Taking Care of Our Community Means Taking Care of Our Earth
Last summer I attended a workshop hosted by Hanahau’oli School, a progressive school in Honolulu that’s been around for over 100 years. Hanahau’oli School is a friend to Westland; we hosted a handful of their teachers on our campus for a week of visitation several years ago. Last summer’s workshop featured a panel of on-the-ground educators, an ED of an innovative progressive education think tank , as well as university scholars. The departure point for the panel was a John Dewey quote from 1916:
“As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only as such make for a better future society. The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this end.”
The panelists dove in with this concept: Schools are society’s most important institution to teach and model the idea that serving the common wealth of society is imperative.
As the evening’s panel progressed, it took an interesting turn when educator and activist Manu Aluli Meyer invited us, perhaps gently demanded us, to link service to the common good with sustainability. She shared, “When we have a relationship with the natural world, [we] begin to heal. Love land and serve people.” Her punctuation of the word “and” was clear. Land and people are inextricably linked. Inspired, I state plainly here: As we think about Westland’s mission and service to the common good, we must think of our earth too.
This sustainability imperative is naturally embedded in Westland’s mission to care for the group, our Westland school community, our Los Angeles community, and our world. Our mission implicitly asks us to be stewards of the environment and the land. How can we not?
When I heard Manu Aluli Meyer explicitly link Dewey’s service to the common good to the land and then explain a necessary indigenization of our sustainability efforts, I do what I often do: take stock first of what Westland does, and then from there, ask questions.
Westland has a deep and expansive history of staff and parent committees working together to be stewards of our environment. As I understand it, their efforts weren’t always met with openness. Years ago, a committee of parents moved the school towards non-toxic, green-certified cleaners on campus. Their work and passion were sometimes met with resistance, from jokes to eyerolls. (Resistance to any change initiative is expected.) But these parents kept on keeping on through the pushback.
Once I was at a DEI training and the facilitator quoted John Lewis and asked us to share what “good kind of trouble” we’d gotten into lately. Afterwards we discussed how in all areas of our life, we must get into the “good kind of trouble” in service of the common good. I think about these Westland parents. By promoting green products schoolwide, they got in “the good kind of trouble” that John Lewis encouraged. I think we must continue to get into this kind of trouble.
There are more examples of Westland’s service to the common good and the planet: our working gardens; chickens (typically) roaming around freely (occasionally lured by Neil and a carton of blueberries); a natural grass field not made out of smelly tires; an industrial composting program; a Board of Trustees who saw that having a Sustainability Committee was essential to prioritizing the long-term health of the school; and curriculum that invites children to ponder questions central to stewarding our earth.
That curriculum is alive with experiences that help children understand their relationship to the natural world and their responsibilities as citizens. Here’s how three teachers describe their curriculum connected to serving the common good through sustainability:
Group Two investigates the interrelationships of the animal and plant worlds as well as the various systems that bring food to our tables. They learn to notice cycles and the connections between natural cycles. Group Two begins the year by learning the interdependence of the plant and pollinator worlds. They study soil and compost and worms and learn how plants and animals make the soil that grows the plants that feed the animals. Group Two works with the chickens. When the chickens lay the eggs, the children sell the eggs at Westland to earn the money that buys the chicken feed that helps make the nutritious eggs. The interconnection and dependence of these elements of our food production provide the framework for learning in Group Two.
In Group Three, the children are invited to think about their relationship to self and others including the land on which they inhabit and all the other sentient beings they are connected to by it. Tongva Elder and Educator Julia Bogany said the land reflects back to us how well we are taking care of each other. This idea is rooted in the understanding that everything is connected and there is a reciprocal relationship to everything. Children in Group Three learn about the land through native plants. They are gifted a native plant to care for forging an immediate relationship where they can experience the inherent value of the plant as is without a need to exploit it. They learn to observe and catch the wisdom and story of the plant which helps them to extend their ability to learn from and hear the story of other beings. Our children will write the next chapter of the story. So, it is our responsibility to support their understanding that caring for yourself is all about how you care for others, especially the natural world.
In Group Five, students focus their attention on sustainability. This begins with the introduction of the Group Five class job, the recyclers. To do this job, students help manage the recycling for the school each day. They are also responsible for teaching the other groups how to understand and properly use the landfill, recycling and compost containers and what goes in each bin. The students’ involvement in this job has led to a series of deeper studies about why we recycle and what we can do to help the school operate in a more sustainable way. Through research involving print and multimedia resources, as well as field trips, students dig into elements of sustainability, such as developing an understanding of renewable and non-renewable resources, in order to build a well-rounded understanding of the concept. Students also engage in learning about concepts of justice related to the environment, such as environmental justice, specifically learning about how access to clean land, air, and water is not always fair and how communities of color are disproportionately impacted. The level of positive impact that the students have at Westland, from the micro level of taking care of the recycling to the macro level of positively impacting the school’s sustainability goals, is demonstrative of how Westland helps children realize the power and impact that they can have on their world.
There are less obvious ways sustainability is ever present at Westland, too. One moment in my first year at Westland comes to mind. We had hired a new photographer to take school photos, and they set up a faux leaf backdrop in the East Yard. One teacher colleague was peacefully adamant that the photographer take the backdrop down. She looked at the photographer - fair, firm and friendly - pointed to the actual East Yard trees and said, “We have many green backdrops already set up.” Watching the photographer roll up his plastic background, the moment was aesthetic and funny to me. I now see it tied to a culture of sustainability.
At a cultural level, our focus on breaking bread in meaningful ways ties us to our earth. Last spring the Civic Engagement Committee hosted environmental activist, scholar, and dope human being Lauren Tucker, who spoke on food equity. Tucker believes that healthy food and lifestyle is a human right! Her work had previously been the “Don’t do this” approach to espousing sustainability, but she has shifted that message recently to one centered on food as celebration. Through celebration and the coming together breaking bread engenders, Tucker argues that we can “reindigenize and rehumanize and regenerate the culture of fooding.” She encouraged Westland to build bridges and focus on health, in order to more effectively tend to our earth through a positive, less shaming, less fear-based approach.
I share these connections and stories and thoughts to lift up, not suggest that “Oh, we got this.” Nobody can be doing enough. Westland has work to do, from getting our solar panels up and running again to considering the ways we can make more explicit connections between our social justice and equity work and our sustainability efforts. Not to mention thinking of ways we can share the work we’re doing more broadly, to teach as well as to learn from neighboring school communities. What parent education opportunities are there to teach us how we ingrain sustainability into our family systems? And here’s a potentially controversial idea: Given that reducing meat is arguably the most impactful step an individual can take to help our earth, do we have a responsibility to reduce our meat consumption as an institution? I know I might get into some good kind of trouble by putting that out there here.
I close by inviting us all to consider the ways we love land and serve people. Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass writes that this is our work as educators, and I’d say as parents too: “Isn’t this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world?” I am eager to explore our gifts for good, what each of us has to offer as individuals and collectively. I think our world might depend on it.