Will the coming generation turn our toxic lawns & brown skies back to the way She intended ’em to be? I sure hope so—we (that is, our planet and everyone on it) could sure use a shot in the arm. This Sunday’s New York Times put The Big Green Bus on the cover of their annual Education section—and did not one not two but three articles on the coming greeneration. 

  The Big Green Bus

“CO2 CONSCIOUS Six green buildings, including the sun-filled Goizueta Business School, helped make Emory one of the Princeton Review’s greenest campuses.” Photo: Tami Chappell for The New York Times.

EXCERPT: “‘Green is good for the planet, but also for a college’s public image. In a Princeton Review survey this year of 10,300 college applicants, 63 percent said that a college’s commitment to the environment could affect their decision to go there.

And where there are application decisions to be made, there are rankings. The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, with more than 660 members, is developing a rating for environmental friendliness; at least six other organizations rated campus greenness last year, according to the group. There are lists from Forbes, Grist and Sierra magazines, and an annual report card from the Sustainable Endowments Institute, a research organization that assesses the greenness of an institution’s investment portfolio. And the Princeton Review will give its top marks to — ta-da! — Arizona State, Bates, Binghamton University, the College of the Atlantic, Harvard, Emory, Georgia Institute of Technology, Yale and the Universities of New Hampshire, Oregon and Washington.

Campuses across the country are racing to be the greenest of them all. They are setting dates in the not too distant future for achieving carbon neutrality (the College of the Atlantic, an eco-college in Maine, already claims that distinction, as does Middlebury College’s Snow Bowl ski area). They are hiring sustainability coordinators (the association’s job board used to get one posting a month; now it often has five a week). And they are competing with one another in buying green power (in an Environmental Protection Agencycontest among athletic conferences, the Ivies triumphed, with a combined 221.6 million kilowatt hours for the quarter ending in April).

“I don’t think we’ve seen activism this strong since apartheid,” says Cheryl Miller, vice president of Sightlines, a data company that helps campuses…'”