In mid-November, three Harker eighth graders were honored in the Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Contest’s junior division. This year’s contest, held by Bow Seat Ocean Programs, received 4,000 entries from around the world and aimed to inspire youth to learn about and take action on climate change. Students researched and wrote about climate issues in their grade 7 expository writing classes, and their essays were entered into the contest as part of the curriculum.
Additionally, middle school English teacher Marjorie Hazeltine received an Educator’s Award along with $750 to put toward education on climate change. “I submitted a summary of the way I used the contest in my classroom at Harker,” Hazeltine said. “The theme last year created the perfect opportunity to teach satire, persuasion, rhetoric and humor.”
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.
On Friday, Daniela Lapidous ’12 visited the upper school to speak to Harker’s Green Team about her personal experiences in environmental activism, with a focus on her efforts to get her alma mater, Columbia University, to divest from funding in the fossil fuel industry.
Lapidous, who is now a deputy field director at Green New Deal Network and worked for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, discussed how she became involved with the organization Barnard Columbia Divest (later renamed Columbia Divest for Climate Justice) after her first year at Columbia and began participating in protests, including one in Washington, D.C., attended by 10,000 people.
One of the most significant protest actions she participated in was the eight-day occupation of Columbia’s Low Library in 2016. She and other CDCJ members staged a sit-in at the library in an effort to persuade university president Lee Bollinger to make a pledge of divestment from the top 200 publicly traded fossil fuel companies. Lapidous said the occupation was supported by many students, who provided food to the occupiers and attended teach-ins on climate justice.
Earlier this year, Columbia ended direct investment in publicly traded oil and gas companies. Lapidous noted that while there are some caveats (exceptions may be made for companies with a “credible plan” to bring business to net zero emissions by 2050), the progress was heartening. She also highlighted the massive mobilization that took place over nearly a decade for the progress to happen.
Members of the Green Team sought advice from Lapidous on how to achieve their own goals. “In my own organizing, I have found that having conversations with decision makers is great,” she said. “When you come to a difference of values or priorities then it is helpful to have support from students and faculty.”
She also said that setting an example can be inspiring to others: “Even if you start small, seeing other people doing the work can inspire more people to come in.”
Last week, freshman Sriram Bhimaraju received the third place Wells Fargo Community Innovation Award in Arizona State University’s Sustainability Solutions Science Fair at the middle school level. Bhimaraju’s project is an app called Saagara: Sunscreen Advisors, which checks the ingredients of sunscreen brands to determine if they are a threat to coral reefs. In addition to the app, Bhimaraju also devised a method for removing water pollution that employs beads that absorb polluting chemicals in water.
Bhimaraju has been offered a mentorship opportunity with ASU’s Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Service, which will display his work in a future webinar. More than 600 entries were received for the fair since June. In addition to mentorship opportunities, winners also received up to $2,500 in cash prizes.
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.”
Harker’s latest addition, the 50,000-square-foot Rothschild Performing Arts Center, was just awarded Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification, accruing 66 out of 67 points attempted. The certification effort was managed by the various groups who oversaw construction, including Devcon Construction, The Integral Group, Studio Bondy Architecture and Kevin Hart Architecture.
This LEED Gold award follows two others. The new athletic center, opened in August 2017, earned LEED Gold certification in February 2018, and Harker’s Nichols Hall science and technology center, opened in 2007, also received LEED Gold certification.
“It is an honor to receive this certification, and a testament to the vision and efforts of the men and women who made these projects a reality,” said Brian Yager, head of school. “Having our two newest building receive LEED Gold certification not only acknowledges our desire to be environmentally responsible members of the community, but also furthers the message we hope to inspire in all of our students and staff that the world we live in needs a responsible approach to building the future.”
As a sustainable site, the center received five out of five points for development density and community connectivity, which encourages development in areas with existing infrastructure to conserve farmland and wildlife habitats, along with promoting walking and transportation efficiency. The building received six out of six points for alternative transportation (public transportation access). The full 19 points were awarded for optimizing energy performance, and seven out of seven points were awarded for onsite renewable energy. The building garnered many other points for things including site selection, light pollution reduction and enhanced refrigerant management, all of which contribute to an efficient building and overall sustainability efforts on campus.
Preschoolers had a great Earth Day last week! Parent volunteers were key to making the day special: one parent volunteer talked about climate change and read “The Lorax” by Dr. Seuss to the class. Other parent volunteers stood by to demonstrate various ecological investigations for our students to explore: solar, wind and water energy stations, a water filtration station and germination station. It was a great week for students, parents and teachers!
Preschoolers had a great Earth Day last week! Parent volunteers were key to making the day special: one parent volunteer talked about climate change and read “The Lorax” by Dr. Seuss to the class. Other parent volunteers stood by to demonstrate various ecological investigations for our students to explore: solar, wind and water energy stations, a water filtration station and germination station. It was a great week for students, parents and teachers!
Preschoolers had a great Earth Day last week! Parent volunteers were key to making the day special: one parent volunteer talked about climate change and read “The Lorax” by Dr. Seuss to the class. Other parent volunteers stood by to demonstrate various ecological investigations for our students to explore: solar, wind and water energy stations, a water filtration station and germination station. It was a great week for students, parents and teachers!
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.