Harvard visitor Leith Sharp sharpens focus on sustainability

LEITH Sharp is enjoying the latest instalment of what she calls "distributed retirement". She explains: "Every seven years or so I take a year of unstructured work to recharge and reflect."

LEITH Sharp is enjoying the latest instalment of what she calls "distributed retirement". She explains: "Every seven years or so I take a year of unstructured work to recharge and reflect."

The environmental engineer has just finished a long stint atHarvard University, where she established its green campus initiative, now the office for sustainability.

A visiting scholar in Harvard's school of public health, she is spending part of her sabbatical in Australia, where she has given lectures at Macquarie and Griffth universities. She spoke at the University of NSW, where she was among the first intake for the new environmental engineering degree in 1991.

She was the first paid environmental officer on the Kensington campus when still a student and after graduation was hired to "green" the university, which she did for five years.

She pushed for sustainable solid waste disposal, worked with the state transit authority to cut commuting times to the campus, and ran a greenhouse gas challenge, an environmental living program so people could learn how to live sustainably, and a "green office" program.

By the time she took up a Churchill Fellowship in 1999 there were eight staff, funded by grants from not-for-profit groups, and government and university funding.

When she set off to study international trends, she discovered "we were the ones leading, and instead of me learning from everyone else's programs I used to get invited to present the UNSW case study. It was exciting to be asked but on the other hand I was devastated to realise that no one had the answers in the higher education sector."

She spoke at Harvard and was recruited to create and run a program aimed at the enormous task of greening the campus.

Her initiatives at Harvard are estimated to be saving $US7millon annually and have set the pace in the US higher education sector. Sharp has plenty of practical advice on inculcating the cultural change that must support technical measures such as equipment upgrades, lighting and insulation improvements, and making it self-funding.

"You have to give people easy pathways within their capacity, resources and time constraints." So, bright stickers on each light switch will remind those leaving a room last to conserve power.

"Then raise the bar," she says. For example, give workers simple instructions for setting the printer closest to them to use both sides of the paper. Finally, recognise and reward achievements, however small.

The imperative is to move from a piecemeal approach, to wholesale, co-ordinated efforts across campuses and the sector.

For example, in Australia, "if the 35 universities and all the TAFEs collectively chose to opt for high-performance buildings, or renewable energy, it would have a remarkable effect on Australian society. I believe we could leapfrog our way into a global leadership if the vice-chancellors came together and seriously considered the scope of what they might do."