Michelle Wei, grade 10, and Helen Gu, grade 8, recently won Silver Awards for their submissions to the 2021 Ocean Awareness Contest. The competition was held by Bow Seat Ocean Programs, an organization that promotes ocean conservation efforts through a variety of initiatives that engage middle and high school students.
The Ocean Awareness Contest is held annually and invites students to submit creations across a wide range of media, including art, creative writing, music and film. Wei submitted a short story called “Water Monster” about a mother and son living in an area with very limited access to clean water, and Gu’s submission was an elegiac poem titled “see her fall,” about the ongoing harm being done to the world’s oceans. They received support from middle school English teacher Marjorie Hazeltine.
The contest received had nearly 6,000 participants, and winners in every category have been featured in a special ocean advocacy gallery.
Yesterday, the Harker Green Team hosted a talk by environmental educator Keshet Miller, who spoke to students about consumption and waste disposal, and how they affect the lives of people in vulnerable parts of the world.
Miller has led educational trips to places such as Indonesia, where communities that rely on fishing are increasingly dealing with waste from other countries disrupting their way of life. As waste makes fish populations sick or less edible, communities are forced to find alternative food sources.
Much of the blame for the creation of waste, Miller said, rested on large companies that generate profits through consumption. To fuel consumption, companies frequently create products that are meant to fail and be replaced, a principal commonly known as planned obsolescence. People are further motivated to consume by a society that places a high value on one’s ability to purchase many products.
She also touched on the limits of personal habits and lifestyles in making a more sustainable society, noting that major policy changes, community monitoring, economic change and education are all crucial to ensure the continued habitability of the planet.
The upper school’s Green Team was today awarded a Distinguished Honorable Mention in the Bow Seat Marine Debris Creative Advocacy Competition. The annual competition, which ended this year after starting in 2016, judged advocacy campaigns created by students aged 11-18 that brought awareness and encouraged action on marine debris in their schools and communities.
Seniors Anvi Banga, Alex Shing, Anthony Shing, and juniors Sachi Bajaj and Natasha Yen created the Buy Better Boba campaign to reduce the proliferation of single-use plastics on campus, particularly those used by bubble tea drinks that have become popular in student fundraisers. The campaign provided reusable glass jars as well as materials that could be used to promote this effort at other schools. The team also engaged with local bubble tea businesses and encouraged them to incentivize the use of reusable containers by their customers.
According to the Bow Seat website, the judges were impressed that, “The Green Team identified a problem that was unique to their school, created a simple and inexpensive solution, and developed strategies to make it scalable in their broader community.”
The 2019 middle school Green Team – sixth graders Summer Adler, Natalie Liu, Genieve Malinen and Claire Zhao – has been hard at work this year advocating for the end of single-use plastics and an increase in recycling of all plastic waste. Because much of our plastic waste ends up in the ocean, the team is concerned with the effects on marine life, from sea birds filling their stomachs – and those of their babies – with indigestible plastic and dying of malnutrition, to fish who mistake tiny bits of colored microplastics as their natural food source, to sea turtles and whales becoming entangled in plastic waste. The team has worked hard to learn about and share with their friends the effects of human activity on the planet’s ecosystems.
In addition to creating inspirational posters and displaying them at the middle school campus, the team participated in the nationwide Plastic Film Recycling Challenge, collecting and recycling more than 300 pounds of plastic film during the five-month challenge. The Green Team managed to increase the middle school community’s recycling of a material difficult to process by waste haulers and recyclers, and effectively communicated the importance of recycling to their fellow students, families, faculty and staff – who all participated in the team’s plastic film collection.
With Earth Day in mind, the Green Team learned more about Earth’s marine environments and the important role that healthy coral plays in maintaining these ecosystems. With a healthy coral reef being the backbone of a thriving ocean, they further discovered the surprising impact that sunscreen has had on the planet’s oceans and that the toxic ingredients oxybenzone and octinoxate have adversely affected coral reefs by poisoning fish, sea urchins, shrimp and baby corals. Widespread coral distress and reef bleaching has been a significant global consequence.
The team shared this information about sunscreen and its effects at the 2019 Earth Day celebration on April 19. The entire student body also participated in an extended advisory meeting that focused on protecting coral reefs globally. They took part in a letter writing campaign that petitioned the FDA to ban oxybenzone and octinoxate in sunscreens nationwide. They further learned that switching to reef-safe sunscreen has a huge impact on coral reef health and were given free reef-safe clear zinc sunscreen sticks at the Green Team’s Earth Day booth, generously donated by Babo Botanicals.
The inspirational story behind Babo Botanicals’ founder is evidenced by her passion for healthy marine ecosystems, beekeeping, sustainable agriculture, nutrition and teaching. A graduate of Harvard, Kate Solomon developed Babo Botanicals with children and families in mind. We are very grateful for the company’s sunscreen donation and the opportunity has provided to share the importance of using reef-safe sunscreens with students and families.
Green Team members have shown their passion for a healthy planet and truly gotten their hands dirty by learning about and maintaining a compost bin on campus, growing vegetables from seeds and replanting the beautiful Harker “H” garden by the school entrance. Maintaining both the flower garden and vegetable patch will be the team’s focus for the remainder of the school year, while continuing to campaign against single-use plastics.
A special faculty retreat was held on Feb. 9 to promote sustainability principles and practices among Harker faculty. The event – organized by Harker’s Sustainability Committee – featured talks and activities related to Harker’s future plans to reduce waste and emissions, and actions that can be taken by the entire community to help Harker realize its sustainability goals via the curriculum and more effective use of school resources as well as personal habits. Attendees also had their choice of a variety of morning activities, including yoga, meditation and a vintage clothing swap.
In an effort to make the retreat a “zero waste” event, all decorations were made from recycled or recyclable materials. Spider plants were placed in biodegradable pots, and the attendees’ name tags were printed on recycled paper, each containing wildflower seeds for planting after the event. Attendees all brought their own receptacles for water, coffee or other drinks, and arrived by bicycle, carpooling or taking public transportation. Food for the event was also locally sourced and organic, with options such as the Impossible Burger, a plant-based burger that mimics the taste and texture of meat.
A morning keynote was delivered by historian and author Jeff Biggers, who wrote about how his family’s homestead was lost to strip-mining in 2014’s “Reckoning at Eagle Creek.” Now leading the Climate Narrative Project, a multidisciplinary approach to finding climate change solutions, Biggers gave a multimedia presentation titled “Ecopolis,” which offered a future of vision Harker and San Jose as regenerative places and how they might appear with enacted sustainability policies. Upper school music teacher and trumpeter Dave Hart, along with drummer Jason Lewis and pianist Malcolm Campbell, provided musical accompaniment during the presentation.
Over the weekend of Feb. 22-24, Harker Green Team officers Anvi Banga, Alex Shing and Anthony Shing, all grade 11, and Natasha Yen, grade 10, attended the 2019 Plastic Ocean Pollution Solutions International Youth Summit at the Algalita Ocean Institute in Dana Point, along with their advisors, science teacher Kate Schafer and Spanish teacher Diana Moss.
The Harker team was selected on the basis of its proposal, titled “Buy Better Boba.” The students’ plan addresses the excessive amount of plastic produced by sales of boba milk tea, a popular drink often sold by Harker student clubs to raise funds. The students acquired reusable glass straws with brush cleaners, repurposed glass jars and designed a sticker to create a cup alternative to the single-use plastic cup, lid, straw and wrapper that comes with each purchase of boba tea.
Team members also have been in contact with local boba shops to encourage the use of their cups and to provide bulk dispensers for clubs that use their cups for their fundraisers. They will launch the sale of their repurposed cups during Earth Week in April, which is also their club week.
The conference was attended by 125 students from various parts of the U.S., as well as from countries including Kenya, Tunisia, Canada, Sri Lanka, New Zealand and Mexico. Students had the opportunity to learn about each other’s projects, to hear from experts in the field of ocean pollution and to engage in team building activities. Additionally, mentors worked with each team to help them hone the details of their projects and envision ways to extend their projects into the greater community to have a more powerful impact.
“The best part of the conference for me was meeting other students from around the world and hearing about their projects,” said Banga. Added Yen, “Seeing all this creative energy working towards a common goal was inspiring.”
The team also enjoyed being right on the beach at the Algalita Ocean Institute and took a short cruise on the ocean with Captain Charles Moore, author of “Plastic Ocean,” who first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Harker team was one of three teams selected to present about their project before the entire assembly on the final day of the conference.