75 Green Businesses You Can Start to Make Money and Make a Difference. Glenn Croston
thing you know, they are telling us how to recycle and asking why we aren’t doing more. I thought I was reasonably conscientious, but the energy, purity of vision, and openness of children puts me to shame. They believe they can do anything. They are right. Green teachers and schools are helping them get started on the path to a green future.
Kids need to learn the basics, and to apply the basics in order to help build a healthy economy, society, and planet. It’s like working with a computer, learning a language, or picking up good nutritional habits. If learned early, such things become second nature to us, woven right into our fabric.
INFORMATION RESOURCE
To learn more about what is being done to build greener school buildings, visit the USGBC green schools website at buildgreenschools.org.
Landmark schools are part of a developing movement to green schools inside and out. The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) is supporting the greening of school facilities, helping schools save money, create a better learning environment, and teach what it means to go green. In 2006 the USGBC estimated that a school can save $100,000 per year on its utility bill by going green—dollars that could be spent on salaries and books. The upfront cost of building green schools has been estimated to be as little as 1 to 2 percent more than traditional schools—money that is recouped quickly through lower power bills (“Greening America’s Schools, Costs and Benefits,” A Capital Report, 2006). Schools around the country are making this change, with 10 percent of school construction expected to go toward green approaches. Schools dating from the baby-boomer era are now so old that they need replacing, creating an opportunity to construct better buildings. Going green also can help the morale of staff and teachers, provide a better work environment, and help staff connect with students behind a common purpose.
Having a green school building leads the way to renewed programs inside, teaching about energy efficiency, waste reduction, and renewable energy by using the school itself as a learning tool. Reading about these topics is great, but learning firsthand how to install a solar panel can change how a young person sees the world. Green schools help kids relate to and get excited about physics (how do solar panels produce electricity?), biology (how are biofuels produced?), and ecology (what services do ecosystems provide for us?). Students who ask the proverbial “Why do we have to know this stuff?” can simply look around their school for the answer, seeing each application in action.
The staff at the Bertschi School in Seattle has been greening its facilities and using these steps as a starting point for learning about sustainability, working with the green schools consultant, Meredith Lohr, to involve teachers, parents, and administrators. With a background in the environmental and earth sciences, Lohr blends her teaching with work to add sustainability to the curriculum at Bertschi. The school now has solar panels, a water reclamation system, composting, and gardens with plants native to the region.
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As the green-schools movement grows, perhaps there will be a green certification program and a green curriculum that will establish minimum course requirements. Maybe kids and teachers can have their sustainability quotient (SQ) tested, rather than their IQ.
“The curriculum at Bertschi has always emphasized diversity and social responsibility, and we have built upon this foundation over the last few years,” Lohr says. “The students study neighborhood gardens and tend the small plots on the school’s urban campus. They study ecology, through visits to local wetlands and watersheds, and participate in restoration projects in local parks.” Students get involved in tracking wasted water and energy at the school, and find ways to do better. The curriculum includes visiting an organic farm in the second grade, reducing their garbage at school and at home in the third grade, conserving water in the fourth grade, and learning about renewable energy provided by the building’s solar panels. The students learn how their lives, their school, their community, and the living world are connected. “We find that when presented with real connections and left to draw their own conclusions, children will make choices that benefit all living things, in the present and the future,” Lohr says.
INFORMATION RESOURCE
See the Alliance to Save Energy’s website at ase.org and click on the section about education for more information.
For eco-entrepreneurs interested in education, one opportunity is to grow their own green private school like the Bertschi School. Those who start out as green teachers can develop a green teaching program or even their own school. To be effective, a green approach is not layered on top but built into the foundation of the school. Green schools need to cover the same material as other schools, but have the advantage of a unique and valuable perspective about the environment that parents won’t find at most other schools. Schools such as the Bertschi provide a model for how to build a green school that others can adopt.
Another opportunity for eco-entrepreneurs is to provide schools with green supplies, curriculum materials, food, janitorial services, and so on. Green schools want cafeteria food that is consistent with their beliefs, opening the way for school chefs to work with local food, food service providers, and distributors of food supplies for green schools. Green schools need recycled paper, and lots of it. The growth of green schools will create a market for more materials for projects such as fuel cells and solar energy.
In working to make new and old schools greener, teachers and administrators need to be entrepreneurial, taking the initiative and risk to create change. But there is a lot of help out there. The Green Schools Program of the Alliance to Save Energy is promoting green schools (Kindergarten through grade 12) around the country, setting up programs to teach about energy, save energy, and spread the word. The program provides curriculum materials like the “Energy Hog Challenge.” Local programs, such as the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance, are also getting involved, providing more ideas and materials to encourage schools and teachers to go green.
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Another great opportunity is a green summer camp, such as Planet Energy run by Strategic Energy Innovations in Marin County, California (seiinc.org).
Green schools do not stop at the K–12 level. Colleges, universities, business schools, and many others are going green as well. Second Nature of Boston, Massachusetts, is a nonprofit group encouraging sustainability in higher education. Many schools have pledged to improve their environmental performance, including a pledge by the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment to go carbon neutral. Courses and majors related to sustainability are popping up everywhere, and business schools and product-design schools are rising to meet the demand for those who want their work to reflect their commitment to a new way of working and doing business.
Opportunities for green teaching and schools include:
As the green economy grows, so does the need for people who can continue building green businesses for the future. The lessons kids learn shape their lives and their world. Someday, they will tell stories to their kids of how crazy things were before we all learned to live a better, greener way. I warn you though, once you get going as a green teacher and unleash kids on greening the world, they will prove unstoppable. Kid power is the ultimate form of renewable