(Head Royce School)

Head-Royce School, a small private academy for students in kindergarten through the 12th grade in Oakland, California, prides itself on strong academic performance as well as leadership skills.

As part of that leadership experience, senior Tyler Finney gets together with other students and school staff to talk about “greening” their school. “Every day we meet to discuss how to lower emissions,” he says, adding that they also plan events to get other students excited about sustainability.

Getting involved from the ground up

Green Team member Mike Eidlin, also a senior, says they’re drafting a letter to parents about why they should carpool and how to buy greener products for their kids. “If we can influence our parents, the generation before us,” he says, “they could help out other people who aren’t as informed.”

Head-Royce principal Paul Chapman says the Green Team has his full support. He believes sustainability is so important that when students first requested this project three years ago, he made sure they would have a major say in generating ideas and taking action.

I told this group there was a reason for that, because it was about their future not our past,” says Chapman. “And I wanted to make it apparent that the kids should have some power. The point was that we wanted them to get out and make change, which they did.”

Chapman encouraged them to think creatively, even if some of the projects they came up with seemed fanciful and some didn’t work out. Thanks to the students’ ingenuity, many of their ideas have paid off. The school now gets much of its electric power from solar panels and has a garden for healthy classroom snacks.

The Green Team’s efforts have also reduced the amount of trash the school generates. Senior Lydia Glenn-Murray says the committee members are trying to reduce it even more through a trash audit. “Next week, we’ll be sorting through all our trash and figuring out how much of our trash should be in compost that’s not and is going into the landfill.” She says that, in Oakland, 30 percent of the trash in the landfill is actually compostable.

Green schools are sprouting up in all shapes and sizes across the United States, according to Lisa Bennett of the Center for Ecoliteracy, in Berkeley, California. “Some schools are doing it through gardens, some are doing it through healthy nutritious lunches, others are doing it through their classes.”

Center for EcoLiteracy

A new book, called Smart by Nature, profiles U.S. schools that are greening their curriculum.

The Center for Ecoliteracy has worked with Head-Royce and other schools to integrate environmental action into lesson plans and offers workshops for educators around the world. A new book from the center, called Smart by Nature, profiles U.S. schools that are greening their curriculum.

Bennett says it’s important for schools to teach sustainability. “Many of the problems that we now face are because we didn’t learn about sustainable living so why not start teaching young kids about it?”

Some educators oppose adding environmental projects to the school day. They are concerned it will distract from basic academics like reading and math. But Bennett says the opposite is usually true. “What the research is now showing is that when kids are out in nature and they’re met with a challenge, when they’re given this kind of education that’s designed around a project, where they then have to learn things for a reason in order to complete their project, they are willing to work a lot harder and we have seen scores go up.”

The environmental focus at Head-Royce has made a positive difference. One Green Team member says, “It’s really cool for once, rather than just learning material, to be able to build material out of our passions and out of our creativity because that’s something that’s not always emphasized enough.”

Headmaster Chapman says that, in addition to supporting academic growth, the green mission at Head-Royce helps students build leadership skills. He points out the connection between that and real world problem solving. “When you pitch a problem to kids and let them understand that they could come up with a solution to a problem that has bedeviled other people, it’s highly motivational.”

(Head Royce School)

You can see the motivation throughout the school, says Head-Royce Academic Dean Crystal Land. She explains that teachers incorporate the idea of sustainability into every subject at every grade level. “Our math classes have a great water-use project where they measure the amount of water that comes out of the shower in each of their homes and then compare to local water use and worldwide water use rates for other families. All through the lower school they study the ocean.”

Future goals at Head-Royce include reducing the school’s carbon footprint down from 2,000 metric tons of C02 a year to zero, in hopes of becoming one of the first carbon-neutral schools in the nation. Headmaster Chapman says the students are figuring out how to make that happen. He says they’ve discussed ideas such as running educational or fund-raising campaigns as well as encouraging carpooling and other alternative transportation.

(Head Royce School)

As for the future of the Green Team students, many plan to keep trying to make the world more sustainable. “There are a lot of colleges out there that have wind turbines and they have composting set up,” one young woman points out. “But I’m definitely going to get involved in whatever college I go to, in helping further green their school.”

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COMMENT – Please read this in the UK! Mr Cameron?

Planet TIGER.

The United Nations’ climate chief is expressing optimism about the movement among various countries to discuss a global carbon-emissions treaty, less than two months after the Copenhagen conference failed to achieve such a deal. 

Gatherings of the European Union, the Group of Eight, the G20 and other international bodies discussing climate change will not sideline the U.N. effort for a sweeping global environmental agreement. That is what the world body’s climate chief, Yvo de Boer, has told reporters in New Delhi. 

“I’m very happy countries are meeting in different constellations, formally and informally, in order to find a way forward. But at the end of the day, if you want a U.N. treaty to be the framework for an advance on climate change then, that will have to have happen in a formal setting, at the end of this year in Mexico,” de Boer. 

The Cancun conference, set for December, hopes to achieve what the Copenhagen meeting failed to accomplish – international consensus on how to combat rising carbon emissions. 

The Danish conference attracted an unprecedented 120 heads of state and government.  But delegates did not go beyond “taking note” of recognizing the need to limit temperature rises to two degrees Celsius above the average recorded in the pre-industrial era. The bare-bones deal was criticized as being drafted by only a few countries – namely the United States, China and other emerging powers – and not taking into consideration developing countries that would be most affected by climate change. 

De Boer, the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, is in India for an environmental conference beginning Friday that will include an informal, off-the-record meeting among some of the Copenhagen climate negotiators. 

The Delhi Sustainable Development Summit is being somewhat overshadowed by its founder and embattled patron, on the defensive.

Indian Nobel Peace prize-winning scientist Rajendra Pachauri heads The Energy Research Institute organizing the Delhi gathering.  He is also chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has come under attack for sloppy science. The Indian scientist recently admitted an IPCC claim the Himalayan glaciers would melt by the year 2035 was erroneous.

U.N. climate chief de Boer says, despite what he termed several “perceived errors” brought to light in IPCC documents, the basic facts remain the same, still compelling the world to act.  

“The scientific evidence that is provided by the IPCC has not been shaken, in spite of a very unfortunate mistake,” said de Boer. 

De Boer terms continual questioning of climate data “positive” because it makes the overall science more robust. 

The United Nations says about 80 countries met a January 31st deadline to unveil national plans on targets and actions to reduce carbon emissions. 

But some climate negotiators are pessimistic about a global pact being achieved any time soon because of a lack of consensus and the state of the world economy.

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Planet TIGER

President Barack Obama wants the United States to move more quickly to increase its reliance on alternative fuels. A presidential panel advocates greater use of biofuels and clean coal technology.

President Obama says the U.S. should depend less on oil and more on so-called clean energy.

He says the country which builds a clean energy economy will own the 21st century global economy.  So far, the president says, that country is not the U.S., but China. “We can’t afford to spin our wheels while the rest of the world speeds ahead,” he said.

An energy task force tells Mr. Obama U.S. production of fuel from plants or animals is not likely to meet a goal set by Congress.  The current production is about one-third the level lawmakers have mandated by 2022.

The group wants more private and government money spent to help stimulate the production of fuel from sources like maize, sugar cane and wood chips.

The president is also encouraging increased production of coal, using environmentally friendly technology. “It has been said that the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal, and that is because, as I said, it is one of our most abundant energy resources.  If we can develop the technology to capture the carbon pollution released by coal, it can create jobs and provide energy well into the future,” he said.

As he met with governors from coal-producing states, Mr. Obama said he is working on a government strategy to put clean-coal technology into wide use within ten years.  

The president told the governors from both parties that politics will have to be put aside. “The bottom line is this:  I am convinced that America can win the race to build a clean-energy economy, but we are going to have to overcome the weight of our own politics.  We have to focus not so much on those narrow areas where we disagree but on the broad areas where we agree,” he said.

Creating jobs through the development of clean energy and related technology is an important part of President Obama’s strategy for boosting the U.S. economy.

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Planet Tiger

The China Tiger has this story.

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