[O]n the homepage of Sterling College’s website, where other schools promote their competitive academics, winning sports, and beautiful campus, the Northeast Kingdom school takes a different approach.

“This Is A Climate Emergency,” the page reads in bold type.

That’s the first thing they want students — current, prospective, and otherwise — to know about the school. Climate change is happening, and Sterling won’t be complicit in it.

In a time when staying afloat as a small college is harder than ever, the 120-student school has taken their environmental stewardship niche a step further — now marketing themselves as the school leading the fight against climate change.

“For a college to try to be green, to have LEED-certified buildings and farms on campus, but then to turn around and teach economics and liberal arts in a way that perpetuates an extractive economy and that promotes consumption — that’s a problem,” said Matthew Derr, Sterling’s president.

Those two things — consumption and an extractive economy — are the heart of what Sterling is trying to combat, as outlined in the college’s newly released 10-year strategic plan. The school’s faculty are currently in the process of combing through their entire curriculum to make sure it addresses those exact problems.

They don’t want to focus on the political issues related to climate change or to create a climate change institute, Derr said, though those things are aspects of what they do, but instead work to advance ecological thinking and action.

“Sterling believes that neither the narrow technician nor the uninformed idealist alone will be ready to address the critical issues facing humanity,” the school stated in a press release.

Sterling has just five majors: ecology, environmental humanities, outdoor education, sustainable agriculture, and sustainable food systems. One of those majors — sustainable agriculture — is about to go on the road.

In the fall, Sterling is launching the Wendell Berry Farming Program in Kentucky, with the intention of addressing the problem of destructive farming practices. It’s not intended for their students currently in Vermont. Instead, the school is focused on place-based learning with students who live in Kentucky about the community that they are already part of.

Derr said on its surface, the program “makes zero sense,” but with the help of a $3.5 million grant from the NoVo Foundation, and their partnership with the Berry Center, the project has ended up being exactly the kind of learning they want to expand.

Sterling doesn’t plan to expand its operations in Vermont much, according to Derr. He said the 120-student enrollment they expect for this fall is roughly the same as that of the past several years. (The 12 students entering the program in Kentucky count in those figures). Even their ideal enrollment, he noted, would be just 125.

“124 would be too few, 126 would be too many.” Derr said.

He said there’s been a lot of suggestions of expanding Sterling given the closure of the like-minded 400-student Green Mountain College in Poultney. But Derr said that wouldn’t be sustainable for them, or for Craftsbury Common.

What they are thinking about, he said, is the possibility of graduate programs, or of putting their continuing education programs online. Sterling is a work college, where every student has a job on campus, which helps keep their students’ average debt at $18,000, much lower than that of most other schools, even small ones. Derr said it’s important to them that that doesn’t change.

“We’re really talking about growing our scope instead of growing scale,” Derr said.

At a time when climate change is a hotly politicized issue, Derr said he’s gotten “a couple of emails” from critics since the school announced its new mission.

“But it’s a straw man argument to engage in a discussion about whether climate change is real or not,” he said. “We really just need to ask ourselves how we want to live when the choices we make cause a lot of problems for other people. It’s hard to justify that. We should live differently.”

Derr said he’d love it if more schools thought like Sterling did, but that for now, they’re in a league of their own.

“Plenty of colleges out there have good people studying this, and putting their education to good use,” Derr said. “But I don’t think any other college has conceived themselves in this way.”