Graduate student Prater: activist and environmentalist at Nicholas School Photo: Les Todd

Green Blue Devil

Meanwhile, back on campus and just down the street from the Pratt construction site, Ben Prater, a second-year graduate student in the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, finishes his class on conservation biology with professors Stuart Pimm and Norman Christensen in time for a conference call with representatives of a range of environmental organizations from around the country. The group is strategizing about H.R. 1904, the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, coming up for a Senate vote at the end of the week. The bill is aimed at protecting communities from catastrophic fire by removing excessive trees and brush that have accumulated because foresters have attempted to control and prevent the natural occurrence of forest fires for decades.

"In my opinion the bill caters too much to the timber industry rather than communities," says Prater. The conference callers agree that Senator Elizabeth Hanford Dole '58 is already "a lost cause," but they discuss how to get North Carolina's other senator, John Edwards, to cast his vote against the legislation.

Such national advocacy work is heady stuff for a young man who had expected to begin teaching environmental science in a local high school after finishing his undergraduate degree at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina. That all changed after Prater had the opportunity, in his senior year, to hear Nicholas School Dean William H. Schlesinger speak at Catawba. (Duke and Catawba have a common link in philanthropists Fred J. Stanback '50 and Alice Stanback '53. The Stanbacks helped Catawba create a 200-acre nature preserve within the Salisbury town limits and also established the Stanback Conservation Internship Program at Duke.)

Prater and his roommate, John Gust, were so impressed with what they heard from Schlesinger about the Nicholas School that Gust immediately applied to Duke's forestry program and was accepted. Not to be outdone, Prater then applied and was selected for the Master of Environmental Management (M.E.M.) program. Between his first and second years at Duke, Prater landed a Stanback Internship working for the Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project, which, in turn, led him to become a state delegate for the National Forest Protection Alliance.

Prater and Gust--still roommates--are also active in the Duke University Greening Initiative, an organization launched by two undergraduates "to integrate environmental stewardship into every facet of life at Duke University." Prater has been working with the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards created by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC). "The LEED standards measure everything from site impact--the footprint of a building--to air quality, to the use of local or imported resources in building materials, to energy inputs and outputs," he says.

Tonight, the North Carolina Chapter of the USGBC will assemble on campus to hear Prater's critique of the LEED standards. "LEED has a point system that doesn't translate well to something as complex as a university campus," he says. "I'd like to see Duke lead the nation in setting appropriate environmental standards for universities in the same way that this country ought to lead the way in conservation."

Prater shoulders his backpack and heads confidently into the meeting, prepared to advocate for a new set of university-specific standards that can accommodate the scale and scope of institutions like Duke.