When Sustainability Isn't Sustained:
The Challenge of Environmental Activism in College
By Gavi Klein
I. The Farm
In the fall of 2014, Jay Feinstein was a Brandeis University sophomore taking a class called “Greening the Ivory Tower.” Professor Laura Goldin had been teaching the course for a decade and a half, having designed it to inspire students to create what she called an “environmental ethic.” Each semester, her students conceived and implemented an array of sustainability projects to solve environmental problems they saw on campus.
The class was reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollen’s acclaimed book about the food system, when it hit Feinstein: “The supermarket is one of the most biodiverse places on earth. But we take it for granted in many ways. How could we just help people think back about where it all comes from?” With the help of classmates, he answered that question with a plan: They would start a farm on campus.
The initiative started off, as most breakthroughs do, with hefty discouragement, in this case from faculty, administrators and advisors. But they were students— idealistic and headstrong— and they were undeterred.
They reached out to people at other student-run farms, at other universities, food justice organizations and urban farming groups. After months of hard work and back-and-forth communication with the university, the fruits of their labor showed; the students secured a $30,000 grant to build the farm.
During all of this, the students were also slogging through the usual pressures and challenges of college life— classes, friends, clubs and more. When the funding for the farm eventually did arrive, it was just before the chaos of finals week. Still, even in the midst of the most stressful period of the semester, the group was able to enlist the help of more than 100 volunteers to physically build the garden. Together, they transformed a 2000-square-foot patch of the Leo Gerstenzang Science Library roof into a farm.
The farm’s founders joined with another group from Goldin’s class to charter the Farmers Club. That spring, even before the farm had produced anything to harvest, the Farmers Club held the first Farmers Market with more than 500 people in attendance, comprised of vendors from the Waltham area. The blossoming group even secured a way to keep the rooftop farm going over the summer, through a combination of student volunteers and the help of an outside contractor.
“The community really came together,” Feinstein said, “It came together just as we had hoped, but really, in a way that surprised all of us, that showed that really anything was possible, that really all you needed was an idea.”
What was unique about this idea was that the students didn’t just want to start something during their time on campus; they wanted to build something that would endure long after they left it. “Some of us spent more time working on that farm and making it productive than we spent on some of our classes,” Feinstein said. “We wanted to build something that was going to outlast the class. We wanted to build something bigger.”
In subsequent years, the farm produced CSAs, hosted hundreds of volunteers and held multiple farmers markets. It was a gorgeous testament to Brandeis’s commitment to sustainability and to the potential of students to effect real change. Even Goldin, who had seen dozens upon dozens of projects during her time at Brandeis, saw the farm as something that stood apart. “It was, I have to say, the most ideal project in every single way,” she said. “They did it right. They created a great sustainability plan. And it should have worked.”
II. The Next Generation
Feinstein graduated from Brandeis in 2017 (which also turned out to be the last year that “Greening the Ivory Tower” was offered). By the fall of 2018, less than a year after the founders had graduated, the farm was overgrown and neglected. A year later, despite best efforts by student leaders to keep it going, worker crews packed up the plant beds and drove them away. The roof of the Leo Gerstenzang Science Library, which had been bountiful and green less than a year before, went back to being a lifeless roof. Today, all that remains is one planting bed, left at the behest of faculty and students, and largely untouched for the past two years.
Benée Hershon was one of the students who remained at Brandeis after the founders graduated and wanted to keep the farm going. She joined the Farmers Club in spring of 2017, her sophomore year, and, because of the pressing need for board members, quickly became the club’s treasurer. As much as she cherished the farm, however, things quickly went awry.
“The farm was really challenging in particular because of the fact that it was entirely student-run,” she recalled in a phone interview, “Tensions were getting pretty high, because it was such a large workload for students to handle [...] We had a large group of people who left because they were frustrated with the process, that there wasn't more support from the university at the time.”
Membership dwindled— quickly. By the fall of her junior year, in 2018, Hershon and one other student had taken on practically all responsibility for the farm. “It was getting ridiculous,” she said. “We'd be on the farm until probably nine at night, just mixing soil and preparing the rows.” It was far too great an undertaking for a pair of college students to handle. And then came news that took the matter out of their hands entirely.
The roof had been deteriorating for months at that point— Hershon recounted one instance where the irrigation system of the farm ended up leaking into the building beneath it— and the university decided that it needed to be renovated. This meant that the farm needed to move, at least temporarily.
“We created a plan for the Farmers Club to continue,” Hershon recalled. “And it was supposed to… well, you know, we weren't really sure how it was ever going to come back. There were discussions of storing the farm somewhere, but we didn't really fully explore it. Mary Fisher kind of took it under her wing.”
III. The Pattern
Mary Fischer, the manager of sustainability programs at Brandeis, is a key player in this story. The only person employed by the university to work towards sustainability efforts, Fischer has spent her almost-six years at Brandeis watching a consistent ebb and flow of student sustainability projects. She is a fan favorite amongst sustainability-oriented students at Brandeis; every person I spoke to for this story sang her praises, and emphasized, again and again, that no one works harder than she does to make the campus sustainable.
Fischer has managed in recent years to roll out campus-wide composting, improve energy efficiency on campus, add renewable energy to the grid, reduce beef consumption across campus and establish the new paid position of student Brandeis Sustainability Ambassadors (BSAs). As important as these achievements have been, however, they make up only a fraction of the projects that have begun and ceased during her half-dozen years at Brandeis.
Fischer runs the Brandeis Sustainability Fund, which gets its resources from the tuition fee of $7.50 per student, per semester, that the university has instituted since 2011. In this capacity, Fischer works with any student or student organization that wants to fund a sustainability project. While the “Greening the Ivory Tower” course was still around, Fischer dealt mainly with Goldin’s students, many of whom requested funding for their project in the class. The rooftop farm was just one of the class projects the fund supported; many of the others simply petered out long before the farm did. DeisBikes, for example, was a bike-share initiative started in Goldin’s class that has failed and been revived three times, two of which while Fischer was on campus. Last she heard, no one even knows where the bikes from the last revival are.
Fischer describes the pattern like this: “Students have a really hard time passing on, from year to year, different projects and ongoing responsibilities. It’s easy to think that it's going to happen because it's a great idea and everybody loves it, but then, when it actually gets down to two or three years later, those original students are gone and [...] it just kind of fizzles out.”
College is an inherently temporary period in one's life, which makes it a challenge to sustain longer-term projects, especially when there is a lack of faculty or staff involvement. One generation of students may start a rooftop farm with unstoppable zeal. But when they leave campus, so does the zeal.
IV. No Anchor
Brandeis students have significantly more power than their counterparts on other campuses. “A lot of clubs at other schools have a faculty advisor that is integral to the organization,” Feinstein explained. “At Brandeis, they're all about ‘everything is student-led.’”
As a current Brandeis student, I find it’s sometimes hard to see that as something special, but the reality is that Brandeis does operate very differently than other schools. It puts an unusual amount of power in the hands of its students to create the campus and the university life that they want— which is both a good and bad thing. On the one hand, Brandeis students are given a level of agency and opportunity that other institutions don’t offer. Newspapers, theater, a capella— it’s all student-run, student-managed and student-controlled. “The plus is, it is incredibly empowering,” said Feinstein:
“I was the president of the Farmers Club, and the amount of power that we were able to have as students to make our own decisions, and to make this farm the way that we wanted to, and to work with the organizations that we wanted to, without many barriers— that was such an incredible experience.”
The downside is mainly that, as empowering as it may be for students, completely removing “the grown-ups” from club dynamics means that the issue the rooftop farm faced comes up a lot. With no university employee pulling a student club or initiative through generations, it becomes a feat to continue anything— in particular, a project or club that requires a lot of work and resources and time— beyond one or two classes of students. As Feinstein admitted, “A project that people poured their hearts into— there was no anchor after we graduated.”
In comparison, the University of Massachusetts Amherst has successfully maintained a student-run farm for more than fourteen seasons. The farm was similarly started by two students with a vision, but it has since grown into a year-long class (with a summer component) and is overseen by professional “vegetable specialists,” in addition to student leadership.
Brandeis’s rooftop farm lasted two years, maybe three, depending on where we start the timeline. The students did everything in their power to help it survive beyond that, but without more structural support from the university, that proved a task too great.
For all the benefits of Brandeis’ high level of student agency, Hershon argues, there should be a different model for more ambitious, long-term projects. She suggests sustaining them either by establishing a work-study program or by hiring part-time staff to oversee them. Fischer agreed, adding that some sort of structured curriculum would be a boon.
While Brandeis hasn’t gotten to these points just yet, it has recently begun moving in the right direction.
V. A Small Army
This spring, the university introduced the Brandeis Sustainability Ambassadors, eight students paid to conduct sustainability actions on campus and work with Fischer in her role as manager of sustainability programs. Since their appointment, the students have been busy, pulling off impressive campus-wide initiatives like Earth Week and SaveOhno. Fischer described the BSAs to me as “her army.” In the ongoing war against the climate crisis, having ground troops is imperative, and even a small army is better than no army at all.
Back in fall of 2019, there was no army left at Brandeis to defend the farm when workers showed up to clear the roof of all the planting beds. The farm died a quiet, quick death, and the Farmers Club, which had been founded in order to maintain the farm, was similarly comatose; Hershon had registered the club for the upcoming semester’s activities fair before leaving campus, and when she returned, unbeknownst to her, “the club kind of just broke up.” The farm ended up being donated to an organization called Mill City Grows, and with its departure from Brandeis campus also went the last bit of energy in the Farmers Club. Years of work, thousands of dollars, impressive publicity and major community and campus involvement all evaporated in the span of a few months.
Most striking, however, is the fact that no one really noticed that it had gone.
When I spoke to him last month, Feinstein had no idea what had happened to the farm. Another founder, Allison Marill ‘17, said in a Zoom alumni event in February that she wasn’t sure “what it’s like today,” and even Hershon, who was actually there when the farm left campus, didn’t know what exactly had happened to it, or where it was when we spoke. Students were notably absent in the last months of the farm’s life on campus; Mary Fischer took the responsibility when there were no students left to do so, and found it a new home where it had a real chance to survive.
These students poured their hearts and souls into the farm. It wasn’t some fleeting goal or pleasure project for undergraduates who needed something to add to their resume; it was years of devotion and initiative and hard work that paid off in a really big way.
The demise of the farm reveals a difficult truth: regardless of how much they put in while in college, when students graduate, they move on. When the projects they have started are worth continuing— when those projects address issues like climate change, arguably the biggest problem the world faces today— it seems prudent for the university to invest a bit more in their perpetuity.
VI. Sustainable Brandeis
Today, the Brandeis rooftop farm is dead. The roof once laden with vegetables and volunteers is now just one of many empty roofs on a busy college campus. It’s still on people’s minds, though; Hershon, who has access to the old Facebook page for the farm, gets messages regularly asking where the farm is or how to start it up again. Even before I reached out to her for an interview, she had been in contact with Mary Fischer to start thinking about reviving the farm at Brandeis. I’ve heard rumors from sustainability-oriented students about a farm starting again; it’s a project everyone loves, even if it proves difficult to sustain in the long run.
Perhaps it is a natural progression, this ebb and flow of energy and projects and students with them. Given that the project in question is a farm— something that, by nature of nature itself, dies and regrows over and over again— the constant and yet unpredictable cycle of plant growth seems apropos. In a garden, seeds are planted, watered, tended to. Farmers monitor the soil, the surrounding plants, the animals and insects that may interfere or assist in the growth. Some seeds, no matter how much love and care they receive, never emerge from the dirt; they lie dormant, never more than an idea of the plant they were supposed to become. But sometimes, and hopefully more often than not, one day a little green sprout will poke through the soil, promising the growth of something new.
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