Teach Your Children Well

Schools across the U.S. go green

Posted at 10:10 AM on 11 Sep 2007

Perhaps in an attempt to prepare students for an eco-college experience, many elementary, middle, and high schools are getting in on the green-building trend. Sixty schools across the U.S. have been certified by the U.S. Green Building Council, and 360 more are waiting to have applications approved; in 2000, only four schools applied for certification. The new generation of educational edifices boasts features such as waterless urinals, motion-sensing light systems, rooftop gardens, and sunshine-streaming skylights that discourage naps in class. Students at the new green-built T.C. Williams High in Alexandria, Va., say they're hesitant to doodle on desks or deface other school property that was built to be sustainable and long-lasting. And according to USGBC's Rachel Gutter, green schools can increase test scores, retain teachers, and save districts up to $100,000 a year in energy, water, and health-care costs. Lesson learned.

source: The Washington Post

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Please children, teach your elders well !!!

In newspapers worldwide, seven days a week, we find ubiquitous presentations regarding the accumulation of wealth in the world economy....now valued at 30 to 40 trillion dollars. It is easy to see how economic globalization is carefully tracked and watched over. Perhaps economic activity is ultimately prized in our time. Nothing quite compares to more money, money, money, money. We seem never to possess enough wealth and the political/military power that is underwritten by people with the most dollars. At least that is what I am seeing and hearing from people like me in the elder generation.

The interlocking national economies of the world economy are also so singularly significant to us because economic systems are impressive, distinctly human inventions. Elders run them. We usually ignore the realization that the global economy is not a part of the natural world per se, nor does it operate like the economy of nature (one we know works), but rather is an artificially designed, faulty human construction.

A question for us today could be, "Is the huge scale and rapidly growth rate of the global economy sustainable through the 21st century or is it to become patently unsustainable in the foreseeable future?"

In my humble opinion, there can be no such thing as economic globalization if there is not a healthy planet from which national economies can derive natural resources and ecosystem services.

In a most remarkable role reversal, our children are teaching their elders that the economy is supported by the natural world in the sense that the world's human economy and living things depend upon nature for existence. They also are teaching us that the human species depends on the Earth for its survival, too. Our children understand that there cannot be a successful economy without a planetary home capable of supporting business and other activities of human life.

In light of what our children teach us today, we can more deeply appreciate the meaning of their recognition that there will be no such thing as a adequately functioning human economy without a living Earth. Let the elders invite our wealthiest captains of economic globalization to make more redirect investments in the preservation of Earth's biodiversity and global ecosystems and to eschew unbridled, large-scale business activities that dissipate limited resources, pollute the environment and ravage this wondrous planet we are blessed by God to inhabit.

By so doing, perhaps we can fulfill the hope of each and every one of us to leave our children a world fit for human habitation.

by stevenearlsalmony at 12:07 PM on 11 Sep 2007

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