The conclusion of clran and green in the school
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While over the last thirty years environmental advocates have, with varying degrees of success, targeted government agencies and large ecologically destructive industries for reform, schools, to a large degree, have slipped below the radar screen. Yet, as this paper has shown, our educational institutions are often environmental health hazards in and of themselves. Collectively, our schools are also significant consumers of natural resources and therefore contributors to a broad variety of society’s environmental problems. The ecological state of our schools today is that they are, generally speaking, unsustainable, often–unhealthy places. And there’s at least one in every community.
The good news, also touted throughout this report is that there are many indications of positive change. National and local healthy school networks of parents, professionals and educators are organizing to address children’s environmental health problems. Related to this, the growing efforts to design green buildings have entered the educational realm, spawning a variety of initiatives to promote healthy, high–performance schools. Some universities and colleges are going solar, providing a potential example for K–12. People are increasingly organizing to get unhealthy food—soda, junk food and fast food––out of our school systems, and replace it, in some cases, with healthy food grown locally, on a small scale. School gardens and green school yard initiatives are sprouting and flourishing across the country. And all of these initiatives, plus many more, are regularly tied into programs designed to make our kids, and therefore our society, more eco–literate: teaching, learning and engaging on issues of health, environment, community and sustainability is happening in one form or another, almost everywhere.
Despite these positive steps forward, many of the laudable efforts to transform and green different aspects of our schools remain unfortunately isolated from one another. We are all working on our individual goals. And in some respects this focus is good and important for achieving tangible results. Yet the fragmentation—the lack of coherence—of what we might call the Sustainable and Healthy Schools Movement weakens all of our work, diminishing the ability to achieve what this report argues is the goal of creating a holistically green and healthy school system. Said another, more positive way, the more this fabulous patchwork of initiatives comes together as a coherent tapestry, the more powerful effect and influence the composition will have on those who come into contact with it.
It is also clear that many of the transformations envisioned in this paper cannot happen unless they are part and parcel of a much broader transformation of our values, laws, and funding priorities nationally, at a state level and locally. But certainly