Leavening not Icing

This is my 19th year of working in Sustainability at the University of Kentucky and I am so excited about the breadth and depth of the initiatives that our faculty staff and students are leading. We have worked hard to have this blog be a clearinghouse for those stories and encourage you to spend some time here learning about the inspiring projects that our community is leading.

Sustainability – the process of embedding justice, equity, and environmental stewardship as fundamental considerations in all of our decision-making processes – has for far too long, and by far too many, been treated like icing on the cake. 

I’m not bashing icing (in fact I have a major sweet tooth), but think about it…Icing is a sweet, eye-catching finish. It’s a nice-to-have, not a have-to-have ingredient. It always costs more to add icing and icing can be fundamentally different than the object it covers. In that way, metaphorically speaking, the icing on the cake is not much different than lipstick on a pig (no offense to the pigs), and it is always in danger of being or being perceived as mere window-dressing or greenwashing. 

For Sustainability efforts at UK, we’ve gotta embrace a different metaphor for sustainability: leavening. Leavening is an essential early ingredient, literally baked in, to help us rise. 

Toward the end of making sustainability part of the leavening for the University of Kentucky, more than 70 faculty staff and students have had leadership roles in helping us reimagine our sustainability strategic plan. Their work is nearing completion and they have identified five guiding principles that will serve as a constellation of north stars for our work in the coming years.

First and foremost, like leavening, we must make the pursuit of our sustainability goals an integral part of the student experience. Our efforts will also reinforce the university’s commitments to justice diversity equity and inclusion. We have built a foundation for our new sustainability strategic plan on three pillars:

1. Becoming a zero-waste campus
2. Decarbonizing our operations; and
3. Modeling environmental excellence.

We have detailed the efforts of developing this plan in a series of several posts over the past year and we look forward to continuing to daylight the specific goals and priority actions on WholeSum beginning early next semester.