The Greene Prize was endowed by the family of David Greene (Will Rice College ‘93) in 1998 as a vehicle for recognizing Rice students who produce exceptional environmental writing.
Richard Johnson, co-director of the Environmental Studies minor; director of the Administrative Center for Sustainability and Energy Management; Professor in the Practice of Environmental Studies; Adjunct Lecturer, Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been involved with the prize selection committee for 15 years, but has been a colleague and friend to David Greene for even longer. A fellow Will Ricer and engineering major, Johnson recalls Greene’s passion for environmental issues early on.
“Dave was an environmental leader on campus at a point in time when it was still fairly rare to find people who were speaking openly and actively about environmental issues — that was just less common in the late 80's early 90's,” he says.
Over the years, Johnson has witnessed the prize become more prominent and inclusive of many different academic fields across campus. Nominations for the prize have grown incredibly diverse, ranging from poetry and speculative fiction to lab-based scientific research and architectural design projects.
“One of the great and challenging things about environmental studies is that it's an incredibly vibrant but multidisciplinary field,” says Joseph Campana, the Alan Dugald McKillop Professor of English and director of the Center for Environmental Studies. “It forces us — students, faculty and staff alike — to be in conversation across our expertise.”
Always wanting to honor the intellectual integrity and parameters of such disparate submissions, Johnson and Campana consult with a faculty-led selection committee to decide what categories would be more appropriate for awarding each year’s strongest submissions.
“This year, the logical category was to have an essay and a thesis at the undergraduate level because how do you compare a five-page essay against a 100-page senior thesis? So rather than have to pick one or the other, we thought that both were award worthy and exceptional,” says Johnson. “We give ourselves freedom to adjust the categories to match what we're seeing amongst the entries.”
To moderate the number of submissions they might receive, the committee reaches out to faculty members across campus and asks them to nominate exceptional student work related to environmental studies that they’ve received over the academic year. “In this way,” Johnson says, “everything that we receive has been essentially endorsed and filtered as being of reasonably high quality and worthy of consideration. So truly, the works that we go through now are all quite good, which makes it harder to select a winner, but also makes me excited about the quality and quantity of outstanding environmental work that's going on.”
Both Johnson and Campana agree that it is critical in our present moment for university students to engage with the difficult and pervasive questions posed by the climate crisis.
“It's kind of an all-hands-on-deck sort of moment,” says Campana. “We need everyone thinking in every way possible, so it’s really an important moment to recognize the intellectual contributions of our students.”
“If environmental issues were just science and engineering challenges, we would have solved this a long time ago, but they're also social, cultural, religious, economic and political — all these other things that exist outside the realm of the traditional engineering classroom,” says Johnson. “So, don't bring in the technicians and expect everything to be solved. This is a broad-based planetary crisis so it's critical that we provide opportunities for students to be able to think about these things in the context of their work, and the Greene Prize provides a vehicle for that to happen.”
This year’s Greene Prize recipients presented work from a wide spectrum of disciplines that intersect with environmentalism in creative, thought-provoking ways.