Nestled in rural New York and home to just over 2,000 students, Hamilton College may seem removed from climate action. What difference could a small liberal arts college make in addressing a global challenge like climate change?
It turns out, quite a bit.
An intimate campus coupled with a liberal arts education can be powerful ingredients for sustainability innovation. Students can identify issues in a larger market and prototype actionable, tangible steps towards remedies that have a significant impact.
Hamilton College seniors and ice hockey varsity teammates Carson Hall and Ben Zimmerman had a goal: to offset the emissions of athletes’ travel. Neither student is an environmental studies major.
Hamilton’s open curriculum, however, led them both to take a course called “Nature & Technology” that highlighted the pitfalls of carbon offsets. The course was the inspiration for their project.
Hamilton College’s enthusiasm
Carbon offsets are designed to compensate for carbon emissions by funding projects such as renewable energy or reforestation that reduce emissions. There are over 9,000 carbon offset companies, with 2,400 founded in just the last five years.
Despite the proliferation of this market, many carbon offset projects are opaque, hard to verify and vulnerable. Renewable energy schemes could be completely nonexistent or market a forest that might burn down immediately after it’s replanted.
Some colleges have fallen prey to such arrangements. As Hall and Zimmerman learned in their class, if institutions want to enact true climate action through offset credits, they need models that are transparent, tangible, localized and preferably replicable.
Working with Hamilton’s directors of sustainability, the environmental studies department and President Steven Tepper, Hall and Zimmerman connected with the city nearest to the campus, Utica.
Utica’s Forest Revitalization Project aimed to reforest the city’s urban landscapes and restore its forest canopy with the assistance of a $2 million USDA grant, planting 2,000 new trees. This was the opportunity that fit Hall and Zimmerman’s mission.
The two students offered to provide the labor to plant the trees in exchange for carbon offset credits from the city, linking Hamilton’s athletics emissions to a local, measurable environmental benefit. With their hockey teammates, they began planting trees in September. But an initiative of this scale required additional resources.
Hall and Zimmerman always intended to recruit other teams, but they didn’t expect the enthusiasm they saw from their fellow athletes. They began by pitching the project to the men’s basketball team. That team joined the endeavor.
At their tightly knit college, word spread and the women’s lacrosse team signed up, followed by three more varsity teams. In spring 2026, off-season fall sports teams are lined up to take their place.
‘Domino effect of relationships’
Ultimately, the project doesn’t just provide carbon offset credits for athletics travel emissions. More importantly, it represents tangible climate action and community connections.
Students are planting trees alongside residents of Utica. Both groups are seeing the impacts first-hand. The students are also building lasting relationships with the local community.
As the trees grow, environmental studies classes will be tasked with measuring their carbon sequestration over time, connecting academic learning with real-world outcomes.
Hall and Zimmerman refer to this as the “domino effect of relationships.” Their project exemplifies how relationships across disciplines, departments, and communities can drive climate action. It began with a classroom conversation, expanded through peer collaboration and grew into a community partnership that will outlast their time at Hamilton.
Tepper observed, “Students come here and they choose a major, but many of them also choose a mission.”
Hall and Zimmerman’s carbon offset mission is a testament to the power of collaboration in higher education. By facilitating partnerships among students, departments and communities, colleges will increasingly see more student-driven solutions.
Students want to make a difference, and stimulating small relationships can lead to big changes in even the most daunting markets.
If replicated on campuses across the country, this kind of project will lead to meaningful change for our communities and the environment. Its impact extends far beyond a few thousand trees.
And it offers a model for how relationships between students, faculty and communities can generate scalable, sustainable solutions. When small schools cultivate those connections, they can inspire significant change.
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