Danny's Earth Week update to Town School Staff

Hi everyone,
Well this year at my school I am helping organize the Earth Week at our school which includes an all school assembly and daily activities in the various classes. Today I will talk with the staff at our staff meeting about the week and last night I wrote these quick notes to organize my thoughts. After talking with the administration I get a sense that I have to move a bit slower than I had hoped and I am definitely gonna tone down what I say today from what I wrote last night. I do not want to offend the less enthusiastic of the bunch, and reading what I wrote last night at midnight I realize that some of it might offend people.
But I thought I would include some of my work for our school's earth week to my larger community so I will post some of it here. Starting with what I wrote last night. here it is:


Hi,
Well I am honored to be part of the Town school earth day Celebration.

There are a couple things I would like to say. First about what earth day (or earth Week in our case) means to me and then what I think it could mean for Town School this year.

To me Earth Week is a time to celebrate the wonders of the planet earth, AND an opportunity to raise awareness about how we effect the earth by the way we live, and to inspire people to make changes in their habits that can improve life on Earth for everyone.

As educators I believe we have a very important role to play when it comes to this mission. We have a very big influence on how our students live their lives, that is part of what we get paid to do. For example we teach them to be kind and empathetic towards each other and part of our strategy for teaching this is to create an environment where they know this is what is expected and by modeling the behaviour we hope to foster.

When it comes to being responsible environmentally we often fail when it comes to modeling the behaviour we try to teach.

Now Town school is impressive in many respects - recycling bins in the classrooms, now compost in the dining hall, we have planted the seed of environmental responsibility but there is much more to gardening than simply planting the seed and walking away.

We are such creatures of habit, it is difficult to break old habits - for example remembering to bring my own shopping bags when I went to the grocery store took me years to finally do habitually. Here at school in the copy room I see paper thrown in the waste bin instead of the recycling all the time. Now that we are composting I notice that 99% of what gets put in our classroom trash can is either recycling or compost.

This year we have an opportunity to collectively change our habits and become world leaders in the future of education by practicing what we preach. We have the support of the San francisco department of the environment who has helped us start a new composting program and is going to monitor how much waste we divert from the landfills and simultaneously we have Earth Week to remind us what we need to do and why.

So my challenge to us as a staff is to give up our cynical and lazy tendencies and to rise to the occasion at hand. Through modeling and encouragement we can change our habits as well as the boys.

One thing I think is important is to be consistent throughout the school. If we expect them to really get the importance of compost, for example, we need to not only compost in the dining hall but throughout the school. As long as we thoughtlessly throw the banana peels from snack into the trash cans our students are not getting the lesson that composting is important. Without this consistency all we will have changed from the boys perspective is the color of the trash can in the dining hall. We as a school should think of it as a big group challenge to see how much of our waste we can divert from the landfill.

I was the chief sorter for the green team at the San Francisco green festival and we set a world record for event waste diversion. I, along with a team of volunteers, sorted 20,000 lbs of trash in four days - 96% of which we diverted from the landfill. We ended up with roughly 6,000 lbs of compost, 6,000 lbs of cardboard, 6,000 lbs of mixed recycling, and only 900 lbs of trash. That was an awsome feeling and the people who saw what we did were very inspired to make changes in their lives. And once you really become present to it all you will really notice all the things that needlessly are going to the landfills and will eventually become greenhouse gas and contribute to global warming.

I know teachers are busy and making changes means training dozens of boys to follow the changes as well. But the first step is being aware of what can be changed and then if we come up with a good plan and go at it with a "we can" additude we can create a whole new set of habits that will change many of our boys lives and have a ripple effect out into the world.

So I would like to work with any of you who are interested including teachers, administration, the kitchen staff, office staff, janitorial staff, etc, to come up with plans that make sense for everyone and accomplish our goals without creating more work for anyone. OF course inspiring and enrolling our students is one necessary step in all this but each of us must also buy into it and do our part.

I will leave with an example of a change we should all make regardless of what the school decides to do. EVERYONE for their own sake as well as the earths should stop drinking bottled water!!!!!!!!!!!! The facts are astounding.

First there is the cost to the environment. In this country alone we drink over 50 billion bottles a year, and of course that represents rediculous amounts of raw materials and energy that say thirty years ago we did not use.

But as we find in nearly every case what is bad for the Earth is bad for us. It turns out plastic, especially numbers 1 and 7 which most of our water is bottled in, leaches deadly chemicals into the water. One of these is a synthetic xenoestrogen which is endocrine disruptor and is linked to breast and uterine cancer, insulin resistance and Type 2 Diabetes. These chemicals are particularly devastating to babies and young children and are unfortunately found in baby bottles, sippy cups, and toys made by Gerber, Playtex, Evenflo, Avent, and Dr. Brown's. Europe has banned these plastics in children's products. Anyway, the point is that bottled water is an example of something that our society has created as a habit. And this habit is horrible for the planet and for our bodies. I tell you this so you can use it as motivation to change your habits if you drink out of plastic and especially if you have young children who do.

And this same story can be told about our other wasteful habits such as the use of plastic shopping bags, paper coffee cups, etc etc.

So I am hoping, this earth Week, to create a whole new level of conciousness here at Town school that we can make part of our culture and in turn changing the world for the better, which, after all, is what we get paid to do.