Common Time: What sustainability initiative would you start at Carleton?
26 February 2025
Photos by Harry Pound & Zach Spindler-Krage
For this green-themed edition of Common Time we approached students outside Goodsell on an unseasonably hot October day to ask a question suggested by Eli Watt ’25, a student member of the working group that developed the Sustainable Futures platform: If budget was no obstacle, what sustainability project would you start at Carleton?
“I have a lot of friends that struggle to get around, and first years aren’t allowed to have vehicles. So I think we need a bit more transportation. There are times the bus doesn’t come into campus and I need to go to the store and I have my tricycle, so it works, but my friends don’t, so they have to walk and carry everything with them. So I think cheap bike, ride-shares, or scooter rentals on campus would be really great.”
— Sofia Chavez ’28
“If cost was no barrier, I would really like to enact totally clean energy for campus. All solar or wind power or even hydroelectric power. Obviously nuclear power would be great, but it’s not an option right now. As a campus, we’ve been really mindful about how we use electricity, but I feel we can still do better, and if we were pulling from a more renewable resource, I would feel a little bit better about our energy use.”
— Gabby Tomczak ’27
“In our work at the sustainability office, we perform waste audits and work with facilities to communicate waste needs. And there’s not a lot of engagement from students. How do we get not just Carleton students, but people in the Northfield community and Rice County in general, to care about their waste? Because for most people, once it’s on the truck, no one’s worried about it. The goal is not to shame anybody: it’s to learn together and fix our issues now so we don’t end up with a Mount Everest of trash.”
— Demetrius Blackmon-Jimenez ’24
“I’d like to see more sustainable housing—building in a way that doesn’t affect our environment, placing it in an area where we’re not encroaching on natural spaces, and using new technology to be energy efficient.”
— Felix Shapiro ’28
“I have a soft spot for agriculture, and if we could have farm interns working year-round and providing food to the dining halls, that would be an incredible educational and community-building opportunity. We’d definitely need more greenhouse space. But honestly, it’s 80 degrees today and it’s almost November. Climate change is awful, but our growing seasons are going to be extended by months and months as the temperate climate of the Midwest begins to change. We should utilize that change.”
— Julianna Baldo ’25
“The West Gym and the stadium flood every few years. If we had unlimited funds, I’d use them to remove those buildings, build up better flood defenses, give the soccer fields to the arboretum, and maybe build some canals in places for beavers to live (I don’t know, I’m a little biased on that). By rebuilding not a soccer field but a floodplain, it could become a teaching opportunity for students to design what wetland restoration actually looks like in a place that floods regularly.”
— Jonah Docter-Loeb ’25
“I’m so proud of the work we do at the Food Recovery Network, and I’d love to see it expanded. We’ve been working in Faribault by sending food along with volunteers who are already going there, and I think we could expand there more. They don’t have a chapter at our level up in the Cities right now, and it would be really great to help get resources up there, too. If we really wanted to target areas that tend to be even lower income, Minneapolis would be a really good next step.
