Our History

Zilkha Center for Environmental Initiatives

Late in 2005 President Schapiro received a petition signed by nearly 1,500 faculty, staff and students asking Williams to set greenhouse gas emissions goals. In 2006, he created the Climate Action Committee (CAC) and charged it “to recommend by the end of this calendar year a goal for the reduction of College greenhouse gas emissions and ways to attain it.” 

The CAC recommended setting a target of 10% below 1990-1991 levels by 2020, and recommended that Williams hire a director of sustainability responsible for developing and coordinating the implementation of a comprehensive strategic plan for emissions reductions and other issues related to sustainability. In January of 2007, the Board of Trustees voted unanimously to adopt the goal of reducing Williams’ emissions to 10% below the 1990-1991 fiscal year by 2020 and to establish sustainability as an institutional priority.

In conjunction with this commitment, the Zilkha Center for Environmental Initiatives was established in the fall of 2007 with a generous donation from Selim Zilkha, Class of 1946. Its first director was appointed in 2007. The college also got on track to achieve its first carbon emission reduction goal and replaced it with the more ambitious one of 35% below 1990 levels by 2020. Although it subsequently missed this target, the college continues to pursue climate action across all three scopes and other sustainability initiatives and has developed a Climate Action Plan.

Over time the Zilkha Center team grew to three staff members and its areas of work were centered on student experiential learning, primarily through meaningful academic year and summer sustainability internships, and a wide range of campus sustainability issue areas. In 2021 the college’s Strategic Plan provided further clarity and guidance by defining the following strategic priority areas:

  • Education and research
  • Climate action
  • Landscaping, buildings and land use
  • Responsible consumption
  • Community, diversity, equity and inclusion
  • Accountability and transparency

Center for Environmental Studies

In October 1967, at the College’s 173rd convocation, President John E. Sawyer announced that Williams was launching the first center for environmental studies at a liberal arts college.  “Our goal,” he said, “will be to foster the kinds of analyses, decisions, and recommendations for action that can help set in motion responses by the several levels of government and community leadership which are needed while there is still time to choose among the environmental options before us?  Almost no other subject is more closely related to the central humane values of liberal learning- its concern for the conditions of quality of living for men on this earth.”  Sawyer felt that a small liberal arts college had the unusual ability to contribute to the understanding of the environment because of its interdisciplinary approach, fundamental to any true understanding of the environmental dilemma.

In the early years, the most popular issues were conservation of resources, preservation of species and the “population bomb.”  The Center’s initial focus was directed beyond the campus, to the preservation of Berkshire County.  By 1970, the college approved a coordinate curricular program in Environmental Studies.

In 1971, a Mellon grant was obtained to start an environmental analysis lab, an environmental research facility in Hopkins Forest, and fund a full-time
librarian for the growing environmental studies library.  Environmentalism flourished during the 1970’s, and so did CES at Williams College. More and more students became involved in research, the library became more systematized and well-stocked, and the number of courses offered increased dramatically.

By the 1990’s, CES was well established on campus and supervised and supported courses throughout the Williams curriculum on environmental topics, in addition to funding ~25-35 funded internships every summer. The Center is also the focus of a varied set of activities and resources, including the Log Lunch series; the Hopkins Memorial Forest; the Environmental Analysis Laboratory; and the Coastal and Ocean Studies concentration, rooted in the course offerings of the Williams-Mystic Program.

Zilkha Center for the Environment