"Higher Learning Adapts to Greening Attitude: Students Lead Drive Reshaping Curricula" [Washington Post, 22 June 2008, by Susan Kinzie]

The environmental fervor sweeping college campuses has reached beyond the push to recycle plastics and offer organic food and is transforming the curriculum, permeating classrooms, academic majors and expensive new research institutes.

The University of Maryland teaches "green" real estate strategies for landscape architects. The University of Virginia's business graduate students recently created a way to generate power in rural Indian villages with discarded rice husks. And in a Catholic University architecture studio last week, students displayed ideas for homes made from discarded shipping containers.

"It should be part of everything we do," said Ligia Johnson, a Catholic student whose plan for the Kenilworth neighborhood in Northeast Washington included roofs that collect rainwater and grow plants and trees.

What was once a fringe interest, perhaps seemingly a fad, has become fully entrenched in academic life, university officials say, affecting not just how students live but what they learn and, as graduates, how they will change workplaces and neighborhoods. ...

At U-Va., where students helped design a barge that will travel the Chesapeake Bay and that they hope will teach children about ecology, architecture dean Karen Van Lengen said environmentalism "is not a course at our school. It's a way of thinking. . . . It's a mind-set."...

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