With the release of the 2010 College Sustainability Report Card, students will be rushing to check their school’s rating. But what I think deserves the most attention is not the overall ranking. Rather, we should look at how the categories are a microcosm for the broad national action needed to strengthen our environmental sustainability.

The first category, for example, is “administration.” It looks at how the school president and officials set certain policies mandating more environmentally friendly practices. These are the people in charge—those officially responsible for the school’s policy.

In the parallel between the Report Card and the national agenda, the administration is comparable to our government. Government sets policy, just as the school administration does. New Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama is the face representing America to foreign nations; the college president is the face of the school in relations with peer institutions.

And of course, it is the pressure from the people that urges the government to action. The connection here is the presence of “student involvement” in the Report Card rankings. When students form environmental activism organizations on campus, they often seek accessibility to the administration. T

These eco-activists, equipped with a passion for sustainability, build wide support on campus for their initiatives, and then go knocking on the door of school officials. It is the dialogue between administration and students that ultimately results in new, environmentally suitable school policy.

At the government level, political activism groups—like the Sierra Club—work toward access with the top government officials. Just think about the anti-genocide campaign for an example of president-to-grassroots connection: The Enough project, a group committed to the end of genocide, has sent John Prendergast to meet with President Obama. The Enough Project’s message is strengthened by the build-up of grassroots organizations on the ground.

For the Report Card, the categories looking at the specifics—“climate change and energy,” “green building,” “food and recycling” and “transportation”—are a testament to the breadth of the problems this nation faces. One key challenge to environmental sustainability is that the nation has to take serious action on such a wide range of issues.

We have to curb carbon dioxide emissions from industry, and at the same time encourage more organic farming. The wide range of the categories, to me, is a wake-up call for the narrow-minded: our nation’s leaders spend so much time talking about carbon dioxide, but they also need to figure out how we are going to produce our food more sustainability.

This requires action on limiting the power of agribusiness—a powerful lobby that perpetuates an agricultural model of high fertilizer and pesticide use. If we offer incentives for organic farming, then we can achieve more environmentally friendly food production. At the intellectual center of this local food movement is the food writer Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food.

Yet college students, impressively have shown a willingness to take the lead on eating locally. Schools that scored high in the food category of the Report Card have built connections with local farmers. (A Print Edition article on this trend will appear in College News later this year)

So, students, let’s remember that the College Sustainability Report Card should be a model by which we must pressure our national leaders to make serious strides on environmental management. Report cards are good, but action is better