going to the library. And one day I picked up a book called Ocean's End, about the Black Sea and the environmental destruction of the oceans -- how there was no return. And all of the sudden it occurred to me: We're messing something up and we can't fix it. It's too late. And I decided I wanted to be able to fix things now, before it's too late. When the ASU School of Global Studies opened in the spring of 2006, I was one of the first to enroll.

Where did the business angle come in?

In the fall of 2006, I read about Greenbuild [a green-building conference and expo] and I thought, "I gotta go to this." The school actually funded my trip to the conference in Denver, and I was just awestruck by the amount of innovations there. The message was, building green isn't too expensive or difficult. There are no insurmountable issues. The biggest issue is that we need to get everyone to realize these are issues in the first place.

But the real epiphany involved compact fluorescent light bulbs, right?

It happened in winter break, after Greenbuild. My friend Lance and I took a trip to Costa Rica and we were going though the jungle, and there were all these CFLs in these jungle huts. And we were like, "Whoa." This was a really remote area and I thought, "If Costa Ricans can use CFLs in huts in the jungle, we can get people to use them in America." I decided I wanted to do an event on campus that showcases CFLs and shows who's using green products that can make a difference.

How did you know what to do next?

I pretty much googled "event management" and got some students together to contact and invite companies. We'd be working till 11:00 and 12:00 at night, in between classes making phone calls and trying to get this thing going. And later I called my stepdad, who has a marketing company in Atlanta, and we borrowed someone from his staff to make a website that looked legitimate. Luckily the Global Institute of Sustainability started helping us. God almighty, it was stressful.

Any advice for fellow college students?

All of these industries realize they have to think outside the box to solve problems, and a lot of them want students to help -- they want to connect with them. Sometimes you can talk to a company and they'll say, "Get lost." But you've got to just keep pushing, keep trying, and don't get pissed off. Join the AIA [American Institute of Architects]; join trade groups. There is this initial disconnect between the business world and students, but businesses really admire how we can multi-task -- emails, text messaging, phone calls, Facebook, AOL, all going at the same time. If you can take that and take your caring about the environment and put that in the business world, it'll make a tremendous difference.

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It's that time again. College students have settled into their dorms, started their classes, checked out some parties, and started cramming for the gnarliest pass-fail test of all time: saving the planet. Not all students are engaged in green endeavors, of course, but fast-growing numbers are -- and the results have been eye-popping.

Students today join green frats, launch green business ventures, and host green bashes. At many U.S. colleges and universities, buildings are going efficient, cafeterias are serving local and organic fare, administrators are pledging to fight climate change, and some lucky students are even getting degrees from new programs focused wholly on sustainability and the environment.

Many students are crusading for the environment beyond their campuses as well. Since 2007, student- and youth-driven campaigns like Focus the Nation, Step It Up, and Power Shift have brought together more than a million people nationwide in demonstrations and other actions to stop climate change. This year, the Power Vote campaign aims to mobilize a million young voters who will prioritize climate change at the polls. Voters between the ages of 18 and 29 -- some 68 percent of whom voted for Democrats in the 2008 primaries -- could be a deciding force in choosing the next president.

In short, the college crowd deserves a special series, so we're giving it to them. Dig in:

Tips, ideas, and resource

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Colleges around the country are ditching cafeteria trays to lower water and energy use and to prevent wasted food. "If a college is looking to go 'green,' they need to start looking in the dining facility," said Sodexo spokeswoman Monica Zimmer; the food-service company expects 230 of the 600 colleges it serves to stop using trays. Skeptics worry about broken dishes, and some students worry about balancing their plates in bustling cafeterias, but it's hard to argue with the savings. The 18,000-student Georgia Tech went trayless in response to last year's drought, saving an estimated 3,000 gallons of water each day. A 25-university study by Aramark Higher Education Food Services found that students waste 25 to 30 percent less food when trays aren't available, and cafeterias save a third- to a half-gallon of water for each tray they don't have to wash. Some advocates also believe that getting rid of trays will help reduce obesity.

sources:

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This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!