“It is high time that we as a school community come together around the notion of “eco-mindedness”, a notion that should simply, in 2007, reside intuitively deep within each one of us. Our dedicated eco-literacy task force under the leadership of Erin Wallen met regularly last semester, and one of its members, 12th grader Harry de Francesco, calculated our carbon foot print as a school as 2500 tons, the culprits residing in three major areas of consumption: the significant population of parents and staff driving cars to and from school; the over-use of electricity throughout the facility; and enormous amounts of air travel, compared with other schools, expended for our exchange programs, trips and conferences. Our broad goal then, as a community, is to reduce our gas usage from mega-miles to nega-miles, and our energy consumption from megawatts to negawatts, the new language of Green. Our specific goal for the academic year 2007-2008, is to reduce our carbon footprint from 2500 to 1500 tons, and Harry will be measuring our progress regularly during the months ahead so we may see how we are doing. But, you may ask, how will we achieve our goal? First of all, we will all model good recycling and responsible purchasing habits: we will use the correct bins for waste, encourage all students to do the same and buy only biodegradable or reusable utensils. We will turn off classroom lights during the day, and we will pilot a composting program in the lower grades at lunch-time. We will refill our re-usable water bottles from the faucets, which we will carefully turn off to prevent leakage. As we have no intention of reducing our exchange programs, so essential to our school’s mission, we will plant trees to compensate, and get involved in other local efforts such as beach clean-up. We will have informational student assemblies, monthly bike- and -walk-to-school days, and free fruit Fridays. We will be a major player and leader at the Focus the Nation Conference Day on January 31, 2008, and, whenever possible, our curriculum at all levels must reflect and reinforce responsible and rational attitudes not only about war and peace, but about the very survival of the planet as we know it. Students must be allowed and encouraged to come up with their own solutions. It’s their planet too, and they will inherit this mess. It’s all about that core part of our mission statement, “Critical thinking”, it’s about teaching students to look at a serious and relevant issue from a variety of differing and objective perspectives. Just as we must teach, for example, that it was both scientists who invented the atom bomb, and scientists who most strongly opposed its use, we must teach that global warming is a product of our everyday behavior, that photosynthesis is, without a doubt, essential for our survival, and that providing drinkable water to everyone on Earth is both one of the greatest challenges to humanity and yet one of the most simple to fix, if only we choose prioritize it.”
