ASU program gets role in documentary

Newsweek profiled its green movement. The scientific journal Nature praised it.

Now, it’s coming to a screen near you. Arizona State University’s focus on sustainable living has garnered it a spot in Leonardo DiCaprio’s new documentary film, “The 11th Hour.”

See the movie trailer for "The 11th Hour."

And it snagged the university a special advance screening of the film on man-made climate change.

ASU officials said the movie’s producers wanted to get the reaction of sustainability scientists before the film, which DiCaprio produced and narrates, is released to general audiences Aug. 31. Tuesday night, dozens of researchers and students from the Global Institute of Sustainability packed Tempe Marketplace’s Harkins Theater to check out the film, which includes an interview with an ASU anthropologist.

The advance viewing is further evidence that, as climate change rises in the national consciousness, it lifts Arizona State to greater prominence.

For the past two years, the university has made sustainable living central to everything it does. The campuses plan to eliminate carbon emissions. Environmental issues are woven into almost every part of the curriculum, including business and law classes.

“Here you take the largest university in the United States in terms of single-campus student population and you do all of these things at once,” said Tom Kimmerer, head of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. “That’s bound to get people’s attention.”

Joseph Tainter joined ASU as an anthropology professor in 2005 to focus on the interplay between society and the environment. His research focuses on the fall of ancient civilizations and what lessons those failures hold for our civilization.

Shortly after starting in Tempe, Tainter said a documentary producer asked to interview him for the movie. “It’s acquiring a reputation that I think was attractive to the producers of the film,” he said of the university.

Tainter recently left ASU to lead Utah State University’s sustainability department.

“11th Hour” argues that humans have steered Earth’s climate into an environmental age that is ravaging the planet, according to the film’s Web site. It urges its audience to change habits and reduce their consumption of natural resources.

ASU’s buzz began to build when it opened its school of sustainability last year. The school is the first to offer degrees in the science and business of running society without depleting its natural resources.

In the spring, the school had only six graduate students enrolled and two full-time professors. However, dozens of students and faculty from other departments took and taught classes on sustainability.

Arizona State officials are hurriedly adding green courses and degree programs, trusting that if they build it, students will come.

“We’re just trying to deliver on what we’re claiming,” said Jonathon Fink, director of ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability.

While the attention is new, Fink said the university has focused on environmental programs since 2002, when Michael Crow became ASU president.

Sustainability has become all-consuming at the university with the help of Julie Wrigley, widow of Wrigley Co. chief executive William Wrigley, who has donated $25 million for the effort.

Climate change has become one of the most pressing issues facing scientists today, generating a huge number of research dollars to investigate the problem.