Blogg-Ed Indetermination

In honor of National Bike to Work Week, and as someone who has biked to work for the last several years myself, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on how biking has made me a better driver. Yes, I still drive my car from time to time, but much less so and with much greater care when I do. I attribute my better driving habits to what I have learned from biking.

1. Context is key. I am constantly thinking about where the hazards are mostly likely to be and alter my behavior accordingly.

For example, I ride down a tow-lane, one way street every morning. Is it safer for me to be in the right lane or the left lane? I choose the left lane for two reasons: (a) in the early morning it is mostly drivers who are getting into and out of their cars, and the driver’s door is on the curb side if I am in the left lane, and (b) with right turn on stop allowed at stop lights I am less likely to be cut-off by a driver if I am in the left lane while stopped at a traffic signal.

My ride also takes me past a couple of nursing homes frequented by elderly drivers. I exercise more caution there, and do the same when I pass a local high school frequented by less experienced, younger drivers.

2. Non-verbal communication keeps you safe. Eye contact with others around you on the road can speak volumes for your safety. Clear signals (hand signals, in my case), let people know my intent.

3. Cell phones are evil (when used by drivers or riders). My closest calls regarding accidents have all involved drivers with cell phones and missed stop signs, traffic signals, or simply unawareness of my presence on the road. Cyclists who try to talk on a cell phone while riding their bike are even worse.

4. Courtesy begets courtesy. There are a lot of cyclists who are real jerks when it comes to sharing the road with cars. And there are a lot of drivers who are real jerks when it comes to sharing the road with bicycles. But I have found that a friendly hand wave and even chatting with drivers at stop signs and signals is not only fun to do, but I think often results in creating a more positive environment for both drivers and riders.

5. It takes a lot of energy to start riding up a hill from a dead stop. If I am expending a lot of energy on a bike, think of what your car has to do with hundreds of times more weight! Rabbit starts in a care waste energy. Drive like you’re on a bike and save fuel.

6. Similarly, I really notice the difference when my bike tires are under-inflated, even by a few pounds. That’s prompted me to be more vigilant with my car tires. The U.S. Government says that properly inflated tires can increase fuel efficiency by as much as 3.3%.

7. While riding, I get to enjoy things such as the feel of the road, smells, the feel of the air against my skin, things that as a driver I am insulated against by shock absorbers, AC, and windows. I’ve learned as a driver to appreciate the days of my youth when my dad would take us for a drive on a warm summer night, no air conditioning of course, and we’d feel the coolness and moistness of the air as we passed lakes and streams, the difference aromas of regions of the country near farms or in forests. I drive with my windows down a lot more now.

8. Routine can lead to disaster. We’ve all had moments where we’ve “zoned out” and wondered where the last few minutes went. Perhaps we’re taking our morning shower and can’t remember if we washed our hair or not. Or we’ve been driving and have gone past our exit – the same one we’ve taken for years. God help you if you do this on a bike, while a motorist does the same thing while driving. When this happens to me it’s time for me to vary my route or do something new so that there’s less chance of my mental autopilot kicking in, resulting in an accident.

My worst cycling crash was due to my own inattention. It happened within a few blocks of home, and involved nothing more than a half-inch lip to a driveway from the street, too soft of a grip on the handlebars, and a mind that wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Scrapes, bruises, cracked ribs, and a deeply wounded ego resulted.

I hope you ride a bike to work this week and, if possible, more often than that. If you’re like me you may find that you’ll end up a better driver, too.

Several years ago, NAIS president Patrick Bassett described a wonderful “multidimensional definition of school sustainability,” including finances, curriculum, demographics, global networking, and the environment. This multidimensional definition of sustainability is an important and helpful model for thinking holistically about school’s sustainability, and I recommend it as a construct for such discussions.

Yet for many people the meaning of the term “sustainability” is still restricted to environmental sustainability in general, and global climate change in particular.

For years many schools have silently practiced aspects of environmental sustainability in the form of conservation’s three-r’s (reduce, re-use, recycle) and through environmental and outdoor education programs. But to many of us it is clear that we must do more than “pick the low hanging fruit” of energy and materials conservation, or mark Earth Day each April with special programs. Rather, we must make significant changes in how we operate our schools and teach our children if we are to truly reduce our environmental footprint and to help students adopt behaviors and attitudes consistent with a sustainable future.

Fortunately, there are many resources available to assist schools in reaching these goals, and many schools have or are creating programs that can be models for the rest of us to learn from and emulate. One such organization is the Green School Alliance, whose logo is depicted here, and I am proud to say that my school is a charter member.

Another useful construct for thinking about your school is to consider three aspects to green initiatives: greening your school’s operations, its curriculum, and its culture.

Greening School Operations

The problems associated with global climate change may seem overwhelming, and the contributions of each of our schools to solving them insignificant. It is imperative to guard against any feelings of helplessness that may occur as you learn more about these issues. (Righteous anger is justified, if it leads to righteous action.) It is especially critical to help students look to the future with a realistic sense of optimism. This is why it is useful to have programs that provide a means for students to take action, and I think that school operations represent the easiest place for this to first occur. Getting students involved in conducting audits of your waste and recycling stream, for example, can not only provide valuable information to the school but can be the springboard for wonderful curricular connections.

A more formal approach to addressing school operations exists in the form of “green business” certification programs, often sponsored by your local county or municipal government, to assist local businesses in assessing and improving their current environmental practices. For example, Castilleja School in Palo Alto, CA is turned to its Santa Clara County government for such a program. Not only was the program of no cost to to them, but it provided them with thousands of dollars worth of consulting assistance in such areas as solid waste reduction, recycling, composting, energy efficiency, toxic chemicals abatement, water use, landscaping, and food service. The goverment also provided to them, again at no cost, replacements for more efficient water and bathroom fixtures.

Greening the Curriculum

Many schools have faculty who are deeply committed environmentalists, and as such bring ideas about sustainability into their classroom in both informal and formal ways:

• Distributing handouts, collecting homework, and correcting student work electronically.
• Providing recharging stations for batteries used in student calculators and computers.
• Modeling conservation by turning off lights when leaving a room, printing on two sides of the page, re-using the blank back sides of printouts for scratch paper, and so on.
• Facilitating age-appropriate discussions of global climate change in their classrooms or advisories.
• Using opportunities to connect sustainability to their subject area, such as measuring and graphing the school’s power and water consumption, writing persuasive essays on environmental topics, reading the great works of fiction, poetry or essays with environmental themes, or expressing a love of the earth through photography, movie making, sculpture, painting and drawing, dance, and music.
• Engaging students in discussions about scarcity (something most children in the U.S. have little first hand experience with), social and environmental justice, and their own economic choices.
• Performing community service projects such as tree planting, coastal and waterways cleanup, creating and tending a school vegetable garden, or helping senior citizens replace incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs.

Greening the School Culture

Creating a culture of sustainability is challenging, particularly if it has not been core to the school’s mission or habits. Indeed, environmental sustainability can appear to be at odds with other school values:

• Your Development office prides itself in the high quality of its print materials used to communicate with parents and donors. Moving to electronic means of communication may seem less personal, and printing on recycled paper using soy-based inks may be more costly.
• Your parent organization is responsible for a number of school events. Getting them to use ceramic plates and cups and cloth napkins instead of disposable paper products may mean more work for the volunteers.
• Your board of trustees may perceive purchasing carbon offset certificates for your utility use and travel as an unnecessary expense rather than as an investment in a clean future.
• Your school lunch program runs on a tight budget. Purchasing locally grown, organic food may be more costly, and using more seasonal fruits and vegetables may require changes in their menus and food preparation practices.
• Your student and athletic uniforms are a big part of your heritage and identity. Switching to fabrics that are organically grown may be difficult, and assuring that the workers in manufacturing plants where the uniforms are created are properly compensated and work in safe conditions may be difficult to validate.

Changes in school culture seldom occur quickly, and require buy-in from the community and persistence on the part of school leaders. Formalizing your goals for sustainability in documents such as the school’s long-range plan, regional or national accreditation goals, and the school mission statement are a means to demonstrate commitment and help to keep environmental sustainability in your community’s eye. Creating connections with other schools and universities, environmental groups, business organizations, media outlets, and local government can also provide you with resources to bolster your efforts to raise awareness, celebrate and publicize your successes, and learn about programs that can assist your efforts.

First Steps

Given the complexities involved in all of these issues it may be difficult to decide where to start. But this very complexity means that there is no “right” place to begin. Rather than getting mired in “analysis-paralysis,” simply start doing. Whether it’s water conservation, reducing landfill-bound waste, the use of environmentally friendly cleaners, pesticides, and herbicides, planting trees and native plants, purchasing carbon credits, creating “green teams” of faculty, staff, and students, or installing solar panels does not matter. These are all great projects and contribute to a sustainable future for your school and our planet. And with action comes hope, and with hope comes a new habit of mind that, ultimately, is the only way that we can save ourselves, and our planet.

I only caught a portion of a report on NPR last week so I am afraid I can’t properly credit the speaker who first mentioned the idea of less consumption leading to more local trash. But it’s such an interesting concept I had to write about it.

Most of us don’t think about what happens to the packaging our stuff comes in. Many of us just throw it away or recycle it. When it’s recycled, cardboard and other waste paper often ends up being processed and bailed at the recycling facility for export to countries that, oddly enough, can’t get enough of this stuff. Places like China and Japan, where they make lots of stuff but don’t have a lot of trees to make into paper and cardboard to put the stuff in.

So China makes stuff, sends it to us in boxes, we buy the stuff, recycle the boxes, that go back to China, to make packaging for more stuff, and the cycle goes on and on.

But apparently, we’re not buying enough new stuff from them and the waste paper we’re sending to the Far East is piling up in their shipping ports and the bottom has fallen out of the recycled paper business. So China et al. may not want our waste paper products any more, or at least not in the quantities we’ve been sending it them in the past.

Meanwhile, all of the stuff from China and company that was already in the pipeline to the U.S. will eventually be sold and the paper and cardboard sent off to recycling centers without a market to sell it to. So where will it go? You guessed it, into landfills, perhaps even the one in your city or neighborhood. It could be worse, at least this paper and cardboard is biodegradable. But it takes up a lot of room in landfills, room that we’re rapidly running out.

So then, is the lesson to buy more to keep the cycle of consumption and waste recycling going? I think not. The lesson is to consider the entire life cycle of what we purchase, including the stuff it comes in. For example, less packaging, less to throw away or recycle. No packaging? Well, good luck unless you’re buying used in which case someone else has already dealt with the packaging.

Here’s an interesting video in Chinese with English subtitles about the problem of over packaging as seen from the Chinese perspective.

As a committed environmentalist, I have often pondered the tension that exists between technology and global climate change. The frenetic pace in which new technologies are produced, consumed, and then discarded contribute to the exhaustion of the earth’s resources. The pollution and social justice problems associated with e-waste are well documented. Our server rooms become more and more crowded, consuming more and more power. Cloud computing simply moves the responsibility for unbridled technology consumption off-campus, where  “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” thinking may come into play.

And yet I recognize that technology also lies at the heart of many innovative solutions that can help address the energy crisis, lead to greater efficiencies, and create a more sustainable planet. Our children, perhaps the first generation in America in which there will be more scarcity of products and resources than in the past, and who certainly are inheriting a mountains of debt, and mountains stripped of their forests, minerals, and snow pack, must learn to use not only use new technologies but to invent them.

Living in the heart of Silicon Valley one is awash in the exultation regarding the latest Web 2.0 technology, server virtualization, and perhaps most of all, the optimism about a future in which technology can and will help us solve the most pressing issues of our time.

Thus it is that within this framework that I wonder if the current economic recession and its resulting slowdown in technology dollars and spending might cause all of us to become more thoughtful about our technology acquisitions. We’ll want to stretch out the useful life of existing equipment. We won’t necessarily go for the next software upgrade which consumes more CPU cycles and RAM than the last one. Perhaps we’ll even come to some understanding of that something does not have to be perfect to be good enough.

Slowing down. Becoming more thoughtful stewards of technology. Questioning “bigger, faster, stronger.” Perhaps this is not such a bad thing. And if it’s taken a recession to get us this point, then perhaps there’s something good amongst this otherwise awful news.