Happy first Friday of fall, Frog Troublers! (I know the photo above doesn’t look like fall, but it was taken just a few days ago here in Chatham County.)
This is your promised post about a few of our favorite resources and ideas for school environmental action and education.
Roots and Shoots is the youth action program founded by Jane Goodall. School-based (or local) groups are part of an international network, and follow guidelines and suggested steps to observe, identify, and address environmental problems in their community. The website has a useful quiz to help you to “find your calling” as organizers.
The Edible Schoolyard Project is the Alice Waters-founded nonprofit that focuses on school-based gardens, kitchens, and cafeterias. There are lesson plans and other resources for teachers, parents, and kids on their site. Bea is especially interested in doing this.
Green Schoolyards America “seeks to transform asphalt-covered school grounds into park-like green spaces that improve children’s well-being, learning, and play while contributing to the ecological health and resilience of our cities.” They also have a fantastic Covid-19 outdoor learning resource page. Who doesn’t love outdoor learning? I take my college students outside every chance I can.
Bea is also interested in starting a Meatless Mondays campaign at her school. All New York City public schools now provide their 1.1 million students with healthy, all-vegetarian breakfast and lunch menus every Monday. If the largest school district in the country can do it, maybe your school can too!
But if your school or system seems too big a place to start, maybe you can do it at home?
While we’re talking about school lunches and the importance of the cafeteria, I also want to recommend this essay by Virginia Sole-Smith about diet culture, schools, and the need to “stop romanticizing your kids’s lunchbox.” Really great information about the gains made by Michelle Obama’s Healthy and Hunger-Free Kids Act, as well as the huge cost of opting out of the FREE school lunches being offered this year (many parents think that opting out saves money for the school, but the opposite is true—opting in means it’s more likely that this free option will continue!).
Today is a global climate strike day, focused on intersectional climate justice, with Fridays for Future, the international organization that began when then-15-year-old Greta Thunberg began a school strike for climate. From the website, about the focus of today’s strike:
The climate crisis does not exist in a vacuum. Other socio-economic crises such as racism, sexism, ableism, class inequality, and more amplify the climate crisis and vice versa. It is not just a single issue, our different struggles and liberations are connected and tied to each other. We are united in our fight for climate justice, but we must also acknowledge that we do not experience the same problems; nor do we experience them to the same extent.
MAPA (Most Affected Peoples and Areas) are experiencing the worst impacts of the climate crisis and are unable to adapt to it. This is because of the elite of the Global North who have caused the destruction of the lands of MAPA through colonialism, imperialism, systemic injustices, and their wanton greed which ultimately caused the warming of the planet. With both the COVID, climate, and every crisis in history, overexploited countries and marginalized sectors of society are systematically left behind to fend for themselves.
Read more here. And more on how to hold a climate strike here.
Bea and I are especially interested in eliminating the plastic rewards that come through fundraisers like Boosterthon and Jump Rope for Heart. More on that in another post.
Please tell us about some of your favorite environmental clubs and activities, or things you’d like to get started in your community!
(Also, can you find the Pickerel Frog in the photo below?)