HIGHER EDUCATION, AT ALTITUDE

摘要

It's not your average undergrad institution that schedules regular class trips involving recon in a Cessna. But tiny Berea College, perched on the periphery of eastern Kentucky's coalfields, is not your average school. Its 11-year-old Sustainability and Environmental Studies program (berea.edu/sens) offers one of the country's most innovative and progressive curricula. While students in the Sustainable Appalachian Communities class take aerial field trips to scope out nearby mountaintop-removal sites, the larger SENS program emphasizes ecological design and household resiliency with courses like Building Renovation and Integrated Ecological Households. Berea's campus includes the 50-unit Ecovillage, an experiment in eco-education and green building that uses passive solar heating, photovoltaic panels, and permaculture gardening. Student residents in the village's SENS demonstration house consume less than 3 kilowatt-hours of electricity per person per day-compared with the average Kentuckian's 16-and the house's entire water supply comes from UV-filtered rainwater.