NEWBURYPORT, Mass.

IF I MIGHT BORROW an oft-borrowed lyric from the late, great Joe Raposo, one of New England’s finest songwriters, and from vocalist Kermit the Frog, it isn’t easy being green. Kermit sings about how challenging it can be to have skin of a color different from those around you. My reference, of course, is to the difficulty of going green in a society consumed by over-consumption.

Colleges and universities, where I have taught for most of the last decade, are joining the green movement. Indeed, the academic community is part of a growing national urge to build green. In 2000 there were just 573 projects registered with the U.S. Green Building Council as intending to go for a LEED (environmentaly friendly) certification, whereas today there are more than 16,000 projects underway nationally.

Of course, the movement is not without onlookers who are seeing green in a whole different way. Even Earth Day has its critics. Since 1970, when April 22 was established as a day to highlight concern over pollution of the soil, air and water, it has been an enormous PR success, observed in 140 nations with outdoor performances, street fairs and TV programs that focus on environmental issues — but it’s questionable whether the movement has had an effect on the overdevelopment, global warming and overpopulation that afflict planet Earth.

“The biggest problem with Earth Day is that it has become a ritual of sympathy for the idea of environmental sanity,” say Alex Steffen and Sarah Rich on WorldChanging.Com. “Small steps, we’re told, ignoring the fact that most of the steps most frequently promoted (returning your bottles, bringing your own bag, turning off the water while you brush your teeth) are of such minor impact (compared to our ecological footprints) that they are essentially meaningless without larger, systemic action as well.”

The strategy of starting small (with recycling) and moving on to harder things has failed, they suggest. “It is, essentially, the politics of gesture, little different than wearing a rubber wrist band or a pink ribbon, and, such a politics is primarily a means of raising money for large non-government organizations while making regular folks feel a little better about their relationship to a terribly flawed system. It’s a broken model, and we can do better.”

Meanwhile, as politicians campaign on the need to drill offshore for oil, voters seem indifferent to the fact that there is no comprehensive U.S. energy policy. We have a drug czar in Washington. Why not an environment czar? Perhaps Obama will change all that.

“So much of it has to do with leadership,” Thomas Friedman, author of Hot, Flat, and Crowded, recently told Time magazine. “For the last eight years we’ve had a president and vice president who have basically said our use of oil is a God-given right. Imagine if our president said tomorrow, I’m going to get rid of my armor-plated limousine and I’m going to have an armor-plated Ford Escape hybrid.” (Politicians, please note that Ford recently announced developing “sturdy yet quickly biodegradable soy bean seats” that are “one of many examples of Ford’s commitment to environmentally sustainable materials.”)

On campuses across the land, every day is Earth Day, and doing better means looking for the green in all things great and small. According to the Associated Press, some 500 colleges and universities are considering removing trays from dining halls, for instance. At the university where I teach, there are roughly 8,000 students on a meal plan. No trays in the dining halls could mean a reduction in wasted food – as students only carry food they intend to eat, not sample or discard — and a reduction in wasted food and less water used for cleaning. This would save about 3,0000 gallons of water daily.

Despite what some critics may say, down here at campus green level, many colleges and universities are recycling, collecting gray water to flush toilets, eliminating cafeteria trays, and more . . . small steps, perhaps, but the start of a much longer journey.

John Brady, former editor-in-chief of Boston Magazine, has taught at Boston University and is visiting professional at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism (Ohio University). This essay first appeared in The New England Journal of Higher Education.