The sustainability committee is proving to be a very useful clearing-house for ideas on how to make our operations at the School more efficient. There are many different points of view and it’s a good reminder (for me at least) that there are many different reasons why people want to help reduce our impact on the environment.
The one point that I really love is efficiency. This particular idea gets the most die-hard skeptics on board in most cases. It’s just about impossible to make a reasoned case for inefficiency. Even people that couldn’t care less about what happens to their garbage or why they should not idle their cars, understand why paying for garbage pickup is silly if we can compost 65% of our solid waste (food) and make fertilizer for the gardens around the school to avoid paying for manure each spring.
Part of the reason why I like working at LCC is that fighting this battle isn’t even an issue. The maintenance staff gets it. Resource management is their game and I don’t have to make a case. The rest of our campus resource users (i.e., students and staff) need to come on board. Like many other members of our society, we are too accustomed to wasting for the sake of convenience. The world can ill-afford our laziness.
—Chris Olive, LCC faculty Member & Green Team Liaison
Planting a tree means being a leader. Anyone can be a leader in their own way. Some people feel like a leader while planting a tree because by doing that you are creating a new beginning for the world and the people who live here. Planting a tree means helping yourself and the world. Plus you have a great time doing it. –Brooks Reid-Constantin ’17
Back in June, Assistant Head of Finance and Administration Nicole Simard-Laurin and I attended the NAIS Conference on Sustainable Schools. It was an incredible experience to interact with excited and motivated individuals from dozens of schools from the US, Canada and Europe. In defiance of many of the attendees’ expectations, science teachers were not the only participants at this conference: there were school board members, several heads-of-school, finance directors, building managers, fundraising coordinators and, of course, many teachers.